S-Day: A Memoir of the Invasion of England

MAP

1

Legends about the great warriors always have a source, often some small event magnified by time and retelling. Down through the centuries has come the tale that Alexander, enraged by his own soldiers’ caution, grabbed a siege ladder, set it in place, and was the first to charge over the wall at Multan. Scipio Africanus, the Roman who defeated Hannibal, is said to have shamed his troops into action by charging on horseback alone into a line of Carthaginian cavalry. At Gettysburg, Confederate Brigadier General Lewis Armistead reportedly waved his hat on the point of his sword, rallying his outgunned men to break through Union lines.

I’d often wished I could witness the birth of a legend. General Wilson Clay and a Messerschmitt offered me that chance just before S-Day.

We had landed in the general’s Cub several miles from Rye, the ancient town in east Sussex two miles inland from the English Channel. A jeep had been waiting for us, with a British driver, Corporal John Markham of the Royal Sussex Regiment, who had lived in Rye most of his life.

Local drivers met us at all stops because the signposts and milestones, some of them hundreds of years old, had been removed throughout England to confuse invaders. Everything else that identified towns had been painted over or hidden. Churches, building societies, shops, railway stations, all were rendered anonymous. Endless problems resulted. Tank columns turned around on themselves; infantry brigades became lost in marshes; truck convoys wandered miles down wrong roads.

I had slapped the general’s four-star magnetized plates on the sides of the jeep, and rifle-carrying bodyguards followed in another jeep. General Clay had just served with George Patton, who always insisted on flags flying from his vehicle, motorcycle escorts, and sirens—a regular parade. He claimed the troops needed to know he was in their area. Clay did not tolerate that pomp, but he made daily tours, no matter how busy he was.

“Look at this.” The general pointed at a ridge. “We’re skulking under those trees, and the German hasn’t even landed yet.”

I was sitting behind him in the jeep.

He said, “Not a thing moving, no reinforcing, no build-up. We might as well be in Nebraska.”

It should have been a peaceful tableau. A plow sat idly at the edge of a field. When the breeze played with patches of green winter wheat, the stalks briefly took on a silver tinge, reflecting the sun at a new angle. Rock walls rimmed the fields. We passed a stone house and barn that abutted the road, narrowing it. A small black dog emerged from the barn to bark at us.

Closer inspection revealed a land braced for battle. The wheat field was studded with poles, each the girth of a man’s leg, a defense against gliders. So many poles dotted the landscape that American soldiers had taken to calling them Clay’s spaghetti. We drove under iron bars arching fifteen feet over the road at regular intervals, also to prevent glider landings. Where the field ended at a defile of trees, an antitank ditch had been dug in the road, then covered with wood planks. A local Home Guard contingent had been assigned to remove the planks when enemy armor approached.

Our road wound along a shallow valley, with forested hills rising above the fields on both sides of us. We saw through the trees the indistinct lines of camouflage tarps and nets. Sentries walked the edge of the woods, carefully keeping under the forest shadows.

General Clay twisted in his seat and spoke loudly over the wind blowing around the windshield and the noise of the engine. “We think General Franz Halder told Hitler in 1940 it would take the Luftwaffe just two weeks to destroy the Royal Air Force. Instead, it has taken them two full years.” Clay pursed his mouth a moment. “But now the Vickers-Supermarine plant in Southampton is a bombed-out hulk. Same with the Nuffield Spitfire factory. The Rolls Royce engine plant in Derby is in ruins. Most RAF squadrons exist only on paper.”

The general once told me that the happiest stint of his career was the four years he taught military history at West Point. Given the slightest opportunity, Clay would still lecture, even if I was his only audience. I always listened attentively; one of the clearer duties of a lieutenant colonel being addressed by a general.

Silent until now, Corporal Markham could not help himself. “I knew we were in trouble when our metal cap badges were replaced with plastic ones a couple months ago. Badges for Spits, they said.”

Worn on the front of his cap, the corporal’s badge was the distinctive eight-pointed star of the Royal Sussex. Markham was tall enough that he was wedged into the jeep. His right leg was pinned awkwardly between the stick shift and the wheel. He had a rough-hewn face, with a bump on his nose, a knobby chin, and a narrow mouth. His Lee Enfield was tucked under his feet.

“You look good in plastic, Corporal.” The general shifted his gaze to the woods on the rise. Several artillery pieces were parked under olive tarps. He scowled and said, “Tell Jones over my signature that his crews are cooking over open fires, and if I can see smoke rising above those trees, so can the goddamn German pilots.”

Soldiers should carry rifles. I carried a note pad. I ate with it, slept with it, visited the latrine with it. I penciled a note in it. I also carried a camera on a strap over my shoulder. A 35-mm Leica, a German product, no less. Major General Burt Jones was commander of the 2nd Infantry.[1] “Yes, sir.”

Clay glanced skyward, narrowing his eyes against the vivid blue. The sun reflected on the four stars sewn near the seam of his cap. He preferred a side cap, which he would fold into a rear pocket when indoors, rather than a brimmed cap. He wore the same clothes every day so his men would recognize him: sharply creased khaki breeches, a tunic, a khaki tie tucked into his shirt below the second button, and a waist-length brown leather coat resembling an aviator’s. Except for the stars on his cap, he typically wore no other badges of rank or service and no decorations. He told me it was his soldiers’ duty to recognize him even without all the glitter on a uniform.

His hair must have been a rich red in his youth. I heard he was once called Red Clay at the academy. Only once. The story goes that he knocked the offending cadet off his feet, yelling that he was no goddamn Indian chief, and the nickname ended right there. The general’s hair was now gray, with touches of auburn, and closely cropped. His grass-green eyes had flecks of brown in them. He had rather pale skin, with a smattering of freckles along his nose and forehead. His grin came easily, as did his laugh. More frequently, when he was lost in thought, his face would have a somber cast, with the infantryman’s thousand-yard stare and his mouth turned down.

“The German didn’t come two years ago in what he was going to call Sea Lion,” Clay added, “because he couldn’t gain control of the sky over England. Now that’s changed.”

I nodded. The general wasn’t looking for conversation. The Luftwaffe’s dominance of English skies had forced the British and Americans to transport men and machinery only at night. At first light every day, the columns left the roads for the forests to pitch camouflage gear overhead. Tanks, mounted antiaircraft and antitank batteries, self-propelled guns, armored and scout cars, half-tracks and trucks—everything and everyone—remained hidden until dusk. During daylight only essential movement was risked. The general had deemed essential this brief jeep journey from the airfield to the beach near Rye.

Clay pulled a sheaf of reports from a folder on his lap. He lifted his reading glasses from his tunic pocket. The wire rim was so flexible he had to wrap the glasses around his face, always left ear to right. I was instantly forgotten. General Clay had a way of making others think they had vanished. I was used to it.

We passed a wood building with white roses climbing a wall trellis. A sign hanging above the door read “Crown and Thorn.” On the door was a hand-printed notice with one word, “Sorry.” There was precious little beer in England.

The general looked up. “Jack, see to it that Jones also takes the—”

The road abruptly turned on its side. At least, that’s how it seemed to me. A wall of dirt and rocks was thrown into the air alongside us, then raced ahead.

“Bloody Christ!” yelled Markham. “We’re under fire!”

He braked hard and swerved off the road. I grabbed a tie-down. The fender-well slammed my backside as the jeep lurched into a ditch. I fell to the cargo bed when the jeep careened off the trunk of an oak tree. The general’s elbow shattered the windshield. We came to rest between two oaks when Markham’s foot slipped off the clutch. The jeep’s motor died.

The sound finally reached us, a dull pounding of four MG 17 machine guns mixed with the scream of a Daimler Benz engine. This model Messerschmitt, the 109E, was popularly known as the Emil, and it had destroyed European air forces early in the war. It was no match for a Spitfire, but there were seldom any British fighters around. The shadow of the plane flickered over us, the whine of its engine dropping to a low growl as it sped down the valley.

“You all right, General Clay?” I asked, rising unsteadily to my feet.

Clay held Corporal Markham’s chin, turning his face toward him. A red crease crossed Markham’s forehead where it had hit the steering wheel. “Report, Corporal.”

“John Markham, Corporal. Royal Sussex. I’m fine.” His words were rough, and he blinked repeatedly. “Little bump on the head is all.”

Clay leaped from the jeep. He bit down on his lip, frowning. I followed his gaze. The bodyguards’ jeep was turned on its side at the edge of the road forty yards behind us. The bullets had almost cut it in two, and shards of metal protruded at odd angles from the vehicle. Smoke poured from under the hood. The driver was sitting on the road, cupping his chin and rocking back and forth. Splattered with blood, the two bodyguards lay on the dirt, motionless, their M1s near them.

“Here it comes again,” Markham said, stamping on the jeep’s starter. The starter churned but the engine would not fire. “Christ, I’ve flooded it.” The corporal hurried out of the jeep and fell behind a tree.

The Messerschmitt was banking out of the valley into the morning sun, the black crosses on its wings clearly visible. It skimmed behind the eastern hill, gaining elevation for another strafing run at us.

“Son of a bitch,” Clay said under his breath. He leaned over the fender to grab Markham’s rifle. He checked the action, stepped from under the tree, then raised the Lee Enfield to his shoulder.

“General, come on,” Markham pleaded. “Take cover.”

I jumped out of the jeep, prepared to shove Clay to the ground.

The Messerschmitt leveled off, coming at us at an oblique angle to the road. Even though the fighter was backlit by the sun, I could see muzzle flashes from the wings and cowling. The German’s aim was low, and clods of dirt burst from the ground a hundred yards in front of us in a wheat field. The eruptions sprinted along the field, closing.

General Clay fired back, repeatedly squeezing the trigger, emptying the ten-round magazine in a few seconds.

The Messerschmitt emitted black smoke, and pieces of the engine blew away, followed by a sheet of the cowling. At the same instant, the rudder tore free. The fighter shuddered, arid its port wing suddenly rose, tipping the plane onto its side. The elevators ripped off, and the Messerschmitt flipped onto its back. The hatch popped off, and the pilot’s arm emerged as he struggled to climb out. It was too late. The Messerschmitt shot into the ground, parts of it spewing toward us across the field. A cloud of flame instantly engulfed the wreckage.

The general appeared to think nothing of it. He nodded approvingly as a white Ford ambulance emerged from the woods and quickly crossed the field to the overturned jeep. He casually asked Markham, “Can you get her going again?”

The corporal was gaping at the blaze. Dumfounded, he took a moment. “Pardon? The jeep? I think so.”

Damage to the vehicle was limited to a sprung hood and a bent push bar. Markham pressed on the starter. After a moment of grinding, the engine rolled over. Clay slammed down the hood, then pushed the rifle back behind Markham’s legs and climbed in.

“Don’t dally, Corporal. I’ve got to get down this road.”

I returned to my post behind the seats, and Markham backed the jeep onto the road. He shifted into forward, and we began again toward Rye.

Now, this is precisely what I saw, as did perhaps a thousand soldiers of the 2nd Infantry peering down at us from the hills. Of course, no Lee Enfield rifle is going to bring down a Messerschmitt. We learned later that it had been the pilot’s hard luck to perform his banking maneuver right above fifteen antiaircraft mobile batteries, quadruple .50-caliber Browning M2 machine guns mounted on wheeled trailers, hidden in the woods on the rise. On the German’s second run at us, they all opened up, gleefully firing through branches and leaves, enveloping the Messerschmitt in a web of fire. This was the AA crews’ first combat, and they made the most of it, firing eleven thousand rounds between them, we learned later.

General Clay never claimed to have hit the plane and, indeed, was a bit embarrassed by his rash action. Yet, he had fired the Lee Enfield and the plane had come down. Within hours, most Americans in southern England knew their commander had single-handedly downed a Messerschmitt. The legend was born.

We passed to the west of Rye, which was once on the coast, but is now considerably inland due to the shingles and silt that have clogged the bay over the centuries. To reach the town, boats must sail two miles up the Rother on the flood tide, then be prepared to settle into the mud as the tide goes out. The general wanted to inspect the beach again.

We turned off the road and drove onto a low dune near the mouth of the river, the jeep’s wheels sinking almost to the hubs as we crossed the sand. We kept well inland of a series of “Danger—Mines” signs. The beach stretched for miles before us, the pale sand contrasting with the radiant blue of the channel and sky.

The beach was littered with twisted metal, cement blocks, wood posts, and wire, reminding me of an abandoned construction site. Flatbed trucks were crossing the beach, carting material and ferrying engineers. Other soldiers were laying wire and filling bags. Fortifications hid thousands of other troops from the Luftwaffe fighters, which might at any moment appear. Each work crew had a spotter, which never lowered his binoculars. Sirens on poles would wail if enemy planes were spotted.

“Jack, take off your coat, will you?” the general said.

“Sir?” I hastily removed my wool overcoat. It was brisk in the back of the open jeep.

“A commander and his staff should never wear warmer clothes than men at the front. Stop at that wire array, Corporal.”

We pulled up next to a length of dannert wire, unrolled coils clipped to support posts. Soldiers working with the wire turned to the general as he got out of the jeep. They smiled and wiped their hands on their uniforms.

“Morning, General,” several shouted. They stepped eagerly toward the jeep.

“Men, look at yourselves,” the general answered with mock anger, pointing at several of them. “You are damn near out of uniform.”

The soldiers laughed. Although they wore steel-reinforced gloves, and a few had leather aprons similar to blacksmiths’, their shirts and breeches were in tatters, victims of the wire’s barbs. Even leather boots were torn, and some were held together by canvas wraps. As always happened, soldiers quickly gathered around General Clay.

“You injured, Private?” Clay nodded toward a soldier, whose blood was dripping along the tongue of one of his boots.

“No, sir.” The private looked fourteen years old, with the skin of a peach and wide eyes. “A few scratches.”

“That’s what you joined the engineers for, right?”

“Yes, sir. For that very reason.”

The others joined the general in the laugh. These were the men of the 2nd Engineers Battalion. Many of them had seams of blood along their faces and red blotches on their trousers and pants, the results of wrestling with barbed wire.

“You look after that, Private,” the general said loudly, as always with his combat soldiers. “I don’t want you working when injured.”

“Yes, sir.”

A jeep sped toward us along the beach, undoubtedly Major General Burt Jones, commander of the 2nd Infantry Division, whose beach we were on.

The general added, “But I’ll be damned if I’ll be issuing you a Purple Heart for a few nicks, either.”

More laughter, which surged and faded in the channel wind. The jeep rolled up, and Jones jumped to the sand. “Good morning, sir. Nothing like a surprise inspection at 0800.”[2]

Clay and Jones had served in the same unit in the Great War, and this gave Jones license to needle his superior. A crowd was assembling before Clay, who played to it. Again, quite loudly, Clay said, “I heard you were breaking these guys’ collective butts, and I’ve come by to make sure it was the truth.”

A round of “It is” and “You heard right” came from the soldiers.

Burt Jones was called Two Inch, but never to his face. It was thought he always wore two-inch platforms in his boots. He was a good five-four or so, alleged platforms included. He claimed he owed his life to his short stature. In the Meuse-Argonne sector in November 1918, mortar fragments had decapitated a taller American soldier running next to him, but had left Jones intact. Nevertheless, Jones walked rigidly, as if he had a poker for a backbone. His features were sized to his stature, with small eyes and a chip of a nose. But he spoke in a rich bass. Without his raising his voice, his orders carried fifty yards.

Jones stepped close, out of earshot of his troops, and said, “The resupply party got here just before dawn. That’s their material you see being installed on the beach.”

“Is it enough?” Clay asked, undoubtedly knowing the answer.

Jones inhaled loudly. “You know, General, I don’t give a damn which day they come. But if I just knew which tide. We’re spread too thin.”

“Admiral Fairfax believes it’ll be low tide.” Clay’s eyes followed the line of surf. “That’ll give them what the admiral calls a dry attack. He argues that in the half-hour between landing and the rise of the tide, our posts and traps can be destroyed by German combat engineers. They’d avoid a high tide, when many of their landing craft would be pinioned and their bellies torn open.”

Jones said. “Even so, I think it’ll be high tide.”

“Same here. A low tide landing means their craft would be grounded as far as four hundred yards offshore. That’s a lot of open ground to cover under fire. It’d be like Suvla Bay at Gallipoli, where the 2nd Yeomanry had to cross the dried-up salt lake under a continuous barrage from Turkish batteries. No cover, easy pickings. They were mauled.”

“General,” interrupted one of the engineers. “We’ve got a piece of art we think you’ll like. You inspired it.”

With a glower, Burt Jones turned to the soldier.

Clay said quickly, “Art? Show me.”

We walked after the engineer. A clot of troops followed us. I sank in the sand with each step. When we reached a landward rise in the dune, the engineer grandly raised his hand as if introducing an act and said, “Wire sculpture. It even has your name on it.”

“Well, I’ll be go to hell.” Clay grinned widely. “Will you look at that? Pure beauty, Private. Pure goddamn beauty. A high-wire entanglement, a tremendous job.”

The sculpture was a criss-crossed barbed wire mesh attached to a maze of wood posts. The entanglement resembled the outlines of a tent city, with stakes and wire guy lines, joined on both ends by dannert wire. It was a city block long and thirty feet deep and appeared impenetrable. We slowly walked along the entanglement. Hanging from wire midway was a hand-painted sign reading “Clay’s Dog House.”

The general paused in front of the sign. “What’s your name, Private?”

“Will Drubowsky, 2nd Engineers Battalion, sir.” A wad of tissue was stuck to a cut on the private’s lip.

“Private Drubowsky, I’m touched.” Clay turned to the crowd and made a production of wiping away a stage tear. “This rates right up there with my wedding day.”

Hearty laughs.

“Get a photo of this, Jack.”

Clay pulled Drubowsky into position next to him, with the sign visible on their right. The general locked his arm around the private’s shoulder. I focused, then pressed the shutter.

Clay raised an imaginary champagne class. “Here’s hoping some German bastard tears his lederhosen on this fine piece of art.”

The soldiers lifted their hands, joining in the toast. They called out, “Here, here,” and “Up theirs,” and “Here’s mud in their eyes.”

The general touched his cap to the soldiers, who, to a man, instantly stood taller and snapped a salute. Clay led us back to the jeep. “Burt, I’ll see you tonight.”

We resumed our places in the jeep. Corporal Markham drove us down a narrow access lane on the beach, well marked with red flags stuck in the sand. To our left, seaward, were the deadly devices we hoped would repel the invasion.

First and foremost were the mines. It takes one ton of mines to cover a hundred yards, and it takes ten man-hours to plant every ton. To be an engineer, then, is to dig holes—hundreds, thousands of them. The mines were M-7 dual-purpose weapons. Some were bounding mines, which leapt three feet into the air to explode. Others, less sophisticated, simply blew legs off when walked on. More antipersonnel mines sat atop posts, which were planted in long lines, resembling the pylons of rotted piers. These explosives were triggered by wires branching out in many directions from each post. Rows of cylindrical steel antitank mines were buried in the sand, each with five and a half pounds of high explosives.

Cluttering the beach below the mine fields were crude antitank obstacles: triangles of steel, saw-tooth bars resembling gates, cones of cement, even piles of rock—a junkyard of ragged stone and steel. Also embedded in the sand were rows and rows of anti—landing craft stakes, jutting at angles toward the water, resembling phalanxes of fifteenth-century Swiss pike-men, locked together and advancing “at push of pike.” Twisted among the stakes were nests of barbed wire. And, above the high-water line, was the general’s own invention: posts on which were mounted M1 portable flamethrowers, each with trip wire triggers. “We’ll cook their asses,” he had said when he showed me the drawing.

To landward of us were the manned obstacles. Piles of burlap sandbags were partly covered with tarpaulins on which were arranged plugs of salt grass. These were camouflaged machine gun nests. As we passed, soldiers set aside their mess tins and stood to wave at the general. He always saluted back. On slopes overlooking the beach were concrete bunkers, their guns pointed not out to sea, but right down the beach. Other guns were hidden in innocent-appearing seaside homes.

Behind the bunkers were batteries of rocket launchers, most commonly M17s, with their boxes of twenty tubes, but also some batteries borrowed from the British. They were mounted on trucks and tanks. Behind all this were the miles of communication trenches and hundreds of hastily poured concrete bunkers, all covered with barbed wire.

If you had asked me then, I’d have said not one living thing could have made it through those defenses. Not a German, not a German shepherd, not a German sand flea, nothing. That’s why I was an aide-de-camp. Wilson Clay was the commander of an army, and he knew better.

He turned to me as we sped down the beach. “Jack, you may be wondering why I took the time back there to admire some barbed wire contraption.”

“Of course I know why, General.”

“Let me explain, then.”

I never knew whether he just didn’t hear me or whether he didn’t care how I replied.

“Yesterday there were about 150 Luftwaffe sorties over the 2nd Infantry’s portion of this beach. Strafing, bombing, dropping leaflets, the works. The 2nd suffered fifty-eight casualties. They’ve endured this day after day.”

I nodded. My teeth chattered against each other. My coat lay on the jeep’s bed.

“The same folks who chewed up France and the Low Countries may be sailing to this very spot. Tonight, tomorrow night, next week, soon. My soldiers are fearful, and they have every right to be. So I’ve got to compensate. I do it by building their morale.”

“Should I be taking notes, sir?”

“‘The moral is to the physical as three is to one.’ Do you know who said that?”

I thought for a moment. “Babe Ruth.”

“For Christ’s sake, Jack, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force doesn’t go around quoting Babe Ruth. He quotes Napoleon. And Napoleon was dead right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A hundred small things assure that my soldiers will follow me and believe in my leadership, such as those snapshots I’m always having you take. They end up in hometown newspapers, soldier arm in arm with his general.”

We zigzagged left and right, through a flag-marked mine field. The flags were removed every evening, lest they mark passage for the invaders. More soldiers, hastily continuing preparation of the beach defenses, waved at General Clay. He waved and saluted, again and again, reminding me of a Harvest Queen on her float. The elbow which he had put through the windshield didn’t seem to bother him. Markham had folded down the windshield frame.

“What’s the most important aspect of morale for troops at the front?” he asked me, mid salute.

“Knowing your side has better men and weapons.”

“Jack, you’re thinking too much. Socks. An army fights on its socks. An officer must make sure his men’s socks fit. Loose or tight socks lead to sore feet. And socks must stay dry to keep away trenchfoot. When new socks are issued, morale soars. Don’t forget that.”

“I won’t, sir.”

“No army with clean, dry, comfortable socks ever lost a battle, not once in history, as far as I can tell.”

“You’ve spent a lot of time studying socks, sir?”

“You’re goddamn right. Corporal, pull up to that fortification.”

“Fortification” was a happy euphemism for three reinforced concrete walls with a gun port, something of a pillbox. It was a rough structure with no finishing on the concrete and no floor. Hundreds had been slapped together along General Clay’s sector. The barrel of an M1 A1 pack howitzer protruded through the portal.

Several soldiers appeared from behind the bunker when Clay got out of the jeep. They shouted greetings.

“Official inspection tour, men,” Clay announced in that patently pompous voice that instantly put the soldiers at ease. He never used that tone with his staff or division commanders.

I followed him across the sand toward the entrenchment. Other soldiers, who had been manning nearby machine gun emplacements, began moving toward us. Several whooped at the honor of the visit. Others climbed out of slit trenches, called out to the general, and broke into trots toward the pillbox.

Clay demanded of the first man who reached him, “Name and unit, soldier.”

“Corporal Allen Wilkes, 38th Field Artillery Battalion, 2nd Infantry, sir.”

“Show me what you’ve got,” ordered Clay. He followed the gunners into the box. The six-man crew took their positions around the weapon. This was an old howitzer, used for close support, mounted on spoked wheels, firing a fourteen-pound shell to nine thousand yards. The size of the crew was determined not by the number of soldiers it took to fire it, which was only two, but by how many it took to dismantle and cart it.

“What’s your load?”

“Steelies, sir.” Corporal Wilkes was about twenty years old. He had an open, cheerful face, with canted eyes and large teeth. He looked at odds with his menacing howitzer. His crew surrounded us in the bunker’s tight quarters.

“What in hell are steelies?”

“When we played marbles as a kid, that’s what we called ball bearings. You’d shoot with them. Most of what’s in these shells are damaged ball bearings.”

“Grapeshot is what you’re telling me.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you’ll pepper them with steelies? Good for you, Corporal.”

Wilkes’s eyes followed the barrel out the port. “We will if we can see them, General.”

“They’ll be sitting ducks, wading in the water, burdened with eighty or a hundred pounds in their packs. Most’ll probably drown. But a few might make the beach. You’ll see them clear as day down your gunsight.”

Wilkes cleared his throat. “General, that’s not what I heard. Word has it they’ve got a fog pill they’re all going to swallow on the way over here. Makes them invisible in their own little cloud of fog.”

I stared at the gunner and was about to burst out laughing, when General Clay asked in earnest, “Where’d you hear that, Corporal?”

“On the wireless, sir,” Wilkes replied sheepishly. His crew-mates nodded. They’d heard it, also.

“On NBBS?” The New British Broadcasting Station. “Lord Haw Haw? Is he your source?”

“There’s no order against listening to him, sir.”

Lord Haw Haw was the sobriquet of William Joyce, an ex-member of the British Union of Fascists who had gone to Germany just before outbreak of the war. With his arrogant, grating voice, he broadcast German propaganda in English from Hamburg.

“And I suppose you believed him about the fog pills and about the electromagnetic ray that can turn cement pillboxes into melting mush?”

“Well, sir…” Wilkes stared at his howitzer. I heard the hissing of waves breaking against the shore.

Clay slapped the gunner on the shoulder. “You and I know it’s all crapola. And I’ll tell you something, Corporal, the Germans think you’ve got your finger on a button that will spray gasoline two miles out to sea, then set it on fire.” Clay laughed, nodding, inviting Corporal Wilkes and the others to join him. “Just think, Corporal. The German thinks we can set the English Channel on fire, huge balls of flame right out of hell, all along the south coast. So he’s over there wetting his pants with fear.”

Wilkes felt the reprieve of humor. He rocked back with a loud guffaw, and the other soldiers joined him.

“That’s not all, Corporal. We’ve also let the German know in our radio broadcasts that we’ve planted gravity rods all along the beach, generating huge pulses of extra gravity that’ll pull his bullets right into the ground in a limp arc just like piss from a goat as soon as he fires.”

“Gravity rods, General?” Wilkes exclaimed. “Those bastards actually believe we’ve got magic gravity rods?”

I chuckled along.

The general abruptly asked, “Where’s your radio, Corporal?”

The young man sobered. “It’s with our truck, sir. It’s just an old Edison we wired to a White six-by-six.”

“Show it to me.”

Clay and I followed the corporal out the back of the entrenchment and up the side of a grass-covered hill of sand. Behind it, under a khaki camouflage tent, was the enormous White. The crowd, now no less than a hundred soldiers, walked with us.

Resting on the truck’s front winch was the radio, a model made of black Bakelite with imitation ivory knobs. Clay ripped out the power wire, then lifted the radio over his head as if he were a boxer displaying his hard-won championship belt. He marched a few paces away from the truck to plant the radio against a sand berm.

He turned back to his men. “Let me show you what we’re going to do Lord Haw Haw after the war.” He pointed to several soldiers carrying their M1s. “You four, form a line in front of the radio.”

They quickly did so. Their faces reflected their bewilderment.

“Ten hut,” barked the general.

The four soldiers came to attention, and they smartly shouldered their rifles as General Clay called out commands. Others stood back.

“Ready.” Safeties clicked off. Clay looked right to insure a clear field of fire.

“Aim.” He pointed at the radio. “Fire.”

The shots crackled. The Bakelite shattered, and tubes and wire blew out the back. The Edison skittered back on the sand. The riflemen lowered their weapons.

“There.” He clapped his hands together as if ridding them of chalk. “That’s what I think of Lord Haw Haw’s bullshit.”

The story that appeared on the Associated Press wire and was reprinted in many U.S. newspapers saying the general ordered a soldier to put the radio on his head, like William Tell, to be shot off by the firing squad is apocryphal, probably begun by one of the general’s detractors.

The general bade good-bye to the 38th, and we climbed into the jeep, applause following us. We made stops at several other units that morning before we left the beach for Rye.

The town is the loveliest of the Cinque Ports, the confederation dating from the reign of Edward the Confessor, which provided sailors and ships to the crown in return for certain privileges. Rye stands on a promontory, the old cliff line, which before the sixteenth century overlooked the channel.

Below the town now are reclaimed marshes, used for grazing and farming. These marshlands and shingles form a twelve-mile indentation in the coast, from Dungeness to the Fairlight headland. Here England was once protected from sea-borne invaders by cliffs. No longer.

Rye is a town of wood warehouses and maritime inns. It is a seaport, although the sea long ago retreated. The town was fortified against the French in the fourteenth century, and we entered it through the remaining town gate, which lost its drawbridge and portcullis long ago. Burt Jones had provided another trailing jeep, this one with a mounted .30 caliber machine gun. It followed us as we passed storefronts and several pubs.

Few of Rye’s citizens remained in town. The area twenty miles inland, from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Plymouth—most of the east and south coasts of England—had been declared a Defense Area. Men and women who were not essential workers and children had been moved inland. No one could visit the coastal area without good reason. The town echoed with their absence. We drove by a poster showing Mr. Squanderbug, drawn over the legend “Wanted for Sabotage.” Most windows along the streets had tape or paper over them. On a sturdy stone building was a sign indicating the air warden’s post was inside and on a nearby wall was an ad, “Wartime living affects your liver… Carter’s Little Liver Pills.”

A man walked along the narrow sidewalk carrying a basket of haws, red berries that come in May, useful for feeding pigs when there is little else. I saw down a side street the man’s penned hogs and several chickens, which throughout Britain had moved into towns for the duration. At another intersection was a news vendor’s stand. Earlier in the war vendors scrawled in chalk on homemade placards the plane tallies, “122 for 48,” or “45 for 22,” as if the war overhead were a cricket match. Of late the scores had been too gloomy, and this vendor’s placard was blank.

Corporal Markham drove us around a mound of stones, once a small church. Rubble was everywhere, piles of rock, brick, and charred timber. Buildings had been destroyed at random, giving the town a gap-toothed look. Rye had no particular military significance, but the Luftwaffe was still carrying out Baedeker raids, originally in retribution for the RAF bombings of Rostock and Lübeck, now simply to injure British morale. Bath, Salisbury, Winchester, Canterbury, and many other historic sites had been hit, singled out from the Baedeker guide book. On a water tower was a plane spotter, with his binoculars on a strap around his neck. Spotters were nicknamed Jim Crow.

We turned up a hill toward the Mermaid Inn, which had hosted smugglers and sailors for hundreds of years, intending to meet the troops of the newly arrived 40th Field Artillery Battalion. Instead, we drove into a nest of activity on the rough stone street. We slowed for the swarm of soldiers. They wore a mix of uniforms, American Army and British Home Guard, and they were agitated.

The crowd parted before our jeep. The shouting gradually died as the soldiers turned and saw stars on the jeep and recognized the general. Standing near the inn’s door was a man whose hands were tied behind him. Blood was flowing from his nostrils and from a cut above an eyebrow. He was wearing dark wool pants, a stained leather vest, and a blue shirt, part of which had been ripped away and hung to his knees. He was braced by two military policemen carrying rifles at the ready. The British press called American MPs Clay’s Snowballs, because of their white helmets. Next to them was Colonel Ralph Simpson, commander of the 40th. He was reading an army manual with such intensity that he did not look up even as the jeep came within six inches of him.

“Something I can help you with, Ralph?” General Clay asked.

The colonel’s head came up. Vast relief crossed his features. He was a rounded man, with a distended belly and an extra chin. Hitler had made mustaches unpopular in the Allied services, but Simpson bucked the trend. His resembled a black bottle brush, which he carefully trimmed so it did not cover his puffy upper lip. “Sir, my prisoner is an Irishman, caught this morning in a flat in Rye with a two-way radio. I’m having a little trouble convincing my men that we should hand him over for interrogation.”

Someone behind the jeep shouted, “We’ll interrogate the bastard, General. Just give him to us.”

A chorus of assent rose from the crowd.

“You’ve questioned him yourself?” Clay asked.

“He refuses to say a word.”

“How’d he get bloodied?”

“My men say he tripped down the stairs as he tried to escape, sir.”

“You sure he’s Irish?” The general remained seated in the jeep.

“Damn right,” one of the Home Guard called out. “Just look at him.”

The prisoner was a jut-jawed brunet with a cold gaze. His face was the white of paste, and he had a prominent Adam’s apple. I didn’t see anything peculiarly Irish about him, but I’m no expert. Despite urgings from the Ministry of Information to “Join the Silent Column,” rumors were rife that the Irish had teamed with the Axis en masse, and most were in southern England radioing intelligence reports to their German masters. The notion was preposterous. Then again, this fellow was no rumor.

“The bastards don’t know who their friends are,” another Guard added. The Guards wore uniforms identical to the British infantry’s except for the shoulder flashes. “He’s a spy.”

The general asked, “What kind of radio?”

“Here’s his two-way.” A lieutenant from the 2nd Signal Company held up a portable radio and a battery pack, a model the Germans called an Agentenfunk.

“How’d you find him?” Clay asked.

“We’ve got one of the new radio direction finders,” the lieutenant answered. He pointed up Mermaid Street to his jeep. Mounted on a roll bar was a circular antenna on a ball joint. “A new Motorola. We’ve been looking for him for a week. He finally obliged with a lengthy broadcast. The Brits and us broke into his room and found the radio, wired and ready to go, and he was still talking into the microphone.”

“Looks pretty suspicious, all right,” General Clay concluded dryly. He turned to the soldiers and asked loudly, “What are you men proposing to do?”

“The man is a spy,” one shouted. “Working behind our lines, plain and simple.”

Another yelled, “We’re going to shoot him out of hand.”

Several soldiers standing around our jeep nodded vigorously. “Line him up,” one called out.

From the rear of the group another shouted, “Let’s dish out some of what we’ve been taking.” There was loud consent from many of the soldiers.

Clay motioned them to silence. “Let’s think this through, men. G2 will be mighty upset if they don’t get a chance to talk to this guy.”

“Look at him.” An American sergeant jerked his thumb at the prisoner. “He’s going to keep his trap shut right into the grave.”

“Let’s not be hasty here, Sergeant. There’s little difference whether this fellow is shot right now or in a couple of weeks, after Intelligence discovers his story.”

“Bullshit, General,” a soldier yelled.

“Let us have the son of a bitch,” another bellowed.

Clay held up a finger, cutting them off. His words became more abrupt. “I’m not making myself clear, men. This fellow is going to be put behind bars and Colonel Simpson will call G2. Are you following me?”

Borrowing the general’s strength, Simpson straightened himself, “Precisely, sir. Thank you.” He turned to the guards. “Corporal, you and the private here find where the jail is in this town, lock the Irishman up, and post guards.”

The soldiers straightened in unison. One yelled, “Are you shitting us, General?”

Another, with a voice tightened by ferocious anger, “This bastard was working to make sure plenty of us die when his German friends come.”

Fists were raised and hammered in the air.

“We can take care of him without help from you, General.”

“We heard you were a hard ass, General. But you see an Irish spy close up, and you go soft.”

“How many of us will this bastard have helped kill in the next week?”

“Now’s our chance.”

The soldiers pulsed a step forward.

General Clay suddenly stood in the jeep. He pointed sharply at the gunner in the trailing vehicle, then at the sky.

The burst of .30-caliber shells was loud in the narrow street. Soldiers ducked, some dropped to the cobblestones. Others instinctively looked for a Messerschmitt. The Irishman didn’t even wince.

The general pushed out his chest in that unattractive way often captured on the newsreels. Too much like Mussolini, I told him once. He said in a brittle voice, “You’ll learn exactly how goddamn hard I am if this prisoner is harmed. Lock him up.” He swept his gaze over the crowd like it was a gun on a swivel. It found the guards. “You heard me. Take him away.”

The corporal pushed the Irishman on the shoulder, directing him through the crowd. The other guard followed. The soldiers let them pass.

Clay smiled thinly. “You men save your anger for when the German is armed and coming at you. It’ll serve you well then.”

“Dismissed,” yelled Colonel Simpson.

Chastened, the soldiers seemed only too happy to disperse.

The general lowered himself to the seat and looked over his shoulder at me. “Did you see that goddamn spy laugh when I saved his ass?”

I had.

“I was tempted to change my mind right then, line him up in front of a firing squad like I did to that Edison back on the beach. The goddamn ingrate.”

“Not only was he spying on us, he’s ungrateful.” I shook my head. “Can you imagine?”

“Hardly, no,” Markham smiled.

“Just because my aide in the back seat is a wise ass doesn’t mean you can be too, Corporal. Let’s go.”

We backed down Mermaid Street to return to the Cub.

2

Wilson Clay treated the press as if he were an elected official. He granted frequent interviews and told reporters what he could, which was usually little. When he arrived back at his headquarters at Eastwell, Donald McDonald of Reuters and Jerry Ness of United Press were waiting for him at his trailer. He waved them in and said, “Everything is off the record unless I say otherwise.”

Both reporters sat in the uncomfortable wood chairs across from the built-in settee. Their reports were censored in any event.

“You two had breakfast?” Clay asked.

“I got an early start, and just had coffee,” McDonald replied. The Reuters correspondent was the dean of war reporters, having filed his first stories from Cuba during the Spanish-American War. His hair was yellow-white, the color of an old newspaper. His skin was the same hue, the result of his struggle with malaria, which had almost killed him thirty years before, when he was posted in Panama, and which occasionally recurred. His jaw was unnaturally cut, as if drawn with a T-square. He wore rimless spectacles and this past month had started using a cane. “If you’ve got breakfast, I’ll eat it.”

“Same here,” Ness said, drawing a pad from his shirt pocket. Ness was a favorite of the GIs because in 1918, during the second Battle of the Marne, he had dropped his paper and pen and crawled out of a trench to drag wounded American soldiers back to safety. Claiming he was a bit deaf, he always kept his left ear cocked toward the person he was interviewing, and he wore a puzzled expression, as if he were not quite hearing the words. He told me once he could hear perfectly well, but people always said more if they thought the reporter wasn’t quite getting it all. Ness had a high forehead, emphasized by his dark hair, which he wore slicked back. His eyes, set far back in his face, reflected his intelligence and humor.

“Charley, have the cook set up four breakfasts, will you?”

Corporal Charles Elliot was the general’s orderly. He emerged from the trailer’s kitchen nook and left for the manor house.

Ness tilted his head at General Clay. “Speculation around the news corps is that they’re coming tonight. I don’t suppose you have any publishable thoughts on that, do you, General?”

“None.”

“Or where they’ll come?” McDonald asked. He didn’t even have his pen out. He knew the routine.

“No.”

“Anything we can send back home?” Ness tried again.

The general’s eyebrows narrowed in thought. “If the German attempts an invasion of England, historians will mark it as the beginning of the end of the Third Reich. How’s that?”

“A little too quotable, General,” Ness said, writing it anyway.

“Put this down, then. The American Expeditionary Force is ready for anything. I have utter confidence in our soldiers.”

“We can always count on you for special insights, General Clay,” Ness said sardonically.

Clay laughed. He removed one of his shoes and rubbed the ball of a foot. “You wouldn’t think someone who sits on his butt all day would get such damn sore feet.”

“Can we quote you, General?” McDonald asked.

“No.”

“I’ve got a deadline,” Ness pleaded. “I need something.”

“Look around my setup here,” General Clay suggested. “Tell your readers how I live.”

“You must think we write for Life,” McDonald growled. Nevertheless, he and Ness stood to tour the trailer.

There wasn’t a lot of furniture or much of anything else. The trailer had a living room, a galley, and sleeping quarters. It was decorated with framed photographs of his wife Margaret, perhaps a dozen photos, some on the walls, several on his desk. Also on the desk were three phones installed by the Signal Corps. The red phone was a direct link to Washington, the green to the cabinet war rooms in London, and the black to his headquarters in the manor house nearby. Just before the reporters arrived, Corporal Elliot had swept all documents on the desk into a drawer, as he always did.

The general slept on a canvas and wood cot. Detective novels were piled on the lamp table, a fact both reporters noted in their pads. A cardboard trunk containing cold weather uniforms was at the foot of the bed. Another photograph of Margaret stood on a bedside table.

With little to look at, McDonald and Ness moved from the cramped bedroom through the main room, where the general was still rubbing his feet, into the galley. Next to the small sink was a basket of mottled apples, a pile of C-ration tins, and a pitcher of water. Ness poured himself a glass. The shelves were bare.

When they resumed their seats, McDonald commented, “This trailer isn’t as swank as I might’ve expected from a full general.”

“I’ve got all I need,” Clay replied in that humble fashion he could generate once in a while.

Charley Elliot returned with breakfast, stacked on trays. He passed them around. The general sat at his desk, and the reporters and I used our knees to balance the trays. Scrambled eggs, ersatz sausage, and a cup of apple juice.

General Clay poked at his eggs, sniffed a forkful of them, then turned to his orderly. “Charley, these look real.”

“They are, sir. The old man who owns the place over by the pond brought by a dozen eggs for you this morning.” Elliot was a slight man, with curly blond hair and a fidgety manner. His job was to be always at the ready, and he excelled at it.

“You know my rule, Charley,” Clay said patiently.

“Yes, sir. You don’t eat better than the men in the field. But I thought that since you’ve got guests this morning, you ought to serve some real eggs.”

“Take these away, and bring the powdered ones,” the general ordered.

Elliot quickly gathered the trays, almost having to wrestle the plate of fragrant eggs away from McDonald. He pushed the trailer’s door open with his foot and sprinted toward the house.

Ness rose from his chair. “I don’t see any profit in waiting around for those wretched powdered eggs, General. Thanks for the interview, such as it was.”

“Any time.” Clay gestured expansively. “Glad to be of help.”

As McDonald and Ness filed out of the trailer, the general smiled conspiratorially at me. When the door closed, he asked, “Think they bought it?”

The interview had been a staged production. The detective novels were props. General Clay never read them. His bedtime reading was anything but relaxing. He read Cromwell on the problems of morale and command. He read Frederick’s Instructions for his Generals, Marshal de Saxe’s Reveries, and Guibert’s Essay on Tactics. And he studied whatever he could find written by the enemy: General Eimannsberg’s Der Kampfwagenkrieg (Tank War), General Guderian’s Achtung Panzer, even Tante Friede, which means Aunt Friede, the German infantry officers’ nickname for their manual. General Clay read in German, French, and English, and he never read anything for pleasure.

Corporal Elliot returned, still carrying three of the trays of real scrambled eggs. The general said, “Nice work, Charley.”

Elliot placed a tray in front of the general, handed one to me, and kept one for himself. Clay dug into them with his fork. Powdered eggs activated his gag reflex, he told me. He always had a full larder, courtesy of nearby English farmers, who, grateful for his presence, frequently sent dressed out chickens, boxes of fruit, milk, and other farm goods. Once in a while a bottle of Scotch Highland whiskey would arrive at the trailer. Each week he also received in the mail from America dozens of boxes of cookies and candy, canned meat, dried fruit, and the like, always with heartrending notes asking him to take care of the writers’ sons. Corporal Elliot had hidden the stockpile of food and whiskey behind the trailer before Ness and McDonald arrived.

His appetite accurately reflected the man. The general enjoyed an iron constitution, despite his Pall Malls and his living on four hours sleep a night. He had only two infirmities. One was a constant ringing in his ears, a symptom of hypertension. Clay claimed he did not have time to take pills, so his doctor was attempting to treat the high blood pressure by having medication surreptitiously added to his food. The other was a stiff and creaking ankle from an old injury.

Perhaps I need to correct an impression here. General Clay was no Gonzalo de Cordoba, the Spanish general who in the late 1400s arrived at a battle elegantly turned out and lavishly provisioned. Clay slept in the spartan trailer, not in the bedroom suite available for him in the manor house. He ate the proffered food not as a display of perquisites, but simply because he could not resist it. Every evening I poured him a whiskey, which he threw back, then another, which he pondered over, sometimes for an hour, and seldom finished. I never saw him drink more than that. The numerous photographs of his wife were certainly not props, but were a genuine expression of his reverence and love for her. At times he would speak to me of Margaret, reminiscing in low, intimate tones, his eyes on one of her photos. I would sit silently, knowing he was talking to her, not me. He had not seen her for more than a year. I write candidly here of his love for her, because in my opinion it vastly overshadowed his relationship with Lady Anne Percival, which I will discuss at some length later.

The show of asceticism so carefully arranged for the Reuters and UP reporters was not a cynical charade. Rather, it was another of the general’s attempts to insure his soldiers would trust his leadership. Clay compared the army to a bunch of bananas, some rotten, some green, some yellow. But, he swore, all would follow him when the time came. Civilians at home and soldiers in the theater would read of an earnest man of simple tastes, a father figure, one who shared his soldier’s privations, one who read pulp novels and whose shoes were too tight—an endearing portrait.

General Clay gobbled his food. Time spent eating was time lost, he liked to tell me if I lingered to chew. His mouth was still full of eggs when he put down his fork and said, “Let’s go.”

Headquarters was in Eastwell Manor, just north of Ashford in Kent. The trailer was parked along a brick wall to the west of the house, and we walked through an ornate but untended rose garden toward the building. The manor had over sixty acres of grounds within a three-thousand-acre estate. Queen Victoria and King Edward VII had been regular visitors, and Prince Alfred had lived there. Before the war, the manor had required more than a hundred retainers: gardeners, cooks, maids, stable hands. The building was quite daunting, three stories, with several wings, all made of gray stone. Spires, cupolas, and banks of chimneys topped it. The owner, Lord Ramsey, had ceded the estate to the general for as long as needed, but Clay changed location of his headquarters every four or five days, fearing Luftwaffe raiders. Lord Ramsey had left his hunting hounds, and they were cared for by the headquarters company. From their run fifty yards from the building, they barked and howled endlessly, a grating background to every conversation I had at the manor.

The manor was referred to as AEFHQ, pronounced “Afe-Q,” American Expeditionary Force Headquarters. Headquarters was actually in London, and this was the advance command post, but it was still called AEFHQ. Almost five hundred people were assigned to it, including staff members, engineers, signal specialists, military police, and others. Most were billeted in the manor outbuildings and in neighboring homes, some in Ashford. General Clay’s close staff assistants lived in the manor house, including his two corps commanders, his chief and assistant chiefs of staff, his G2 and G4, liaison officers, and others. I shared a room on the second floor with Colonel William Strothers, Clay’s chief medical officer. From his office in the billiard room, the general guided, dominated, rewarded, and harried his staff.

The billiard room was on the ground floor, facing the north gardens, which dropped away from the manor house in a gradual slope, with long grass concourses, topiaries, and an empty fountain. The billiard table had been moved against a paneled wall and was used for spreading out maps. Windows had been taped, and blankets dyed black hung around them, to be drawn over the glass at nightfall. The general’s desk was flanked by one for his secretary and another for his stenographer. Mine was against an inner wall, near the cue rack, which had a chalk ball attached to it. A fine powder of blue chalk always covered my work.

Clay’s G2, Major General David Lorenzo, was sitting in a chair beside the general’s desk, waiting. The G2 was forty-five years old, young for the rank. He had a broad nose and dark eyes hidden under vast eyebrows. Lorenzo carried a small notebook he would refer to, but he never offered a written report. Clay required oral briefings so he would not be overwhelmed with the details of written reports. Clay nodded to the G2, but the phone rang before they could begin. He lifted it and listened for a moment. The general believed a commander should answer his own phone during daylight. Not many people telephone a commanding general, except for emergencies, and then callers needed to speak to him at once.

Clay said into the phone, “Fine. Move it up.”

He hung up and turned to his stenographer to quickly relay the conversation. The general finally lowered himself into his chair. G2 leaned forward and began speaking about overnight developments and what was known about German air, land, and sea movements. Lorenzo’s was an early job. He always met at 4:30 in the morning with his night duty officers. Clay bit crescents into the corners of his mouth as he listened. I was not privy to the conversation. Undoubtedly Lorenzo would do most of the talking and make recommendations. Subordinates who thought their jobs were done when they reported on a problem without also offering a solution did not last long. Lorenzo knew the requirements. He had worked with the general for three years. Clay disliked new faces around him.

There is little romance in leading an army. The general’s days at Eastwell or other headquarters locations were usually steady grinds of appointments. But as the invasion inevitably drew near, Clay allowed fewer things to crowd his calendar. “On the day of the battle, I want to do nothing,” he had said, believing his observations would be clearer, his judgment more sane, and his reactions to change better. After Lorenzo, Clay was scheduled to meet with Lieutenant General Eugene Girard, commander of II Corps, and others. Then we would be off again in his Cub. Clay told me that twenty years of staff assignments and combat schools had given him calluses on his butt, and he loathed being at his desk.

A week-old copy of the Detroit Free Press was in my basket. I glanced at the front page and its war news. There was also a story on General Clay’s mother and a photo of her holding up a snapshot of a ten-year-old Wilson Clay. The intense press coverage of Clay had begun two months before, on his promotion and appointment to command the American Expeditionary Force.

Unlike European military officers, most American professional soldiers come from modest origins, and Clay was no exception. The American public found all the elements for a folk hero. Clay was born in 1890 in Davenport, Washington, thirty-five miles west of Spokane, in a three-room clapboard house. Not exactly a log cabin, but close enough for the newspaper photographers who converged on it. The general’s father, Tom Clay, who later owned a state bank, was supposed to have killed a man from Sprague, twenty-five miles southeast, in a war over which town would be Lincoln County seat. Davenport won. Wilson Clay never knew whether the story was true and never got up enough courage to ask his father, but citizens of Davenport never tired of speculating about it in front of the son. The general allowed untrue stories about himself to circulate if they were useful. Perhaps he learned that from his father.

Tom Clay abused his son relentlessly. Wilson spent his first sixteen years learning of his inadequacies and being reminded of his failures. He was the object of cruel jokes and public humiliations and the target of countless backhand cuffs. His mother, loving and weak, was powerless to intercede. The general told me once that he wished he could blame his father’s mean spirit on alcohol or dementia, but, in fact, he said, “My father simply came into this world packed with bile to his eyeballs.” Tom died in the early 1920s. “The bastard choked to death on his own spite.” Actually, it was on a piece of ham. General Clay had said he hoped time would diminish the hateful memories of his father. It hadn’t yet.

Tom Clay’s sourness was the key to his son’s success, I believe. The general’s dogged ambition to outshine his belittling father drove him throughout his life, even after the old man was gone. Other warriors have suffered cruel fathers. The two greats, Alexander and Frederick, come to mind. Perhaps they too tried to exonerate themselves before their fathers. In any event, you can be sure neither Alexander nor Frederick tolerated amateur psychiatrists as aides, and General Clay certainly did not, so I’ll end my speculation.

Tom Clay’s persistence in obtaining for his son a West Point appointment was viewed by Wilson as another form of punishment. A military academy had never crossed the boy’s mind, the general claimed. Tom failed at first and settled for shipping Wilson to the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. General Clay said the year at VMI paid a handsome premium, because it allowed him to enter West Point by certificate, without taking the dreaded entrance examination. During that year, Tom called in favors from local businessmen and politicians, asking them to pressure Henry Wade, the United States senator from Spokane, until, finally, Wade appointed Wilson to the academy. My suggestion one evening that his father’s obtaining a West Point appointment might have been motivated by something other than the desire to be rid of the boy was dismissed out of hand by the general.

It is well known now that Wilson Clay graduated first in the class of 1915. For the next two years he was an assistant commanding officer at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He served in artillery in the Great War. “I didn’t see the enemy much, but I sent my regards often enough.” In 1918, he received the Distinguished Service Cross “basically for not tucking my tail between my legs and running away from my battery one day when I really wanted to.”

Clay was discharged as a colonel of the wartime National Army in 1919, reverting to his Regular Army grade of captain. He was posted to West Point for four years as a lecturer. Then came twelve years of staff assignments and combat schools, during which time he was stuck at the rank of major. In 1933 he was sent to the Philippines for three years, where he made lieutenant colonel.

Clay’s meteoric rise began during the 1939 army maneuvers, where his impressive performance earned him an assignment to Washington as deputy, then chief of operations. He visited the White House more often than any soldier except George Marshall, the chief of staff. By December 7, 1941, Clay was wearing two stars.

President Roosevelt wanted to keep Clay in Washington as assistant to Marshall, perhaps eventually to replace Marshall, but Clay desperately wanted a field command. “I came as close to begging as I ever have,” he once told me. “It would have been an ugly sight, a major general groveling on his knees.”

It is easy, and accurate, to say Wilson Clay thirsted for fame. In his words, “History recalls those in the field. We remember Grant, not Halleck, Lincoln’s chief of staff.”

His appointment to command the AEF in Great Britain was a surprise, and the press concluded it was due largely to his favor with the president and the chief of staff. Clay brushed aside newspaper terms such as “practiced charm” and “Eleanor’s favorite GI.”

Credit the president and George Marshall with more than promoting a crony. Washington bristled with desk-bound generals lusting after that command, but the president must have known that competent peacetime military leaders do not always make skilled warriors; they can prepare for war, but they can’t practice the real thing. And Roosevelt knew of Clay’s talents: Clay understood the qualities and needs of the American soldier, he was skilled at stage management and a genius in administration, and he knew the art of war. The president and the world would soon learn of yet another talent, one the French call le feu sacré, the distinctive characteristic of the warrior, an utter determination to conquer or to perish with glory.

The president and George Marshall were looking for the perfect general, one with Charles XII’s courage, Eugene’s art, Montecuccoli’s foresight, and Turenne’s ability to seize the critical moment. No such person existed. They settled on Wilson Clay. Some now say this was the gravest mistake of Roosevelt’s presidency. Others will always cheer the decision. You will already have guessed that I am a Clay partisan.

He was a lieutenant general all of one month before being promoted again, virtually unprecedented in American military history. The general clearly understood his transition from an obscure staff officer to commander of the American army in Great Britain, from an unknown to a celebrity, and he cherished his new position in the world.

Not that there wasn’t a drawback to fame. He railed, but only to me, about the press when they acquired and published personal letters to family and friends. He asked the judge advocate general to prevent their publication and was told there was no legal means to do so. So he began censoring his own letters, depriving them of substance. He called them “dull whitewash.”

I looked up from my copy of the Free Press. General Clay walked David Lorenzo to the billiard room’s door, a hand on his shoulder, talking into his ear and stabbing the air with a finger, gesturing encouragingly. Clay believed it was his duty to be optimistic with his staff commanders. He conveyed his buoyancy and hope at every meeting. His chief of intelligence, Lorenzo, was the most difficult to convince. Clay always underestimated the enemy’s strength to junior officers, but it was the G2’s job to know better. With a final pat on the back, Clay said goodbye to Lorenzo. He turned back into the room. His face was ashen.

Others were loitering in the reception room, waiting for their turn with the general, but he quickly walked by the billiard table and out the glass door onto the stone veranda behind the manor house. He descended the steps into the garden. I viewed it as my job to follow him.

I found him near a hedge, hidden from the manor house. He was bent over, hands on his knees. He shuddered, but there was nothing left. A pool of vomit was beneath him on the grass. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked up at me.

“Don’t put this in your diary,” he ordered.

“No, sir.”

“If a quarterback can puke before the big game, why can’t I?” He stood and squared his shoulders, then snapped, “Enough fresh air, Colonel.”

I walked with him back into the billiard room. This incident in the garden was how I learned that the general was afraid, just like the rest of us.

A short while later we were again squeezed into the Cub, sitting in a pasture used as a runway near the manor house. The pilot talked aloud to himself, doing his preflight check. The take-offs were usually the roughest part of any journey.

General Clay boasted he had stolen the best American pilot in England, Captain Terry Norman. Norman vociferously complained he was wasted ferrying the general around in “this puny nosepicker.” He had lost his Mustang in the channel, and there was no replacement. In a fit, he had stenciled “Nosepicker” on the plane. Clay laughed, but ordered the censors not to let the American public learn of it.

Norman lifted a pair of spectacles from his pocket and put them on. I had never seen them before.

“You’re wearing glasses?” the general exclaimed. “You’re a fighter jock.”

“I’m tired of squinting,” he said equably. “And now that you’ve seen me put them on, do you want me to take them off?”

“No,” Clay answered hastily. “Not at all.”

The engine roared, and the plane began down the runway. I am a large man, and my seat behind the pilot and Clay allowed for little dignity. My knees were almost touching my chin, and my neck was bent over at an uncomfortable angle. Every time the wheels rolled into a rut over a hardened cow pie, the roof banged against my head.

Norman lifted the plane into the air, and the ride at once became smooth. The land fell away from us. We flew over the pond south of the manor, then banked over Westwell. The spires of Ashford were out our port window. Longbeech Wood was to our right. Below us, sheep speckled their grazing grounds. Fields of grain and hops were cut into the land. Stone walls surrounded orchards. Kent was proudly called the Garden of England. The general gazed intently at the verdant hills and pastures.

After a moment he said, “I’ve been entrusted with the special stewardship of the land below us, Jack. No matter what is to come, I’m not going to forget that.”

Sometimes I thought the general was making a record for posterity, knowing I wrote down his pithier comments. This wasn’t one of his better ones, but I noted it anyway.

He turned in his seat and said in a less noble vein, “I had to fight like hell to get it, too. The Brits, full of righteous indignation, wanted to put us Americans on the back burner, set us up in Berkshire and Oxfordshire and some of the other shires, and use us only as reserves. They argued they could defend their own beaches, thank you. They’ve got five thousand miles of coastline, for Christ’s sake. Sometimes I think English optimism is a national danger.”

He interrupted himself to address Captain Norman. “This is about the moment in any flight where you lobby me to transfer you back to your unit.”

“I’ve given up on that, sir.”

“Saving your breath for swimming, in case you ditch us in the channel? You’ve got experience at that.” The general winked at me. “I heard you had to dogpaddle five miles to shore because nobody would rescue you.”

“I like to think they didn’t know I was down, sir.”

Norman was old for a fighter pilot, and he was the only bald Mustang pilot I saw during the entire war. He said he lost his hair within three months of his twenty-fifth birthday, and his fellow pilots were ceaseless and imaginative inventing nicknames for him. He was from Mobile.

The general returned to his subject. “I asked Roosevelt to insist that as a condition of our participation in this theater American troops would be on the line.”

“I’m sure our soldiers are grateful, sir,” I said.

“We busted out butts to get here, but we’re still being relegated to a kiss-your-sister role,” he said with distaste. “The British Army is going to see the action while we sit on our thumbs.”

“You sure of that?” Norman asked.

“No, but it’s AACCS’s last, best guess. Only the German knows better, and he’s not talking.” AACCS was the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff. Unfortunately, the acronym was pronounced “axis.”

Norman pressed his headset against an ear, listening intently, then said, “Folkestone is being shot up, sir. They think it’s an E-boat raid. Couple of RN ships are in trouble.”

The general said, “Let’s take a look.”

The pilot grinned and instantly put the Cub on its wing, turning south toward the channel. He was one of those fellows whose entire being atrophied when he wasn’t in the middle of the fray.

Clay said, “Captain, this plane isn’t going to get there any faster, no matter how hard you rock back and forth.”

Norman stilled himself. “Sorry, sir.”

Several moments later we flew over the Great Stour River northwest of Ashford. The English call a hill a mountain, a pond a lake, and a creek a river. The Great Stour River is an example. A stone could be thrown over it at most places. To someone from the West Coast of America (I’m from San Diego), England is a miniature. All of Great Britain, including England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, is smaller than Oregon, as I once heard Clay petulantly remind Churchill. (The PM replied, “Oregon? That’s somewhere near British Columbia, is it not?”) It takes a while for an American to adjust to English map scales.

Clay frequently complained to me that the Defense Committee had given him too little of the country to defend. The general’s army, the AEF, was comprised of two corps, called, fittingly, I Corps and II Corps. I Corps’s sector was roughly from Portsmouth to the River Rother, or about seventy-five air miles along the channel, and extended inland almost to London. II Corps’s area was from the Rother east to Foreness Point, about forty-five miles, and included most of Kent, England’s southeast county. Thus, the area of Great Britain defended by Americans just before S-Day was the combined size of Delaware and Rhode Island, our two smallest states.

British and Commonwealth soldiers, with a smattering of Free French, Poles, and others, guarded the balance and, by far, the bulk of the island. To the west of the American Expeditionary Force was the British V Corps, spread over Hampshire and Wiltshire and eastern Dorset. Next was the British VIII Corps, responsible for the rest of Dorset and west to Land’s End.

On the other side of the Americans were five British corps, ranging from the Thames estuary north to the Scottish border. A Canadian and yet another British corps were in reserve north and east of London.

Something over 85,000 soldiers were in the American sector, all under General Clay. Each American corps was comprised of three divisions and a pool of nondivisional combat units. The divisions each contained between seven and ten thousand soldiers. To get an idea of a division’s size, figure that a division on the move may take two hours to pass a given point and stretch for twenty miles.

More Americans were frantically on the way. Almost an entire corps was in transit on the Atlantic on S-Day. Some never arrived, and the rest were too late.

We were five miles north by northwest of Folkestone, over Acrise Place, when Captain Norman spotted the smoke from a fire at the stern of a ship. It was under power, churning eastward away from Folkestone, as if trying to flee the flames on its own aft deck.

After a moment, the general said, “Looks like a Hunt class.” It was a British destroyer, an older design, armed with antiaircraft weapons and intended to defend coastal convoys. “The E-boats have done their work. There they go.”

Clay pointed at five sets of tell-tale tracks across the water, glittering in the sun, resembling etchings on glass, the E-boats’ wakes. Another few seconds passed before we could see the boats themselves, tiny craft from our distant perspective. They were heading back across the channel.

I never met anyone who knew why E-boats were so called by the British and Americans. The Germans called them S-boats, for Schnellboots, fast boats. Their principal role was to draw off British naval power, although they could inflict terrible damage when called on to do so. They had sunk the British destroyer Wakeful and the French destroyers Jaguar and Sirocco during the Dunkirk evacuation. With Allied air defense almost nonexistent as S-Day neared, the E-boats had become more aggressive. These five had apparently not even bothered with air cover.

“Why would they leave the British destroyer afloat?” I asked.

“They wouldn’t,” Clay replied. “They know it’s finished.”

As if on cue, the destroyer’s midships erupted, spewing flame skyward in a roiling ball.

“The fire just reached the magazine,” the general said.

Now cut almost in half, the ship began slewing to starboard. We were close enough to see sailors jumping into the channel. Black smoke of the oil-fed blaze trailed away from the craft. An oil slick near the destroyer was also on fire, and spreading quickly. I could see sailors frantically swimming away from flames on the water. A rescue boat, it looked like a tug, was pulling away from the harbor at Folkestone, heading for the gutted ship. I learned later the wounded destroyer was the HMS Everlast, which went to the bottom half an hour later. Twenty-two Royal Navy sailors were lost.

Norman banked the Cub at Hougham Court, and we were soon right above the cliffs at the waterline. The plane bobbed up and down in pockets of air. The blue-green French coast was visible across the channel, unknowable in the haze, ominous, full of Germans. We flew over the Warren, just east of Folkestone, where mudstone slides had fallen away from the cliff. The Cub approached the town. Smoke was swirling inland and upward in winding black cones. Several flashes came from the dock area, soundless and insignificant at our distance.

As we drew near, we saw that another boat was ablaze still at its moorings in the harbor. It was a merchant cruiser, and it had a wide hole ripped open at the waterline. It was listing away from the dock, with its gunwales almost to the water. I couldn’t see any fire aboard the ship, but smoke was wending out its landward portholes.

Yet another torpedo had rammed a small pier. Much of the dock had collapsed into the harbor, but a tangle of pylons and planking remained, a perilously balanced knot of wreckage. Soldiers and sailors were running to the scene. A fire truck had just arrived, and I could see the firemen hurriedly unwrapping their hoses.

The general had been uncharacteristically silent for a while. Finally he said, “The Germans are landsmen, Jack. Over the centuries the Spanish, Portuguese, Scandinavians, French, Dutch, and British have competed to dominate the world with their sea power. Not the Germans.”

Clay touched the corner of his nose and craned his head to look out the Cub’s side windows as the harbor passed under us. He went on: “Hitler has been to sea only once in his entire life, a short trip to Memel on the Baltic, and the son of a bitch got seasick.”

The general’s voice rose, mixing with the angry buzz of the Cub’s engine. “Hitler knows absolutely nothing about the sea or about navies. Nor do his people. G2 told me that a lot of the Kriegsmarine’s recruits are so ignorant of the sea that they are astonished to learn the water in the channel rises and falls twice a day, for Christ’s sake. Many of their sailors are inducted into their navy only because they indicate a taste for canoeing, or say they visited the beach once or twice in their youths. They simply are not a sea-going people.”

Clay sniffed, as if at the unfairness of it. “Yet here they are, poised and ready, undisputed champions of the North Sea and the English Channel, waiting for God only knows what before they set sail, more German assholes than in all of goddamn Pennsylvania.”

He turned fully in his seat and glared at me as if I had been arguing. He jabbed a finger right in front of my nose. “If they come anywhere near me, Jack, I’m going to rip them up. All I want is the chance. Just one goddamn chance.”

I wanted to protest that it was not up to me to offer him the opportunity, that I had very little say about where the Germans would land. I remained silent.

He turned back to the windscreen. “Head north, Captain. I’m due in London.”

Norman maneuvered the plane away from the channel. The back of Clay’s neck had turned almost purple. His hands were tightly balled on his lap. He was in a fury—not, I suspect, at the Germans, but at the secondary role he believed he would have in the days ahead. He said nothing more until we were over the East End.

3

“Just before the Germans come, things will start popping,” the general had said to me several weeks before.

“Like what?”

“Dozens of piddling, curious events. We’ll hear about a few of them right away. Most, we won’t. Some’ll be very nasty. Many will be designed to lower a fog over the British Isles. A baffling, distracting fog.”

General Clay was right, we know now. As he and I flew toward London that morning, the German countdown for S-Day had already begun. It had started the previous night.

I spoke with Obermaat (Chief Petty Officer) Karl Hanneken after the war. At two that morning, he and his three-man team had climbed through the galley hatch of U-513 a moment after the submarine surfaced in the choppy waters of Pentland Firth. He was wearing a cumbersome dry suit, and climbing was difficult. On the conning tower above him were the Kapitänleutnant, the first officer, and two spotters. The commander leaned over the wind deflector, a steel lip surrounding the conning tower. The spotters carried binoculars, useless on a black night.

The Kapitänleutnant, wearing the white peaked cap of a U-boat commander, whirled his hand, indicating to hurry. Hanneken could just barely see the radio aerial, foghorn mount, and bedstead radar above the spotters. The sub was running on its batteries, and the only sound was of the water lapping at the hull.

The sub was abreast of Hearston Head, on the eastern coast of South Ronaldsay Island in the Orkneys. I’ve never been to those islands, and Hanneken knew them only by maps and photographs he had studied. His memory of the Orkneys that night was of freezing water and darkness. Farmers, shepherds, and dairymen live at this northern tip of Scotland, but most British sailors who served in the Orkneys remember the island as windswept and barren.

Scapa Flow is a sea basin fifteen miles long and eight miles wide, surrounded by the Orkney Islands. It was the chief Royal Navy base in the Great War, and it was there that on June 21, 1919, the Germans scuttled their own surrendered fleet. In the Second World War, Scapa Flow was the Home Fleet’s base. Because of its distance from Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine bases, Scapa Flow was the Germans’ most difficult target of the war.

That morning it was Karl Hanneken’s target. He lifted an inflatable boat and an air hose through the hatch. His team quickly unrolled the boat and attached the nozzle. The boat filled rapidly with air. Two crewmen joined them on deck and were handed air tanks, regulators, and fins from below. Because the team members would not have fit through the hatch wearing their equipment, they had frequently rehearsed suiting up on a pitching submarine deck. The crewmen helped the team into their equipment, then helped strap Schmeisser submachine guns wrapped in oil cloth to the midriff belts of two members of the team.

Within moments. Hanneken and his men were ready. The boat was lowered down the hull on lines, and the team followed it down the side of the sub. Hanneken slipped on the steel, and his face slapped against the hull. He could not see the blood and did not realize for hours that he had broken his nose. Equipment boxes were lowered to them. The team cast off and began paddling north.

Hanneken told me how clumsy he had felt, encased in the dry suit, crowded into the inflatable boat, an awkward craft that seemed to fight them. Every few seconds a wave would crest the low-riding boat, drenching the team. One crewman did nothing but bail. There were no visible landmarks. Lights on the island were blacked out. Every so often Hanneken would cup a hand around the waterproof flashlight and illuminate the compass attached to the boat. They paddled for an hour toward the Sound of Hoxa, the mile-and-a-half-wide passage between South Ronaldsay and Flotta islands that led into Scapa Flow.

Hanneken was a member of the Aufklärungsstreikräfte, the Reconnaissance Forces. The Germans had no equivalent of the American Rangers or the British Special Service Brigade. With the exception of the paratroopers, German special forces were created ad hoc, as need demanded. The Navy Reconnaissance Force, under Vizeadmiral Hermann Densch, was largely for intelligence gathering, but hidden in the organizational chart was 10th Marineabteilung, the obscurely named 10th Naval Detachment, in which, after vigorous examinations, Hanneken had found himself. Hanneken had joined the navy to escape the army and the Waffen SS. “I thought boats would be easier. I misjudged that, I suppose. At the 10th, all I did was train for twelve months.”

All his training was for this journey, paddling in a rubber raft between two Scottish islands. He might have seen Stranger Head and Hoxa Head to his left and right, smudges on the horizon, black on black, just before the team came to the buoys. It was too dark to be sure. A submarine net was strung across the sound, hung from a line of black buoys. Hanneken tied the boat to a buoy, scraping his hand on barnacles. His team members unfastened their submachine guns and lowered them to the boat’s deck. The equipment box was secured to a strap that ran along the side of the boat. They wiped spit on the glass on their masks, fitted the masks over their faces, inserted mouthpieces, and slid into the water.

For half an hour, the sailors attached explosive charges to the net, along the buoy line and under the floats. The waves were high enough to break over their heads. The charges were modified s-minen-42s in glass cases. Hanneken retrieved from the boat a battery pack and timer enclosed in waterproof cloth. He secured the mechanism under a buoy.

Another half hour was spent connecting the charges to the battery. Finally, Hanneken tied to buoys on each side of the charges small red and green navigation lights, ingenious spring-loaded pop-up devices manufactured by a toy company in Munich, which would not be noticed by early morning Royal Navy patrols. Each light was on a timer. The team climbed back into the raft and grabbed the paddles.

Hanneken was exhausted and numb to his soul, but he and the others paddled mightily. In one hour, the U-boat would resurface for only ten minutes. If the sailors of the 10th Marine Detachment were late or lost, they were on their own.

U-513 was not the only German submarine working the waters near Scapa Flow that early morning. There was at least one other net-mining operation, launched from U-478, and there was the commando raid on Wideford Hill on Pomona (Mainland) Island. These raiders, also of the 10th Marineabteilung, concealed their boat in the rocks at Quanter Ness, then climbed in the darkness uphill past Chambered Cairn.

Near the outer barbed wire defenses, the five raiders dug shallow trenches and lay down to wait, covering themselves with camouflaged tarps. Not one of these commandos survived the day.

William Dawes was a locomotive engineer whom I spoke with while interviewing his son, Lawrence, after the war. Lawrence had been a Hurricane pilot with the 96th Squadron at Cranage. Lawrence invited his father along with us to a pub in Durham, where he proposed I conduct the interview.

I had my first glass of porter that day, which alone would have made our talk memorable. Research for this work required me to sample most of England’s beers and ales. After a pint with an American, an Englishman begins to remember our common heritage and becomes more voluble and takes on the tone of one addressing a younger brother.

Lawrence commented that many RAF pilots hid injuries so they could continue flying. One day his crew was mounting a refurbished 20mm cannon in his Hurricane, and the cannon was dropped on his foot. He flew with a fractured instep for the rest of the war. He added, “But I was scarcely injured as badly as my father here.”

The senior Dawes flicked his fingers in a deprecating manner. He had used a crutch on the way to the pub.

“He lost his leg,” Lawrence said, slashing with his hand, indicating the abruptness with which the leg had gone. The son had leaf-green eyes and a narrow nose with a small bulb at the tip. “Just before the Germans came, in one of their last rail-yard raids, it was. He wears a wood peg now.”

“Your locomotive was hit?” I asked.

William Dawes gently shook his head. He was sixty-eight and had a mesh of lines around his mouth and patchy gray hair. We expect everything on older people to wrinkle and fade. But the color of the eyes always remains true to youth. William’s eyes were still the same sparkling green of his son’s. “It was four in the morning. By that point in the war, most rail stock was moved only at night, to be sure. My engine, an American Southern on Lend Lease, was out of service for a while because the coal tender was being loaded. I was in the barn, in the switchroom.” He sipped his ale. “Of a sudden the walls blew inward. I wish there were more to tell.”

“There certainly is more, Father,” Lawrence said, probably not for the first time.

William stared at his porter. “They believe it was a five-hundred-pound bomb, and it landed about a hundred feet away.”

Lawrence annotated, “The Germans were using what they called Knickebein, which means something like dog-leg, a system of directional radio beams, transmitted from German stations which intersected over the bombers’ target. Accurate at night.”

“Accurate enough to find me, anyway.” William waved away further technical explanations. “The sirens had just gone off, but they were late. I wanted to roll my engine into a cement roundhouse to protect it. I just got to the door when the bomb hit. For a split second, I thought I’d been lifted off my feet and pitched against the wall. What actually happened was that the wall was thrown at me, and everything on it. The calendar, a framed photograph of an old steam engine, a clock—all right at me. Half the building hit me. Then, as soon as you could say knife, the rafter came down, crushing my left leg. How the timber got only one leg, the doctors never guessed. And only then came the sounds of the explosion, like thunder in my ear.”

He pulled at his ale, then asked, “Do you think the Germans had delayed-sound bombs, Lawrence?”

“Not then, anyway,” the son smiled.

“I spent four months in hospital. But my rail yard was maimed worse than I was. An antiaircraft regiment from the Staffordshire Infantry was assigned to the yard, with a number of the big sixty-inch searchlights.”

“They can spot a plane at three and a half miles,” Lawrence said.

“And the AA crew hit two of the bombers. But the Germans were determined this time. They wanted my yard. We’d been bombed on five prior occasions, damaged quite badly. We always had it back in operation within days. After that morning, though, there wasn’t much left of the yard but twisted steel and parts of locomotives and boxcars scattered around the craters.”

We spent another hour in the pub, learning primarily about William Dawes’ three operations, “the scalpels running seconds ahead of the gangrene, like a ghastly foot race toward my crotch.”

Dawes’ switchyard near Sheffield was not the only rail installation destroyed by the Luftwaffe during the same hours Karl Hanneken was mining the sub nets. From London north to Middlesbrough, inland from the North Sea, switchyards, railroad bridges, important crossings, and long lengths of mainline track were destroyed by Heinkels and Junkers. It was night, and “Not even the dog-leg could be bang on,” as Lawrence said, so the Luftwaffe made up for their lack of pinpoint accuracy by using over three hundred planes, the Observer Corps later estimated.

In counter-invasion studies done before S-Day, AACCS had correctly anticipated the Luftwaffe would undertake a massive air strike at rail installations immediately preceding the invasion. The Combined Chiefs believed the bombing’s purpose would be to impede the British in rushing reserves to the invasion front. The Heinkel and Junkers railway raids that night were further proof that the Germans would soon be at hand.

I have read Clara Gaudet’s letter to her daughter Anna, written just before Clara’s execution. Anna showed me the letter, handling it carefully, as if the words might spill off the page. Because my French is halting, she helped me through it.

Written on onionskin and wrinkled badly, as if tamped into a boot or a hat at some point in its journey, the letter was a painful, defiant missive describing the elder Gaudet’s life as a member of the French Resistance in Normandy, and of her proudest moment of the entire war, her radio broadcast from Le Havre, which had been received and decoded at Bletchley just before S-Day.

Mme. Gaudet was a physician, educated at the Sorbonne. When the Germans occupied France, she continued making rounds to her patients’ homes throughout Le Havre, using a bicycle after the Wehrmacht pressed her Renault into service. She had documents allowing almost unrestricted travel in the city, and she always had ready explanations if she was stopped late at night.

Le Havre is a major port and was a center of Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine activity. The city is due south across the channel from Brighton. An invasion on the southern English coast would be launched from Le Havre and other Norman ports. Clara Gaudet reported weekly on German troop movements in and around the city.

Her radio had once been a pack wireless set used by a German infantry squad for unit signals. A more powerful transmission amplifier and a frequency multiplier had been installed by a resistance man who had not introduced himself. The radio was hidden in the loft of a barn near Montivilliers, a short bicycle ride inland from Le Havre. The antenna was concealed in a wind vane on the barn’s roof. Her broadcasts were at night, when her signals carried farthest. She kept them short because she had been told the Le Havre Gestapo was using a new radio direction finder, with its circular antenna mounted on the cab of an Opel Blitz truck.

She kept her coding pad in the false bottom of a milk can. The pad was a thick block of sheets of alternating green and black paper, green for enciphering and black for deciphering. The paper was made of cellulose nitrate, once used for film in the movie industry. She kept a vial of potassium permanganate with the pad, which, when thrown on the paper, would cause an explosion, consuming the pad without leaving a latent image.

That early morning Clara Gaudet had encoded her message by candlelight in the loft. Then she dug the radio pack from under the hay and opened it like a standing suitcase. The batteries were on the left and the dials and knobs on the right. She pulled the Morse key and the earphones from the compartment below the volume control. The first few times she had used the key her hand had been shaking so violently she kept getting the repeat signal from England. She was steady that morning.

Mme. Gaudet first sent a series of Vs, paused, and immediately heard the return Vs in her headset. Bletchley had her. She pressed the key rapidly in a series of dits and dahs for no more than sixty seconds, knowing well the importance of her message. Three nights before this signal, she clicked, the Wehrmacht’s 8th and 28th divisions, which made up VIII Corps, had abandoned their encampments along the Seine between Le Havre and Rouen. They had moved at night, their armor, trucks, field cars, soldiers, everything. She had heard they headed northeast toward Brussels, but could not be certain.

I’ve seen a copy of her deciphered message, and it was considerably less wordy than my retelling. With RDF equipment on the prowl, Bletchley rarely risked a request for a confirm. This time they did. She repeated the message, then signed off with another series of Vs.

The letter to her daughter closed with heart-breaking vows of love, made even more so because Mme. Gaudet, sitting in her tiny cell, knew her fate. Anna, who was twenty years old when I talked with her, told me of her pride in her mother’s accomplishment that night. The war would have taken a different course had it not been for her mother, she said. No one would argue that.

Ava Singleton’s cottage at the Goldings, just south of St. Leonard’s Forest, midway between London and the channel, was set squarely in a half-acre of vegetable garden. Before the war, grass had grown in front of the cottage, and roses had been wrapped up and over an iron bar at the front gate. But vegetables had replaced the grass and the iron had been given to the Ministry of Works’ salvage drive. She told me she had also wanted to donate the garish cement birdbath at the side of her home, which her long-dead husband had made from a mold, but the ministry would not take it. Her cottage had three rooms and was heated by a log fire in the sitting room. Her bedroom, little bigger than a closet, was off the kitchen.

At about the same moment Bletchley was receiving Gaudet’s signal, Ava Singleton was awakened by the rattle of nearby gunfire. It seemed to be coming from behind her shed, where she kept her wheelbarrow and rakes. And then from somewhere near the Bedfords’ home down the road. She was familiar with the sound of shotguns. Her husband had been a bird hunter, and she occasionally went with him into the field. But this was entirely different—many shots, right after each other, the crackling sound rolling together with urgency. Many weapons, she thought.

Last night she had heard on the BBC that the War Ministry had issued an Invasion Alert No. 2, meaning an invasion was probably to occur within two days. It was their fifth alert in the past month, but she was taking all of them seriously.

And now the Germans were here. She threw back her blankets and lowered her feet to the floor, pushing them into her slippers. She lifted her robe off the hook on the back of the door. She was curiously calm.

Mrs. Singleton had lived all her life within five miles of the Goldings and had made few trips elsewhere. She took for granted that German spies and parachutists and tanks would come to the Goldings once the invasion was under way. She did not know enough about the rest of England to imagine them going anywhere else. She wondered what Germans looked like.

She trundled into the kitchen and pushed aside the blackout curtain. She could hear planes overhead, as was usual during recent nights. More shots were coming from behind her shed, louder. She could see the shed in the dim light, with its door open so the dog could come and go. Nothing new to be seen.

She walked through the sitting room to the front door and opened it without hesitating. She stepped out onto her narrow stone walkway between the rows of beans and tomatoes. Still nothing to be seen, and now the firing behind the shed had quieted. But the Bedfords still had their hands full. The noise was like the machine guns she had heard on BBC recordings of the fighting in Africa.

She admitted to me that she jumped when the branches started rustling in her apple tree near the birdbath. Most of the tree was hidden by the corner of the cottage, but she could see a few branches shake. Then the tree was still. She padded along a bean row toward it.

I asked her how she remained so steady during all this. She replied, “I was an old woman during the First War, and I was even older during the Second. Nothing excites me.”

Apparently not, because when she turned the corner of her home and found a German paratrooper dangling from her apple tree, still swaying, his parachute stuck in the higher branches, all she did was stare up at him.

She said, “My first thought was that they grew them small in the Reich. This fellow was a midget.”

Then she felt a fine disappointment when she realized that her paratrooper was made of hay stuffed into a small uniform, with a cloth doll’s head, and arms sewn up to the parachute lines. Not even the coal-scuttle helmet, the very symbol of Nazi terror, was real, but was painted on the head. She reached up to feel his cloth boots. They were heavy. Probably rocks for weight, she thought. She was put out that if the Germans were going to drop dolls, they wouldn’t even bother to make them life-sized.

Mrs. Singleton was wondering how she would ever climb into the tree to cut the doll down when the first tank came roaring down the road. It had a white star on it, the emblem of all Allied forces. Probably those knotty Americans, she thought. Her village was full of them. Every time one of their tanks came by, it left a sheen of dust over her vegetables. She squinted in anticipation of the cloud. The Bedfords had a telephone and must have called. Another tank rolled by, then another vehicle, which Mr. Bedford later told her was an armored personnel carrier.

She walked toward the shed and called for her dog, a golden retriever named Jedediah. He emerged slowly, and when she patted him, she could feel he was shaking. The dog followed her around the tool shed toward the grove of pear trees. Jedediah was not born to be a hero, and he walked alongside her, pressed into her leg almost hard enough to topple her. She had walked this path a thousand times, knew it so well she was not even aware it was night.

She found the noise-maker lying on the ground between two pear trees. It was attached to a small parachute, and was nothing more than a string of firecrackers with a pressure-activated detonator. All that was left of the firecrackers was a tumble of paper. Her small orchard still smelled of gunpowder.

“Well, posh,” she said, and began back to her cottage. “You come and sleep inside with me the rest of the night, Jedediah. You look like you need a good watchperson.”

Mrs. Singleton told me she found reason that night to be glad she had no telephone. Down the road, when Mr. Bedford was visited by firecrackers and two dummy paratroopers, he made a frantic call to the local Home Guard regiment, who passed it along to the Americans. Moments later, their tanks ground through his garden over apple trees, snapping them off at the ground. “And completely, I say, completely, tearing out my raspberries,” he told her later. His small greenhouse was crushed underneath the treads, not one pane surviving. One tank fired into his barn, which was razed. “I have my suspicions, Mrs. Singleton, that the Americans had already seen the dummies and were just getting in a practice round.”

Mrs. Singleton returned to bed, Jedediah in tow. Later that morning the radio would report that paratrooper dummies had landed in dozens of places along the south and east coasts, even some as far north as Edinburgh. She had utterly no idea what to make of it. Neither did AACCS.

The British Foreign Office’s Department of Communications was at Bletchley Park, in the town of Bletchley, about fifty miles northwest of London. The first mansion was built on the estate in the 1870s, and expanded many times through the years. Even so, the department added numerous other buildings to house the seven thousand people who worked there during the war. Bletchley was the heart of the British radio interception and code-breaking efforts.

On watch in the Netherlands and Baltic Intercept Section that morning was Commander Joseph Morehouse, a Royal Navy officer serving with the Foreign Office. Morehouse came by his position honestly, as his uncle was Nigel de Grey, who in 1917 had solved the Zimmermann telegram, in which Germany promised to return Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona to Mexico if Mexico would declare war on the United States. President Wilson released the intercepted and decoded telegram to the press, and it helped turn American public opinion against Germany. Morehouse’s duty was to gather on tape as many radio signals from Holland and the Baltic as possible. “I was in intercept,” he told me, “rather than in code-breaking because, shall we say, I simply didn’t have my uncle’s knack.”

Morehouse’s section was in one of the new buildings at Bletchley. On the roof were numerous antennas: rotary beams, a trap, several quads, a long-wire directive array, and others. Despite the impressive number of antennas at Bletchley, most of his signals were picked up at intercept stations on the east coast and relayed over telephone wires.

Morehouse’s desk was at the head of an aisle of radio operators. They sat six to a side, with banks of electronics in front of them: crystal converters, VHF receivers, 110-MC amplifiers, grid-dip meters, signal generators, oscillators, and Edison and Motorola recorders. The array seemed strapped against the walls by a mesh of wires. Light was low, and the men’s faces were washed in the green and amber of the dial lights. The room was filled with amplified Morse and scratchy snippets of German conversation. Morehouse spoke German and read Morse, but what he heard, as always, was in code.

At precisely six that morning, Commander Morehouse’s head jerked up from a transcript he was reading. Something indefinable was occurring. A part of the room suddenly seemed to be missing.

“Sir,” one of his operators said, “I’ve lost all signals.”

“Me, too, sir.” The second operator turned a dial. “I’m scanning and not getting anything.”

Except for the low static of empty radio bands, the room was eerily silent. In the six months he had been posted to this room, Morehouse had witnessed this only once before, a month ago. Radio silence often precedes a military operation, but the abruptly empty airwaves last month had been a Wehrmacht feint. He walked down the aisle, bending over one radioman after another, glancing at their dials. Finally, he asked, “What is happening, Barnett?”

Barnett threw two switches and slowly rolled another knob. “I don’t know yet, sir. Perhaps the same as in April. Give me a moment.”

Morehouse’s section was monitoring the Wehrmacht’s Army Group C, which in the previous week had moved into Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the smaller ports at Ijmuiden, Wijk Aan Zee, Den Helder, and the West Frisian Islands along the Netherlands’ north coast. Army Group C was commanded by Erwin Rommel, proven in Africa. AACCS believed Rommel had been given authority to strip from other Wehrmacht and Waffen SS corps any divisions he desired for the invasion. Bletchley’s latest estimated order of battle for Rommel’s Group C included the new XXX Corps, made up of the 7th and 15th panzer divisions and the 15th Light Division, veteran units to be feared. Also in the Army Group C was the XXXIV Corps. Rommel’s troops were crammed into the Dutch ports, waiting for their signal.

“I can’t get even one reading, sir,” Barnett said. “There’s nothing to hear.”

For weeks Army Group C had filled Commander Morehouse’s recorders, day after day and night after night, a relentless onslaught over the airwaves. Now, utterly nothing. The Army Group had suddenly covered itself with a blanket of radio silence. Morehouse sprinted to his desk and lifted a telephone. “Get me Admiral Reynolds immediately. Yes, I know what time it is. Do as I tell you, and quickly.”

George Stephens was a dairyman in Lincolnshire, a few miles south of where the Humber empties into the North Sea. Stephens was a veteran of the Somme. “Trenchfoot, trenchmouth, ringworm, scabies, dysentery, prickly heat, and that’s my entire war record.”

That early morning he woke to his dogs’ barking. They were border collies, three of them, reliable and earnest, not often causing a commotion. Like everyone else in England, Stephens was aware of Invasion Alert No. 2, and he had just heard planes overhead. He climbed out of bed, stepped into his pants, and reached for his shotgun, which he brought into the bedroom whenever there was an alert. The gun was an over-under, and so well handled over the years that the maker’s mark had almost vanished.

Without opening her eyes, his wife Carlene said, “It’s just the bombers, George. Like always.”

“I heard something else,” he answered. “So did the dogs.”

He stepped out of his house toward the barn. The collies were confined to a run next to a milking shed, and they were still yelping when he got there.

He held a finger to his lips. “Hush, you.”

The dogs paid him no heed. Crouched like an infantryman, Stephens rounded the barn. Just to the west was a low-rising hill, too stony even for grazing. There, caught in a passing glimpse of moonlight, was a man in a parachute harness.

This was not a doll. The fellow was gathering up his parachute, rolling it under his arms. Strapped to the parachutist’s stomach was a large pack.

“I’ve thought back over the next fifteen seconds so many times, it seems like an hour in my memory now,” Stephens recalled. “I walked closer to him, praying he wouldn’t turn to see me. I know my bare feet were making sounds on the rocks, but he didn’t hear me because my dogs were still yowling.”

“It was dark,” Stephens continued. “In my mind I saw a German army uniform and was quite struck later to see his farmer’s clothes, pants just like mine, and a blue shirt.”

Stephens was forty feet away when the parachutist heard him. The man turned slightly and at the same time drew a Luger from a holster strapped to his leg.

“I was going to say something like, ‘Friend or foe?’ but he didn’t give me time, you see.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

Stephens looked at me as if I’d gone daft. “Why, I shot him, of course.”

The burst of birdshot hit the German squarely in his stomach pack. It jolted him, and he staggered back a step, dropping the chute.

“But I don’t think it hurt him—just destroyed his fancy radio. It got a bit dicey then.”

“How so?” I ventured again.

“I glimpsed his pistol, coming up toward me once more, but I raised the shotgun a fraction and pulled the other trigger.” Stephens added with mischief, “He lost his head over that one.”

So he did. George Stephens gloried in the showdown. The German war machine had personally tested him, and he had triumphed. If only his country would do as well.

Gunboats, motor torpedo boats, minelayers, antisubmarine trawlers, sloops, and drifters patrolled the perimeter of Britain. In 1940, the Royal Navy had two to three hundred of these craft at sea at any given time, predominately on the most threatened eastern and southeastern seaboards. By May 1942, however, the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine had exacted their heavy toll, and the Navy was hard-pressed to have fifty ships on patrol.

Lieutenant Richard Keyes was the mine engineer aboard the minelayer HMS Pettibone, which that morning was four miles off Benacre Broad, on the Suffolk coast, northeast of London. At 5:30 that morning, Keyes was overseeing the repair of a launcher on the aft deck—a tedious, cold duty. He could not have known he was three minutes from earning the Distinguished Service Cross, the first of the invasion.

Keyes was on one knee, a pair of pliers in his hand, when the battle stations klaxon rang and the Pettibone veered hard to starboard. He dropped the pliers and ran forward, catching up to an AA gunner sprinting to his weapon.

“What is it?” Keyes yelled over the alarm.

“U-boat off the starboard bow, sir. On the surface.”

The gunner swung the barrels of his dual Polsten 20-mm guns to starboard. Keyes steadied himself against the rail and peered into the night.

“That’s when I stopped thinking, I believe,” he told me after the war. “Our searchlight flicked on and caught the submarine spot on its beam. The sub was dead ahead. It was a tiny thing, really, looking for all the world quite harmless.”

The submarine was one of the Kriegsmarine’s Kleine Kampfmittel (small battle units), a V80 midget, seventy-two feet long with a six-foot beam and a crew of four.

“Three German submariners were on deck, trying to keep their balance as the sub rolled in the sea. The midget was sinking. The bow was in the air, and the Germans were inching higher and higher along the deck to keep above water, all the while trying to keep their hands in the air, surrendering—small wonder with our AA gun aimed at them.”

Just as the British armed forces are penurious in granting bravery decorations, the recipients of those awards are usually hesitant in describing their heroics. I prompted him: “What spurred you to dive overboard?”

“My captain stepped out of the bridge and yelled down, ‘They’re scuttling their sub. Stop them.’”

“So you jumped into the sea?”

Keyes had a broad forehead and heavily lidded eyes. He paused before every sentence. “Colonel, in the Royal Navy your superior tells you what to do, not how to do it. I had just been given an order to prevent the submarine from sinking.”

His expression was purposely deadpan, so I adopted his tone and asked fatuously, “So tell me, was the North Sea cold?”

He smiled. “I thought I was living my last moments, it was so cold. And it was enough of a swim, perhaps forty yards, for my stupidity to chill me further.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I had no idea what had brought the sub to the surface disabled, or why it was now sinking.”

Lieutenant Keyes grabbed the sub’s metal deck grating, now at a considerable cant, and pulled his feet under him. One of the Germans stood between him and the small conning tower. The others were forward, standing on the nose. All still had their hands above their heads. Keyes moved on all fours toward the tower, the water following him as the sub continued to slide under the water.

The sub’s aft hatch was secure. He crawled higher. The German said something, indecipherable to Keyes, and positioned himself between the lieutenant and the tower.

“Get out of my way,” Keyes ordered as he approached. The lieutenant was backlit by the searchlight. The sub had a two-dimensional quality, like a photograph, all in shades of gray and black, as had the crewmen, wearing shining wet suits and appearing otherwordly.

The German blocked him and said something more. He sounded calm and reasonable. Keyes pushed him off the deck into the water and clambered for the tower.

“I knew nothing about submarines,” he remembered. “I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”

When he reached the short conning tower, Keyes gripped the periscope and levered himself over the tower rail. Just as he dropped onto the conning deck, the fourth crewman’s head emerged through the hatch. When Keyes kicked him in the face, the submariner slipped back into the craft. The lieutenant heard waves splash against the conning tower. Another minute, and the sub would slip below the surface.

“Lights were still on in the control room below. I gripped the hatch ring and lowered myself as far as my arms allowed. My feet didn’t find anything, so I let go, and landed on the German crewman. I don’t know whether I’d kicked him into unconsciousness or whether landing on him did it, but he was out by the time I gathered my feet under me.”

The lieutenant found himself in the only crew space on the midget submarine, the control room. “It was filled with wheel controls, cables, tubes, compasses, fuse boxes, gauges, and all the plumbing. The room was so narrow I couldn’t extend my arms in any direction. I have no idea how four men fit in there.”

The sea was gushing up into the room from the grate over the control room deck, swirling and bubbling around Keyes’ knees. The lights flickered. The German sputtered. Keyes looked quickly about him. The submariner’s head hung limply.

I asked, “How’d you shut off the water?”

Another modest grin. “I started turning every wheel in the place. No small task, mind, there must have been a dozen of them. The deck was by then at a considerable angle, and I kept slipping, sometimes to my knees. All the while, the water rose. Drowning, that’s the real drawback of joining the Royal Navy. And that’s all I was thinking about. Jesus, I didn’t want to drown. I turned those wheels in a panic.”

“But you finally found the right one.”

“Something lost is always found in the last place you look. That’s how it must be with submarine controls. Yes, I found the shut-off valve, and I swear it was the last one in the room.”

By then the water was to Lieutenant Keyes’ chest. The light sputtered out and plunged the chamber into darkness as black as the sea bottom. The submarine groaned and hissed. Water splashed into Keyes’ mouth, and he gagged and spit. He reached for pipes to support him as he waded toward the hatch. He was startled when the unconscious floating German bumped him. The lieutenant found the rungs and climbed toward the night air.

Only the rim of the conning tower and the bow were still above water, but the sub had stopped sinking. Two of the topside Germans were in the water, both clinging to life rings which had been thrown from the trawler. The third submariner was still on the bow, his gaze shifting uncertainly between the British ship and Keyes.

“Come here,” the lieutenant yelled as his head crested the conning tower’s rail. He signaled the German with an arm, then pointed down the hatch.

“I give that fellow credit. I didn’t have to tell him again. He slid down the deck toward the tower. I lowered myself back into the control room to water level, now about three feet below the hatch. I reached around underwater until I found that fourth German, not knowing if he was alive. I dragged him up as far as I could, and the topside German pulled him up the rest of the way. I hurried out of there. Carrying the German, we jumped into the water.”

Keyes and the German submariners were hauled to the trawler’s deck. The fourth German was quickly resuscitated. The Kriegsmarine sailors were locked in a storeroom and armed guards were posted outside the hatch. After a line was rigged to the submarine, the control room was emptied of water with the Pettibone’s portable pump. The sub was still low in the water, but stable. The trawler made slowly to port, its prize in tow.

In the British fashion, the Pettibone’s captain said nothing to Lieutenant Keyes. Not until the DSC was announced did Keyes learn what his captain, who made the recommendation, had thought of his little swim.

I have chosen these incidents virtually at random. There were many others that morning. Little incursions by the Germans, deceptions picayune and otherwise, touches of violence. As General Clay had warned, the Germans were parrying and feinting with Allied intelligence, and a shroud of confusion was descending on Great Britain.

Several days earlier the general had exclaimed, “I don’t want to go down in history as America’s great blind commander, another Custer, who was told by scouts that there were more Sioux and Cheyenne over the next hill than the 7th Cavalry had cartridges. If I could just have a glimpse over the next hill.”

Well, he couldn’t, at least not an accurate glimpse. The Germans were making sure of that.

4

German planes had not settled for destroying the landscape. They also devastated the language. A full moon, once a lovers’ moon, had become a bombers’ moon. A cloudless night was termed a smoking night, due to the smoke screens from oil-burning canisters, the most bothersome of all bomber defenses. Londoners had begun calling the River Thames Bombers’ Lane, because Luftwaffe planes flew to the city along the estuary.

We were flying along Bombers’ Lane toward London. To our right were the ruins of the oil tanker farms at Thameshaven. The fires there had been burning for months. The joke was that the Luftwaffe used the smoke column as a navigation aid, and the Heinkels returned to the tanks at once whenever the smoke threatened to die down.

The general and I came to London almost daily for meetings, and there was usually some new smudge on the horizon, some neighborhood which had ceased to exist the night before, some factory destroyed, some new outrage to peer at as we flew overhead. The Germans had begun their all-out bomber attack on August 13, 1940, which they called Adlertag, or Eagle Day. They had been coming back since, each bomber escorted by two fighters, which often flew fifteen thousand feet above their wards, ready to pounce on anything that dared interfere. As the months passed and the ranks of RAF interceptors had dwindled, many Luftwaffe bombing runs were made at only four thousand feet. A plane hardly needed a bombsight at that height.

The East End and the docklands had suffered most. Bethnal Green, Stepney, Hackney, Brick Lane, Bow, and East and West Ham were gone. There were only crater-pocked, wreckage-strewn, ash-covered expanses, which from the air appeared as one imagines the moon might. Industrial areas to the west of the city had also been gutted. Brentford, Hounslow, many more.

“Will you look at that, Jack?” the general said from the copilot’s seat. “I’d heard it’d been hit yesterday, scarcely believed it. But there’s the proof.”

Coming into view under the Cub’s fuselage was the Tower of London. I could see its dry moat, double castellated walls, and the four towers of the White Tower. From our angle, it should have been framed by the Tower Bridge, to my eye the loveliest structure in the city. Built in 1894, with Gothic towers over two hundred feet high, it was the last bridge over the Thames before the river flows into the sea, the pride of the river.

The bridge was not there. Instead, only the two foundation piers remained, topped by mounds of rubble. The bascules had fallen into the water, as had the decks to the north and south of the foundations. Steel suspension spans lay over the rubble, twisted together like snakes basking on rocks in the sun. The neighborhood south of the bridge was still on fire. Spots of flame were visible through the smoke. Bricks and stone and shattered glass covered Tower Bridge Road. Glittering in the sun, the glass made the road appear like a river, as if bright light was reflecting off waves.

Just north of the bridge site, the warehouses of St. Katherine’s Dock had also been heavily damaged, not for the first time in the war. Ivory House’s roof and clock tower had collapsed. Fire was still curling through the building’s windows.

“A bridge is a tough target,” Captain Norman said. “Dive bombers, probably. Brave pilots, what with all the balloons around.”

The balloons over the city resembled a cloud layer. They belonged to the 30th Balloon Barrage Group, under Group Captain J. W. Smithers. A Ministry of Information propaganda film, The Lion Has Wings, showed a preposterous sequence in which Luftwaffe pilots recoiled in horror at the sight of the balloons. Londoners scoffed at the film and at the balloons. We learned after the war that the film was not too far off the mark. The silver behemoths frightened German pilots. In fact, a Junkers attacking the Tower Bridge had plummeted into the Thames when its wing was sheared off by a tethering cable.

Norman tipped up the Cub’s port wing, and we veered north a few degrees over the city. Many Londoners believed the Germans were making it a point of honor to destroy St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unbelievably, they had not succeeded, although the entire neighborhood, blocks around, had been flattened. Volunteers slept in the cathedral every night, putting out fires blown their way from near misses.

Looking down on St. Paul’s, General Clay said, “The Brits are an adaptable bunch, I’ll give them that. For a while they claimed that as long as Big Ben stood, there’d always be an England. Then when it fell, it was Buckingham Palace. As long as there was a Buckingham Palace, there’d always be an England. Now it’s St. Paul’s.” He shook his head. “I wonder what they’ll pick next. As long as there’s a Dr. Johnson’s house, there’ll always be an England. Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.”

He laughed without mirth, then drew on his Pall Mall. He turned to me. “You know why Winnie thinks the Germans are destroying the landmarks, don’t you?”

I shook my head. Winnie. Even to my tin American ear, the nickname was brazen effrontery. The Cub lurched in an air pocket, and I grabbed the edge of my seat.

“Hitler is obsessed with a bloodless victory.”

“It’s hardly been bloodless,” I said.

“Goddamn it, Jack, don’t chip away at my stories. Relatively bloodless, then. Hitler thinks he understands the British, since they are Anglo-Saxons like the Germans. His comments about the English have a proprietary quality. From the very first, Hitler was amazed Great Britain entered the war. And once Britain declared war, he was puzzled by its adamant refusal to make peace.”

The general held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger over his palm, like a forester. “Hitler has never stopped dreaming of British panic, revolution, and surrender. He doesn’t understand that the British are incapable of thinking of capitulation. It’s a foreign concept to them, something French, from Paris, like lingerie.”

“And that’s the reason for the terror bombings,” I concluded.

Clay frowned at my stealing his punchline. “You’d think Hitler would have learned that civilian bombings don’t always bring results. Madrid was bombed for twenty-eight months, and there never was wholesale panic. Because Hitler thought the British government would collapse, he never planned on really coming. Now, with the British as stiff-necked as ever, he’s got to.”

I said, “What you mean, then, is that the imminent invasion isn’t really the führer’s fault.”

The general turned to our pilot. “I asked for an aide-de-camp, and I got an asshole-de-camp. Isn’t that the military for you?”

We flew over Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then banked southwest over Shaftesbury, then Piccadilly. Below, London’s main avenues were dappled with ruins. Sticks of high explosive bombs had torn long streaks of destruction across the neighborhoods. The bombs chose their targets with no more logic than a tornado in the American South, touching down here and there in a willy-nilly way, devastating several buildings in a row, then mockingly sparing several, then touching down again. The Luftwaffe was running out of targets, yet they still came to London almost nightly. There seemed to be a weary petulance to the German bombing.

We began descending to the airstrip south of the lake called the Serpentine in Hyde Park. When the general liked a subject, he was a bulldog with a bone. He started again, “Von der Goltz wrote at the end of the last century that it is no longer possible to frighten an enemy into submission. Hitler should have read him. Twenty thousand whirling dervishes howling their battle cries didn’t break the British square at Omdurman in North Africa in 1898. The Highlanders’ terrifying war cries at Culloden Moor in 1746 didn’t drive the British from the field.”

Terry Norman said, “Nothing’ll make an enemy turn tail like a rebel yell, General. You ever heard one?”

“Captain, I’m trying to make a point here.”

“A rebel yell will make your skin crawl. Listen to this.”

The general held up a hand, too late. Our pilot filled his lungs and loosed a screech that rattled everything in the Cub’s tiny cabin and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand. I swear it registered on some of the plane’s instruments.

Norman ended it with a smile. “If the dervishes had had the rebel yell, Britain would have lost Africa. No question about that.”

General Clay turned forward in his seat. He put a finger in his ear and rubbed it around. The rebel yell’s effect on ears already ringing from hypertension could only be imagined. He said under his breath, “Christ, we might lose this war yet.”

The plane soared over Hyde Park Corner and settled into its approach paralleling the Carriage Road. The lake and trees seemed to rise up to us. At one end of the park were three-story mountains of rubble, growing daily, resembling the mysterious, prehistoric barrows that mark the English countryside. Hyde Park’s grass was strangely silver, and when the wheels met the grass, a gray plume rose behind us, swirling away in the prop wash. We bounced along, raising clouds of this gray dust as we taxied toward a waiting car.

Norman switched off the engine as soon as we drew alongside the automobile. He said, “I don’t want to get any of that crap in my cylinders, whatever it is.”

I followed the general out the hatch. When my foot landed on the ground, a puff of powder squirted from under my shoes.

We left Norman at the plane. Our driver was one of Churchill’s orderlies, a Scot named Bruce McWhorter who always drove for us in the city. He held the Bentley’s door open and explained, “Bombs hit the coal dump at the west end of the park last night. Coal dust everywhere now, all over the park. Could hardly breathe last night around here. I was wearing a scarf over my nose and mouth.”

We entered the rear doors of the car. The general began reviewing documents from a folder he had brought along. I sank back into the Bentley’s seat. We rolled onto Kensington Road toward Knightsbridge. Not even the opulent scent of the Bentley’s leather could mask the smell of the bombed city, the unforgettable blitz odor: a mix of domestic gas, charred timber, broken sewer lines, water-doused fires, and a hint of high explosives.

We rounded Hyde Park Corner, passed the Wellington Arch, and drove along Constitution Hill. Because it was through Green Park, the avenue was one of the few in London that did not have hills of brick and stone lining it. Other than canvas-topped Humber Snipes, three-ton Austins, and other military trucks, few vehicles shared the road with us.

General Clay looked up from his paperwork and stared out the window for a moment. “Did you ever visit London before the war, Jack?”

“No, sir. First time was when I came with you.”

“It’s unrecognizable now, and I don’t mean just the wrecked buildings and the craters and rubble everywhere and the pall of smoke that’s always overhead. The bombers are abrading the soul of the city, and it may never recover. Everyone here has lost family members and friends, but there’s more to it than that. People here drew strength from the immutability of their city and their lives. Nothing ever changed. Now everything is different.”

He glanced at his wristwatch. “The children have been taken to the country. There are block-long lines for food and virtually everything else. Two years ago, most Londoners wouldn’t have anything to do with the black market. Now it’s a second economy, and folks here are wondering at their inability to do the patriotic thing and avoid the black markets.”

The general returned the wave of a pedestrian who had recognized him. “And the smaller things. Having to feed potatoes to their dogs. The banning of the ringing of church bells except to announce the invasion. The warning sirens and the all-clears night after night, sometimes as many as ten times a night. These and hundreds of other nuisances are grinding away at them, making them less British, less resolute and enduring.”

He paused a moment, then added, “And now this. Jesus, this is going to be tough for the Brits to take.”

We had reached the Queen Victoria Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace, rather, what remained of the palace, which was very little. A night bombing three days before had torn apart the structure. The edifice had been reduced to hillocks of Portland stone and bricks. Those parts of the palace familiar to the public, the Ball Room and the Bow Room, had vanished, though ragged portions of the gold-capitaled pilasters and the corbeled doorways could be seen protruding from the stone piles. An enormous crystal candelabra had been dug from the ruins, and lay in an inglorious, fractured heap behind the iron fence.

Flying the royal standard over the palace when the monarch was in residence had been discontinued early in the war. During the bombing, the king had been in Leeds reviewing soldiers of the British I Corps and the royal family had been at Balmoral. Even so, fifteen members of the household staff had perished in the blasts and ensuing fire.

All that remained upright of Buckingham Palace were a few jagged brick spires, charred black and tottering so precariously it was judged wise to topple them. Perhaps a thousand people had gathered near the gates to watch a wrecking ball swing from a crane in the forecourt. The ball hit a segment of wall, and bricks and mortar fell to the ground, sending up a roll of dust.

As we slowed for the crowd, the general said, “This’ll be hugely demoralizing.”

I understood him to mean the bombing of the palace, until he said a moment later, “To finish the job for the Luftwaffe by bringing down the last of the walls with a wrecking ball is a terrible decision. The ruins should sit there for Londoners to gaze on every time they pass by.”

He fished a cigarette from his tunic pocket and said, “After all the pounding these people have taken, they need an Alamo. This should have been it. I’d say so to Winnie and Montgomery, that SOB, but it’s too late.”

I hasten to mention that General Clay had enormous respect for Bernard Montgomery, particularly for his genius at managing the set battle, but the British general “affects me like a cold sore,” Clay often said. I almost never heard Clay mention Montgomery without adding “that SOB,” much like the letters following the names of British valor award winners, such as VC for Victoria Cross.

“Honk the horn, Sergeant,” Clay ordered. The crowd was blocking the Bentley’s progress. “We’re late. I received a telex from Roosevelt yesterday asking me to be more prompt for the meetings with Churchill, if you can imagine. Winnie must have complained to the president. Christ, many is the morning I’ve waited two hours for the PM to get out of bed.”

McWhorter tapped the horn, and we waded through the bystanders. Several times the general returned greetings with waves. When we resumed speed, he said again, “An Alamo. That’s what is needed.”

I wanted to say that the British already had enough Alamos, that the entire country would soon be an Alamo, but I remained silent.

General Clay began one of his trademark orations, this one about promptness in the military, which lasted all the way to the War Rooms, and which will be happily omitted here. Instead, I’ll introduce myself.

The British call an aide-de-camp a dog’s body, someone always under foot and easy to kick. That’s all I knew about military aides when I was first assigned to General Clay. He never did outline my duties, and, with the exception of the diary he directed I keep, I invented my own tasks. My job evolved, and by S-Day I was acting as a staff troubleshooter, handling relations with the press, scheduling the general’s appointments, and channeling his orders.

To my regret, not once did any newspaper or radio ever suggest that I was a power behind the throne, a Richelieu or a Rasputin. I suppose my dispensable nature was too apparent. In fact, in many command and staff photos that appeared in stateside newspapers during the war, I was the only person not named. The caption under the famous Life photograph taken by Margaret Bourke-White reads, “With the weight of the free world on their shoulders, Prime Minister Churchill and General Clay spread a map on a tree stump at the Prime Minister’s retreat at Chequers. Also present is an unidentified aide.” My wife’s next letter to me began, “My dear Unidentified.”

I have three degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles. My Ph.D. thesis is entitled “Lieutenant General John Burgoyne’s Strategy to Restore King George III’s Rule in His Rebellious American Colonies; Defects in the Design.” Quite a read, I might add, if you are interested in that sort of thing. I was hired by the War Department as a lecturer in military history and strategy soon after leaving the university, and I taught as a civilian at West Point and at combat schools around the country for a number of years. For a while, Major Wilson Clay was a fellow staff member at the artillery officer’s school in Washington.

My knowledge of military history was the nexus of my relationship with General Clay, I believe. The anecdotes of war that he would extract from his remarkable memory and parade before me—at times it seemed he was flogging me with them—acted as a religion for him, offering him guidance and support. Perhaps he viewed me as a disciple.

To say we were friends during those days would be an exaggeration. Our wives became quite close, though. Clay was the hardest worker I ever met. He thought nothing of his seventy-hour work week. He spent the little time he allowed himself for socializing with staff-level officers and congressmen or administration officials. Among Wilson Clay’s many gifts was the ability to make friends with influential people. I am a student of command and of Clay, but I don’t pretend to understand this talent.

By 1939 one didn’t need a doctorate to see the war coming, so I joined the army, tired by then of teaching, thinking that I’d prefer to fight than teach fighting. The army promptly sent me back to West Point, this time in uniform. I made repeated requests for transfers to line duty, all of which were denied. Finally, when I heard Wilson Clay was being sent to Europe as a divisional commander, I wrote him asking for work. I tried to avoid pleading in my letter, but failed, so much did I want to be in the war. I also shamelessly asked my wife, Barbara, to ask Clay’s wife for help. This and, as the general delighted in pointing out, only this succeeded.

A few more personal notes. I was thirty-five years old at the time of S-Day. Barbara and I have one child, a boy, born since the war ended, who is now two years old and who appears on his way to becoming a gifted surgeon. I have three bald brothers, but I boast every hair I ever had, and it is seal brown. I wouldn’t call myself handsome (and if I won’t, no one else will), but my features are presentable. My nose is a bit too wide, and I can’t quite hide my Adam’s apple. My eyes are blue or green, depending on the light, and my wife loves them. I have a strong laugh and what I think is an attentive manner. People like being around me.

I cannot truthfully expand my role as General Clay’s aide. I was one of those people you see walking the heavyweight champ from his dressing room to the ring. Much of the time my presence meant only that General Clay didn’t have to talk to himself. Other times I could be handy. On my uniform was the badge of a general’s aide, an eagle clutching a shield decorated with stars and stripes in colored enamels. On the shield were four stars, corresponding to Clay’s rank. After the war I returned to UCLA as a professor of history. I now keep the badge in a drawer of my desk there, and I lift it out and ponder over it and recall those days more often than I’d care to admit.

The general was not one for compliments, but he inadvertently paid me one once, and modesty won’t prevent me from passing it along here. Our wives back in Washington were lamenting our absences over wine one evening. The next day Margaret Clay wrote her husband asking if he would arrange a leave so I could return to the States and my wife for a few days. His reply, according to Margaret, was that I would be missed more at AEFHQ than I was being missed in Washington. I swelled with that one.

We arrived at Great George Street at 1:15 that afternoon. The government offices are between Whitehall and St. James Park. To the south was the half-ruin of Westminster Abbey. The Gothic Nave, built in the sixteenth century and once the tallest in Britain, had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombs. Its soaring vaults had collapsed onto the monuments in the nave’s aisles and transepts, all of which were now piles of rock and dust. The rest of the structure, including the two western towers, the Chapter House, Cloisters, Sanctuary, and the chapels, remained undamaged, and services were still being conducted daily.

The cabinet war rooms had been built in the basement of the Great George Street offices because of the building’s proximity to Whitehall and because of its steel-framed structure. The basement complex had been reinforced with tons of concrete and steel I-beams. Engineers promised that even a direct hit on the building above would only flicker the lights and loosen dust in the subterranean rooms. Most who worked there called it “the hole in the ground.”

General Clay nodded at the guards, and I followed him down the stairs. We were joined at the bottom of the steps by Lieutenant Ed Paley, Clay’s London headquarters secretary. “Sir, Senator Longley is here to see you. Insists on it, in fact.”

Clay glared at the lieutenant. “What is he doing in London, for Christ’s sake?”

“Fact-finding tour, he claims, sir. He said he could not alert you to his arrival for security reasons. The president issued him a BIGOT, and he’s been waving it around down here.”

The BIGOT security card was the most secure in the ETO, and allowed its holder to know all details of the invasion defense.

“Lest you hadn’t already concluded this, Lieutenant, Senator Longley is the north end of a horse walking south.” Clay removed his cap and pushed it into his pants pocket. “I’ve got too goddamn many things to do to meet with a politician. Is the prime minister here yet?”

“He’s been delayed a few moments, sir.”

“Show the senator into my office.”

The general and I walked along the main corridor. It was Clay’s nature to both say he had no time and then to make time for Senator Lawton Longley, the Democrat from Louisiana, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and a long-time supporter of President Roosevelt. The general was not about to have the powerful senator return to Washington to whisper negative things about the AEF commander into Roosevelt’s ear. Longley was known to imagine slights and nurse grudges. He was not anyone to toy with.

As he walked, Clay said over his shoulder at me, “Don’t stand between Longley and a mirror, Jack. It’d be too dangerous. He loves mirrors like most men love women.”

The war rooms were a series of small cubicles, most not much larger than the desks inside. They included a radio room, the shorthand-typist station, a map room, the mess, a transatlantic telephone room, a number of offices and quarters for high-ranking war personnel, the cabinet room, and the prime minister’s quarters. The long corridor was filled with soldiers and sailors, all moving briskly.

We entered General Clay’s office. He made do with an oak desk and chair, a filing cabinet, and a cot, which was placed against the wall under a clock. A light in milk glass hung from the ceiling. Also overhead was an air duct, painted tan, with adjustable nozzles. A banker’s lamp with a green glass shade was on the desk. On one wall was a curtain hiding a map. Under the cot was a bedpan. Because there was no plumbing in the war rooms, Clay loathed staying the night there and always attempted to return to his advance command post or his rooms at Grosvenor Square.

Clay had just lowered himself into the chair when Paley ushered Senator Longley into the rooms, then retreated. You’d have thought it was Margaret Clay rather than the senator. The general leaped up, a broad grin suddenly on his face. He held out both hands and charged around the desk to greet the senator.

“Lawton, if you’d have told me you were coming I would have prepared a reception, a little drum and bugle in your honor.”

The senator beamed and pumped Clay’s hand. I’d seen photographs and newsreels of the senator working his home state. He invariably wore a white suit, black suspenders, spats, and sometimes even a boater. Outside Louisiana, he dressed like a Wall Street banker. For his meeting with the general, he had chosen to wear a paratrooper’s camouflage jacket and pants. I thought I could hear Clay’s teeth grinding behind the grin.

“The president sent me over to gather information and report back, Wilson.”

Which General Clay knew meant that FDR sent him over to get him out of FDR’s hair.

“And I’m glad he did, Lawton. Those twice daily briefings the president receives from my office can’t completely keep him informed, I know. Hell, they’re only fifteen to twenty pages apiece.”

Longley helped himself to the general’s chair. Clay locked his hands behind his back and rocked on his toes, the smile frozen on his face. He introduced me. I was worth only a dip of the senator’s chin.

“Well, tell me what you need to know, Lawton,” the general said.

The senator’s black hair was two-tone, white near his ears, while the remainder was black. “A skunk’s coloring,” General Clay told me later. Longley had teeth as white and as perfectly spaced as piano keys. His eyes had friendly lines around them, giving him an avuncular appearance. He was as tall as I am, but had broader shoulders. He had played football at LSU. Eighteen of those ballplayers were appointed to federal government jobs within days of his first senate election victory, along with twelve of his immediate family and countless friends. “Sucking on the government tit, the lot of them,” Clay had said.

“Tell me, Wilson,” the senator asked, “are you positive the Germans are going to invade?”

The question was so brainless, indicative of such a vast expanse of unknowing, that General Clay’s mouth actually dropped. He recovered quickly. “Let me show you how we know, Lawton.”

He crossed quickly to his files and pulled out several folders. He leafed through them a moment, then lowered a few to the desk. He stood over Longley’s shoulder.

“These photos were taken by recon planes, usually De Haviland Mosquitoes. They’ve been analyzed by the Photographic Interpretation Unit at Wembley.” The general slid the top photo under the senator’s nose. “This was taken over a harbor near Amsterdam. What looks like a herringbone pattern are two long docks with barges tied to each side of both docks. There are over two hundred craft in this one photo.”

General Clay pushed the top photo aside, revealing another. “These show a number of inlets in Zeeland, in southern Holland. You see more of the same barges.” He brought up another photograph. The image was partly obscured by clouds. “We believe this photo shows the German navy’s new Marinefährprähme, a special landing craft they have been mass producing for half a year.”

“You mentioned barges. You mean the type that ply the European canals?”

“The same. The Kriegsmarine has requisitioned tugs, motor vessels, trawlers, lighters, and launches from throughout Europe. At least five thousand vessels. It has virtually paralyzed canal, coastal, and fishing traffic, seriously reducing trade with the Baltic and shipment of supplies to Norway. The withdrawal of merchant ships, especially coal and iron ships, has impaired ore imports from Sweden. We believe that collecting and adapting invasion vessels has put such a severe strain on the Germans’ limited shipyard facilities that almost all other naval construction has come to a standstill.”

“I worked on barges on the Mississippi as a lad, Wilson. They wouldn’t seem to be the ideal landing craft.”

“The Germans are modifying them.” He returned briefly to the file cabinet, then placed a six-by-eight photo in front of the senator. “The bow of the barge you see here has been replaced with a collapsible ramp, which will act as both a sally-port and a gangway for men and vehicles. Some have been given a concrete deck for carrying tanks. These barges have a loading capacity of five to eight hundred tons and a draught of six feet. Most of them are not self-propelled, but will rely on tugs.”

“This is a remarkable photo. Good clear shot, like someone just held up a Brownie and snapped it. Who took it and how did it get back to England?” The senator had left most of his Southern accent in the States.

“I wasn’t told,” Clay smiled briefly. Longley undoubtedly wanted a few war stories to take back home. During the Great War he had served as a typist at a Navy Reserve base in New Orleans.

“All these barges and ships are in Holland?” he asked.

“Not at all.” The general pulled the curtain cord to display a map. He drew an arc from the North Sea to the English Channel. “Kriegsmarine HQ Coblenz and HQ Rotterdam have clogged these estuaries in north Germany, the Elbe, Weser, and Ems, and the bays and river outlets in Holland and Belgium. Antwerp, Rotterdam, along here to the Seine. We estimate that the Kriegsmarine has a million and a quarter sea-going tons ready for the crossing.”

“What’s this one show?” Senator Longley asked.

“An assembly area near Amsterdam, an enormous staging area.”

The general bent lower over the desk. “We think those are Krauss-Maffei half-tracks, which carry troops and can haul AA guns. This line of vehicles here at the south end of the area are Panzerjäger, which are self-propelled guns, tank hunters.”

The senator flipped through photograph after photograph, each showing a concentration of war materiel. Tanks, armored cars, artillery tractors, trucks, scout cars. Howitzers, antiaircraft guns, prefabricated huts, bulldozers, and excavators. Enormous stockpiles of food, clothing, and medical supplies. Horses and bicycles.

General Clay said, “Those little things that look like bumps are tents for Wehrmacht and Waffen SS troops.”

Other photos showed row after row of tents, perfectly aligned grids. Churchill estimated there were half a million men waiting to cross. The impression from the photos was of the enormity of the German invasion effort, and of its perfect, methodical order. Men and materiel cluttered the coasts of Germany, Belgium, Holland, and France. The photos bristled with the imminent danger. The coastland seemed about to sink under the weight of it all.

The general lifted another photograph. “And here we see a large encampment under construction, this one in Zeeland. Here’s a photo of another, near Bruges in Belgium. The square within a square in each of the shots is a fence within a fence. Note the small buildings at the corners. The bastard German is building POW camps for British and American soldiers. He plans on his ships and barges being full of men both ways.”

Senator Longley stared at the photos without comment. His face had lost its practiced composure. Finally he gathered up the photos and handed them to the general. “Quite an eye-opener, those photos.”

“Not eye-opening enough, I’m afraid. Most of these are dated. The Luftwaffe is heavily patrolling the coast, looking for our recon planes. This past week we lost three high-altitude recon De Havilands out of four attempts. Our ability to obtain air reconnaissance has been almost eliminated.”

Clay returned the folders to the cabinet. When he turned again to Senator Longley he said, “We know they are coming, Lawton, simply because it is impossible to hide an operation of this size. The Germans know it, and so do we. The surprise will be when and where they come.”

“What’s your best guess when?”

“I thought they’d try it thirty days ago and was proven wrong.” The general remained standing. “The tides weren’t perfect, but the Allies were much less prepared than now. I thought the Germans would accept that trade-off.”

“What’s your next guess?”

“The enemy will make the crossing at night so darkness will conceal the strength and direction of their attacks. The German will want about an hour of daylight prior to the amphibious assault to complete air and naval bombardments. He wants a moon for airborne assaults. Whether he’ll come at high or low tide is a matter of heated controversy here, but I think it’ll be high tide. So we believe the enemy must land at or just after dawn and at or about high tide. These conditions exist for only a week in any given lunar month. We’re in this month’s critical period now.”

The general returned to his map. “Tides for landing in Norfolk, which is the county here above London on the east coast, become suitable five days later than they are for landing in Sussex, here on the south coast. Three days ago Sussex was ripe. Now it’s the east coast’s turn to be nervous.”

Lieutenant Paley pushed open the door. “The prime minister has just arrived, General. He’s in his quarters and will be in the cabinet room in a few moments.”

Clay glanced at Paley. “He can wait a moment until my briefing of Senator Longley is complete.”

I swear the senator flushed with pleasure. Longley had met his political match in the general.

“Finally, Lawton, there’s another reason we know they are invading. Hitler has insolently announced it to the public. Three months ago, at the tenth Winter Relief campaign at the Sportspalast, Hitler, with great zest and confidence, yelled over the public address system, ‘Wir fahren gegen England.’ His audience, mostly nurses and social workers, applauded hysterically.”

Senator Longley rose and patted the general on the back, one campaigner bucking up another for the task ahead. “I won’t have you keeping Churchill long. I’ll relay to the president and my committee members all you’ve said, Wilson.” He stepped to the door. “Remember, I’m behind you.”

The general took the proffered hand in both his. “I know you are, Lawton. Winston and I are counting on your support.”

Another gratified grin from the senator, then Lieutenant Paley escorted him down the hall.

General Clay looked at me. “‘Winston and I are counting on you.’ Christ on a crutch, you’d think the senior senator from Louisiana would know bullshit when he’s standing in a bucket of it.” He squared his black tie. “Let’s go hear more bad news.”

5

When disaster looms, the British look for a leader rather than a scapegoat. Winston Churchill entered the cabinet room, and we rose like a jury. He walked briskly around the table to his post nearest the world map and nodded once before lowering himself into the chair. He was wearing a black, rumpled pinstripe suit, a burgundy tie, and the knowing smile and sparkling eyes of one who has already won the battle. Lately, Churchill’s public face had not been lasting through these sessions.

We settled into our seats. Pipes and tobacco were produced. Churchill chewed on a cigar. He seldom lit them, by the way, just gnawed them down to empty rags. Water was poured into glasses from several pitchers, and folders were opened. This was a meeting of the Defense Committee, comprised of portions of the War Ministry and the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sitting near Churchill were the only other men not in uniform, Deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Minister for Coordination of Defense Lord Lindley.

The table, covered with green cloth, was a rectangle with a gap in the center. Overhead were massive steel beams, double riveted and painted red. Several fans and a clock were on the wall. Arranged round the room were portable blackboards and map boards. The room was ten feet underground.

General Clay sat opposite the prime minister, quite a distance from him, since the table was twelve or so feet across. On Clay’s left was Lieutenant General Henry Bisset, commander of the Canadian I Corps. The Americans, four of us, were grouped together. Admiral Walter Stanton, commander, U.S. Atlantic Fleet East, was to Clay’s right. Stanton’s aid, a lieutenant commander from Chicago, was near me. We aides, about fifteen of us, called ourselves the Flying Buttresses. At each meeting we leaned in our chairs against the walls as if holding them up.

“Shall we begin?” the prime minister asked as he pulled another cigar from his breast pocket. He stared at it a moment, turning it in his hand. From his expression, it was impossible to tell if he was pondering the fate of the free world or an imperfection in a tobacco leaf. He cleared his throat grandly, a British art. “Let’s start where we ended yesterday. Bring in the meteorologist.”

A nagging dread was that the weather would blind us to the attack. German air, land, and sea operations required a minimum level of weather conditions. Whenever the North Sea and English Channel were tossed by storms, committee members shared a palpable sense of relief. We prayed for white horses, as the British called white caps. The Meteorology Committee, a subgroup of the Defense Committee, met twice daily, at five in the morning and ten at night.

One of the few advantages we enjoyed over the enemy was more accurate weather reporting. The Germans were forced to predict the predominately western weather patterns based on data from Ireland and Norway and periodic weather patrols in the east Atlantic by four-engined Fw200s stationed at Lorient. In contrast, the Allies gleaned information from stations in Northern Ireland, Iceland, Greenland, the Faero Islands, Labrador, Gibraltar, and the eastern United States. Weather in the North Sea could be reliably predicted twenty-four hours in advance. In the channel, forty-eight hours.

Group Captain Dr. Richard Swarthmore was shown into the room, looking uncomfortable in his RAF uniform, which hung limply on him. Swarthmore was a civilian meteorologist on loan to the Royal Air Force. He led a team of experts collected from the Admiralty and from the Air Ministry at Dunstable. He stepped quickly to a map displaying eastern and southern England.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Swarthmore,” Churchill said, his wonderful voice filling the room to its corners. Despite frightening intelligence reports from all fronts, I was convinced that with that voice, we could not lose the war. “I want you to tell me your children have been playing with your barometer.”

Swarthmore was accustomed to the prime minister’s perplexing openings. Churchill liked holding forth a moment before each session. “My children, Prime Minister?”

“You remember, I am sure, that the night before the devastating storm of 27 November 1703, Daniel Defoe in London glanced at his barometer to find that the bottom had quite fallen out of it. He accused his children of playing with the instrument. Defoe did not know that the gale of the century was hours away. I want you to tell me, Doctor, that your barometer has fallen to unprecedented lows, and that our seas will shortly become impassable.”

“I am afraid I cannot, Prime Minister.” Swarthmore pushed a lock of his hair to one side. His face was the pasty color of one who never saw the sun. He had dark patches resembling oysters under his eyes. Swarthmore’s job allowed little sleep. “A high-pressure ridge, reaching from Iceland east to the Outer Hebrides, continues to force depressions southward. Yesterday I said that depressions may be forming between Newfoundland and Ireland, which will make the weather eastward deteriorate. These are developing, but we remain under the calming influence of the broad high-pressure zone. Those depressions are moving our way, but too slowly to interfere dramatically with channel weather in the next three days.”

“Hitlerwetter, is it then, Doctor?” Churchill asked. Hitler-weather, or perfect sailing, as German radio was openly calling it.

“For the next twenty-four hours there will be a patchy two-thousand-foot ceiling over the North Sea from Edinburgh south. A touch lower further north. Seas will be level two to three. The channel will be clear, with the possible appearance of spotty clouds at three or four thousand feet and with a slightly freshening wind. Fair weather, Prime Minister.”

“Do all the members of your team agree?” Admiral Peter Fairfax challenged. He was commander of the Royal Navy Home Fleet. He and his superior, Admiral Parker Gilford, commander in chief, Allied Naval Forces, were on the hallway side of the room. The other Royal Navy representative in the room was Lord Erskine, admiral of the fleet and first sea lord, sitting next to Attlee.

“Admiral, there is little to disagree with in our report,” Swarthmore replied. “This is a predictable front, with little movement and few surprises. Yes, the team agrees.”

“There is a saying that in war weather is neutral,” the prime minister said. “A regrettable fiction in our case. Doctor, on your way out will you ask General Cadogan to join us?”

General Roger Cadogan was head of the Combined Intelligence Committee, which drew members from all British and American forces. Cadogan reported to the Defense Committee daily and sent reports three times each day. He marched into the room.

I’m always surprised to see an overweight Englishman. Cadogan carried a substantial bulk that pushed out his uniform and robbed his face of angles. Rumor had it that he shaved several times a day to avoid a five o’clock shadow.

“Prime Minister, there have been developments since we spoke last.” Cadogan began his briefing this way each day, much like a radio announcer’s distinctive sign on. Nobody questioned his right to do so, because he was always true to his word, bringing some new, startling glimpse of what was to come.

He said, “We have analyzed the submarine caught by the Pettibone this morning in the North Sea near Benacre Broad. It is a V80 midget which carried no weapons other than one pistol. The sub was fitted with a Netz radio designed to send continuous signals once the sub has surfaced. It also had an Asdic-type apparatus, called a Nadel BE, made by the Kroner Radio Works in Hamburg, which broadcasts sound waves through the water to be picked up by underwater listening devices on German ships.”

“It’s a pathfinder, then, is it?” asked General Sir Allen Barclay. Other than the first sea lord, Barclay was the ranking military officer in the room. He was chairman of AACCS and chief of the Imperial General Staff. The British are careful with precedent. Barclay sat next to Lord Lindley, who was to Churchill’s immediate left at the head of the table.

“Yes, sir. The submarine’s equipment is designed to guide other ships to it.”

“That submarine is a plant,” General Arthur Stedman exclaimed. He was commander in chief, Home Forces. With several others in the room, Stedman was convinced the increasing evidence pointing to an invasion on the east coast was part of an intricate deception. “There have been no satisfactory explanations why it foundered. The Kriegsmarine let us find it.”

“Arthur,” Churchill said mildly, “let’s hear what else General Cadogan has to say, shall we?”

Cadogan said, “There is certainly a chance it is a deception, General. We are considering that possibility. However, other evidence is mounting.”

He lifted a blank piece of paper from a display stand, revealing an enlarged photograph. He reached for a pointer. “As you know, we have recently had very few successful reconnaissance flights. But one made it through yesterday. Here is a photograph taken by a Mosquito flying from our Photographic Reconnaissance Unit base at St. Eval in Cornwall. It shows a pasture on the French coast near Dieppe. The field is apparently a staging area for tanks. Our analysts say that these twelve structures you see here,” he tapped the photo, “are supposed to be medium tanks, which the Germans call the PzKpfw III, short for Panzerkampfwagen. They are the Wehrmacht’s standard battle tank.”

“Supposed to be?” the prime minister asked.

“Sir, if you will look closely at this photograph you will see that the Wehrmacht was careful, but not quite careful enough. A tank cannot cross a field of any sort without leaving track prints. This is what these double lines are crossing the pasture.” Cadogan drew patterns with the stick. “But this one tank has left no track marks, either in front or in back of it. It has apparently sprung from nowhere onto this field.”

“What you are saying, General, is that those tanks are not tanks at all, but mock-ups?” The question came from General Alfred Alexander, commander in chief, Joint Army Operations. Alexander, an Old Harrovian and a graduate of Sandhurst, as were many in the room, including the PM, spoke with a pointed public school accent, also called a plumstone accent, meaning he spoke as if his mouth were full of plum pits.

“We are quite certain that this tank—and probably the others in this field—is in fact made of canvas and wood. These tank tracks have been cut into the ground with some sort of implement, perhaps a lawn roller. They forgot to roll on the tracks behind this one tank.”

“That doesn’t sound very German, forgetting like that, Roger,” Wilson Clay commented.

After all these British speakers, General Clay’s words sounded broad and flat, a hillbilly’s language. Several of the British officers smiled, as always at Clay’s first words at a meeting. They weren’t being unkind. People grin when someone belches in church, and I think that’s what the British heard when an American spoke.

“Granted, it does not.” He hesitated, then lowered his pointer. “But despite evidence to the contrary, the Germans are human. Here they have made a human mistake by forgetting to put tracks behind a decoy tank.”

Fairfax asked, “Then did the Luftwaffe deliberately let our reconnaissance plane through?”

“Evidence points that way,” General Crawford Douglas replied. He was commander in chief, Allied Air Forces, the only RAF officer at the meeting. “Our pilot reported only dispirited antiaircraft fire, and no chase from the Messerschmitts. No other recon flight has had such a jolly time of it lately.”

Churchill said, “So by installing the decoys, the Germans want us to believe there are more tank columns in northern France than there actually are. Or, by deliberately omitting a tank track and knowing we’d discover it, the Germans want us to believe their forces in northern France are largely phantoms. Which is it, General?”

“I cannot tell you, Prime Minister.” Cadogan’s voice was strained, as if Churchill’s question were an indictment.

Churchill summarized the endless arguments of these meetings when he added, “Do they think we think they think we think they think?” He threw up a hand as if casting away all further speculation and chuckled unconvincingly.

The prime minister always tried to allay the tension during these councils with an offhand remark. Fewer and fewer were joining him in a laugh. These men knew they were making the onerous decisions that would echo down through the generations. The British had a studied nonchalance during moments of great emotion and decision. They resumed their positions around the table each day, placid on the surface, portraits of British stoicism. But of late their facades of calm and reserve were being stripped away by the daily grind of command and their trepidation.

“Look at a man’s hands—they’re a telltale,” General Clay once told me. Around the table, fists were knotted so tightly that hands were white. Several men drummed tattoos on the table. Admiral Fairfax repeatedly pulled at his fingers, as if setting disjointed knuckles. Lord Erskine constantly rubbed his upper lip with two fingers, as if trying to wipe away a clinging bit of lunch. General Douglas endlessly rotated an ashtray.

Tension was worse during the part of the month when the tides were right, and worse again when the weather was fair. The meeting the day before had disintegrated into a shouting match, such an uncharacteristic event that it startled even those who had done the shouting.

Churchill drew his palm along the table, smoothing the cloth. “What else do you have for us, General?”

“We have heard from a reliable resistance source in Normandy that two Wehrmacht divisions, the 8th and 28th, which had been encamped in the valley of the Seine, have suddenly left the area and may be marching toward Amsterdam. And a few moments ago we received another radio report, this one from Merksem, near Antwerp, that the Wehrmacht 30th Division may be passing through to the north.”

“You say reliable,” General Barclay said. His face was so narrow and his nose so thin that his eyes almost touched. “How reliable?”

“These two contacts have sent information before that we have been able to confirm, but there is always the possibility they have been compromised, as you know.”

“And the rest of it, General Cadogan?” Churchill prompted.

“You have read my midday reports, so you know that this morning at 0600 hours Wehrmacht units from northern Germany through the Netherlands to Belgium began a complete radio silence. Their unit orders, which constitute the bulk of their coded transmissions, are now presumably being delivered over telephone lines or by messengers. And just an hour ago, German forces along the French coast also went off the air. As you know, German units underwent radio silence like this in April for several days.”

“Last month the silence turned out to be either a rehearsal or a feint,” General Douglas said. “What about this month?”

“The Germans do not trust their own radio codes. On occasion we break one, and we gain information until the code changes. Radio silence lets them rest more comfortably. Last minute orders will remain their secret. This month? Another simulation, a bluff, or the actual launch? We can only speculate, General Douglas.”

Douglas pounded his fist onto the table. “What I’m asking, General Cadogan, is if the bloody Germans are coming tonight? And where? Those two things are all I want to know. Why won’t you tell us where and when?”

Cadogan stiffened. “I am a reporter. I will inform you of all I know, and the committee’s task is to draw the conclusions.”

Tension shimmered in the room. Finally the Allied Air Forces commander inhaled deeply and dipped his chin at Cadogan, an apology. The room was quiet for a moment. One by one, the committee members turned to the prime minister. Defense decisions were ultimately his. Churchill never formally polled the committee, but he always tried to gain consensus advice. He knew he could be crashingly wrong, witness Gallipoli.

I should briefly describe the chain of command. Doggedly following Wilson Clay around as I did, I could easily exaggerate his pre-invasion role. I don’t wish to do so here. Despite more American troops and equipment arriving daily, the defense of England remained primarily a British undertaking.

The War Ministry was charged with governing Great Britain and directing the war effort, with Churchill as its principal. Reporting to the ministry were the Imperial General Staff and the Anglo-American Joint Chiefs of Staff, which met together as the Defense Committee. Reporting in turn to the Joint Chiefs were the commanders of the Allied Naval Forces (Gilford), Joint Army Operations (Alexander), and Allied Air Forces (Douglas), all British officers.

Then, on yet a lower rung, were the battle chiefs. The American Expeditionary Force commander (Clay) and the Home Forces commander (Stedman) reported to Alexander. Commanders of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet East (Stanton), the Royal Navy Home Fleet (Fairfax), and the Eastern and Southern Approaches (Admiral Sir Hugh Pembroke) reported to Admiral Gilford. Finally, all air operations were under General Douglas, including the American Army Air Force East and the RAF Fighter Command and Bomber Command.

“General Cadogan, is there more?” the prime minister asked glumly.

“Yes, sir. You have read my report on the German paratrooper killed by a farmer just south of the Humber early this morning. The commando’s wireless was the same equipment that was being used by the Irish spy your troops captured near Rye this morning, General Clay.”

“A German radioman on the east coast, another on the south,” Alexander said. He had a high forehead and eyebrows that could climb most of it. “We know the German’s aren’t targeting both our east and south coasts. It would be a logistical impossibility. So one of the radiomen was a decoy, and the other was going to guide the invasion. Which was which?”

“We have examined their equipment and interrogated the Irishman at length. We received no clue either way.”

General Barclay said, “The Germans would not have told the decoy he was a decoy.”

“There is more,” Cadogan said.

Mouths turned down around the room.

“General Laidlaw of the 2nd Infantry was thorough. He had troops from his reconnaissance regiment search the area. They found a second parachute which had been buried a quarter mile away from where the first German was killed. They also found footprints heading west toward the Lincolnshire Wolds, but have been unable to find him.”

The inevitable question was asked by Arthur Stedman, “Were we supposed to find that parachute?”

The chief of the Intelligence merely shook his head.

“Will you summarize for us, General Cadogan?” Churchill asked. His hands were folded in front of him as if he were in prayer.

“We have new evidence—if that evidence is taken at face value—that our North Sea coast may be the target of the invasion. The pathfinder submarine, the increasing radio activity before the blackout this morning, and, of course, the intensified bombing of rail installations along the east coast last night, on which you’ve seen preliminary reports from the Observer Corps and Coastal Command, all point that way.”

Cadogan walked to the best estimate map on the wall to the prime minister’s left. He brought up his pointer. “As you know, we are faced with three German Army groups, A, C, and B, arranged from the Netherlands south and east along the coast to the Cherbourg Peninsula. Rommel’s Army Group C is in Dutch ports, here and here.”

He moved the pointer. “Army Group A, under Von Rundstedt, which remains near Antwerp and south roughly to here.” He struck the board at Ostend, on the Belgium coast near the French border. “Von Rundstedt’s army also includes the divisions we think are marching north. CIC believes that between 45,000 and 50,000 Wehrmacht soldiers have left Normandy between Le Havre and Dieppe, and are heading northeast.”

Cadogan stepped along the map. “Finally, Army Group B, with just three corps, remains here in Normandy, largely from Caen east. We know of nothing new here. There are other German divisions inland on the continent, of course, but these are troops of occupation.”

“Thank you, General,” the prime minister said, dismissing him. When the door closed behind Cadogan, Churchill went on, “I have always thought the Germans would choose our east coast.”

“So you have said on numerous occasions,” Clement Attlee remarked. The leader of the Labour Party was dry, unemotional, and self-effacing, Churchill’s polar opposite. But he and the prime minister worked together with surprisingly little disharmony.

“I’ll say it again, Clement. The Wehrmacht movements described by General Cadogan reinforce my argument. Our east coast has open, gently shelving beaches, a requirement for an amphibious assault. Many of the beaches on the south coast are flanked or dominated by cliffs, or are overlooked by escarpments of downland, much more difficult for landing craft.”

“And the East Anglian plain offers better opportunities for blitz warfare than does the quilted, intricate terrain of Kent and Sussex,” General Alexander added. “The German’s first goal will be to isolate London, which will be easier from the east.”

Admiral Gilford disagreed. “The Germans would have three or four times the sea distance coming to our east coast than to our south coast.”

Lord Erskine spoke his first words of the meeting. “They will be able to land eight or ten divisions anywhere they choose before we can counter them. If the invasion armada crosses the North Sea to our east coast, the Royal Navy will have an improved chance to cut off the German’s second wave and their efforts at resupplying the first wave. The Kriegsmarine surely knows this. So they will choose the shortest sea route possible, to our south coasts. Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, from France.”

“Eight or ten divisions anywhere they choose?” Alexander was sputtering. “Do you think, Lord Erskine, that the British Army has been spending all this time laying out welcoming mats?”

The first sea lord had a scimitar nose and veiled eyes. His features gave away nothing. His voice was a rich baritone, and he used it with effect. “I have long maintained the Germans will gain tactical surprise, despite your gallant efforts, General.”

“Poppycock,” Arthur Stedman injected. “Sheer and utter poppycock.”

“I agree with Lord Erskine,” Admiral Gilford joined in. “Eight or ten divisions, tactical surprise.”

The first sea lord asked, “Have you ever been to sea, General Alexander?”

“Not often,” Alexander admitted icily. “Every time I do, I have an uncontrollable urge to urinate.”

Lord Erskine inhaled sharply, gathering himself for an outburst, but Churchill held up his cigar, cutting off the squabbling. “Let us not have history record we were discussing bodily functions at the critical hour.”

We had heard this argument countless times. Early on, the location of the invasion was utter guesswork, and even Scotland, the Shetlands, Ireland, and Iceland were mentioned. Then the committee became divided along service lines, with the army believing the German target would be the east coast and the navy arguing the south coast. As evidence mounted over recent weeks that Rommel had formed a third army, Army Group C, in the Dutch ports, and with Cadogan’s new intelligence that certain German units were moving north, the view favoring the east coast was prevailing. RAF General Douglas had before this meeting supported the navy position, but as he told General Clay later, the heavy bombing of the railways along the east coast the night before had convinced him otherwise. The first sea lord and Admiral Gilford tenaciously clung to their cross-channel argument.

The prime minister said, “Even though our best information is that the east coast, somewhere along the coasts of Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, or Lincolnshire, will be the location of the invasion, I counsel caution. These late developments should not prompt us into hasty redeployment.”

“Prime Minister,” General Alexander asked, “is that precisely what Hitler hopes we are doing in this meeting today, absolutely nothing? We have kept XI Corps and the Canadians in reserve, and I believe we must now release them to reinforce the eastern counties.”

“Lord Lindley?” Churchill asked his minister for coordination of defense.

“I quite agree with you, Prime Minister.” Lord Lindley sat forward in his chair, peering left and right. There was a delicacy to him, with his peaked lips, moist eyes, and milky skin. Strangers might have taken him for a weak man, a mistake. “At this point, panicked redeployment can only be what the German High Command wants from us.”

“Then it is decided,” Churchill said. “We have very few reserves and will keep our XI and the Canadians back and commit them only when needed. What is next today?”

General Clay caught himself raising his hand like a schoolboy. “I want to propose realignment of some of my units from a two-one to a one-two defense.”

“We have been down this long road before, have we not, General Clay?” Alexander asked. He pushed his chair away from the table in a resigned manner.

“Yes, and I’ll try it again. I wish to pull back certain battalions of the 4th Motorized from the Hastings-Eastbourne area, the 35th Infantry from Folkestone, and the 1st Armored behind Worthing.”

“A little early to call a retreat, is it not?” Alexander asked bitingly.

Clay rudely sucked on a tooth before he said, “One of the most endearing of British traits is your indifference to outside suggestions or criticisms. But let me impose on you anyway. The strength of our defense can be measured not by the number of troops on the shoreline, but by the number of hours in which a strong counterattack can be delivered.”

“Once invading vessels have landed, they will never leave,” Alexander said. “Nelson wrote that in 1801, and it is still true today. We must destroy them on the beach. The Germans must not get as far as the saltgrass at the top of our dunes.”

Clay said with some heat, “I can prove mathematically that the brunt of their amphibious attack cannot be stopped on the beach.”

“Spare us your multiplication tables this afternoon,” Alexander said wearily.

Clay pointed at Alexander and said, “Your Lord D’Arbernon said, ‘An Englishman’s mind works best when it is almost too late.’ But he was giving you the goddamn benefit of a doubt.”

Furious, Alexander rose from his chair. “You—”

Churchill stabbed them to silence with his cigar. Alexander stiffly resumed his seat.

Alan Barclay toyed with a folder as he said, “In any event, it is simply too late to transfer those divisions.”

“It is never too late if the battle hangs in the balance,” Clay countered.

This was another argument that had racked the Defense Committee. Stedman and Clay regarded the North Sea–English Channel wall of fixed defenses as an ephemeral hindrance, another Maginot Line. Keeping the Germans out of the country, irrespective of where they landed, would be difficult, perhaps impossible because the Allied navies had not nearly enough remaining destroyers or patrol vessels to cover the entire coast from Dorset to Edinburgh. And the fixed defenses were still weak. Instead, the battle commanders favored massed counterattacks against German penetrations. A static defense repels by fire, and the Allies had insufficient fire. Counterattack defeats by movement, and even undermanned and underequipped units could move. “Counterattack is the soul of defense,” Clay had said before.

But the weight of British chiefs had fervently pushed for an intractable defense on the shore line. They believed that the ordered movement of large land formations, necessary for counterattack, would be almost impossible under constant air attack, which, with recent Luftwaffe air superiority, was guaranteed. And, more simply, deliberately leaving a porous sea wall defense, of virtually admitting the Germans into the country and hoping for the best, was a particularly noxious notion.

Barclay and Clay argued back and forth for several minutes. There have been few amphibious landings in the modern era, and much of what the generals said was speculation. When they began pointing fingers at each other, Churchill ended the argument by saying, “General Clay, I must side with my chiefs. Should the enemy not come during this vulnerable time, we’ll take up the issue again. What is next?”

The meeting lasted another thirty minutes, largely regarding issues of supply. When Churchill said, “We will meet here again tomorrow, if the Germans allow it,” members of the Defense Committee broke off into smaller groups to continue discussions.

The prime minister pushed himself slowly from his seat. He waved Clay around to him, then said, “I’ve got ten minutes until the War Ministry meets, so I’ll be having a drop of tea in my quarters. Will you join me?”

“Of course, sir.”

“You too, Colonel Royce.”

I was always astonished when the prime minister remembered my name. Had I tail feathers, I would have flared them. He and Clay had met socially at Chequers and 10 Downing Street and other residences. They enjoyed each other’s company. Perhaps it was the game they played. It was the prime minister’s turn to serve, to choose the topic. Churchill and Clay leaned toward each other as they walked, deeply into their talk before they reached the hallway. I trailed after them.

Before I tell of their contest, let me mention a few incidents from Wilson Clay’s early life that may shed some light on him. I’ve collected them like others collect stamps or autographs. People always wanted to talk about him. When they learned I was his aide, they cornered me and exhausted their memories of him, perhaps thinking they were adding to some official history and setting the record straight.

By far the most frequent anecdote I heard involved the Plebe Production, the spring show first-year students put on for the faculty and other cadets at West Point. For an entire academy class, Clay’s skit remains the most vivid moment of their first year. Although only one of several plebes in the piece, Clay received all the blame and all the demerits because he delivered the punchline.

Major General Clinton Robinson was superintendent of the academy at that time. He was known as a stickler on everything from precision drill to participation in athletics, but his overwhelming passion was hygiene. From his office poured forth orders regarding sanitation. Nothing was too clean or crisp. One week before the skit, he instructed all cadets to wash their hands a minimum of 120 seconds before each meal. “Robinson was asking for it,” one of Clay’s classmates told me, recalling the skit with glee.

During the Plebe Production, five cadets stood on the stage at rigid attention, while another cadet, dressed as Robinson, reviewed them. The cadet perfectly exaggerated Robinson’s pompous lift to his chin and the way he tapped his swagger stick on his thigh. He stepped along the line. “Straight tie, chin up. Excellent.”

He stopped at the fourth cadet to stare at his uniform. “I’ve just noticed, Cadet, that each of you has a fork in your uniform pocket. Tell me why.”

“Sir, we use them to lift bread slices from the platter, so we won’t touch the other slices with our hands.”

“Excellent,” the cadet-general boomed. “That’s the spirit.”

There was hearty laughter from the audience.

The mock general next paused in front of Wilson Clay, who also had a fork in his pocket. The general then asked, “Cadet Clay, I’ve also noticed that each of you has a string hanging from your fly. Tell me why.”

“Sir, we use them to pull our things out in the latrine, so we won’t touch ourselves with our hands.”

Gasps from the audience.

“Excellent,” barked the mock general. “There’s initiative for you.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “But tell me, Cadet Clay, how do you get your thing back in?”

Clay answered, “I don’t know about the others, sir, but I use my fork.”

Pandemonium swept the hall. Some cadets laughed so hard they fell off their chairs. General Robinson—the real one—indignantly marched out of the room. Clay was in his doghouse for the remainder of his stint at the academy.

Another story was told to me by Lieutenant General Alex Hargrave, commander of AEF’s I Corps. Clay had been a sickly youth who missed a year of high school because of persistent pneumonia. His father blamed the boy for the disease. When Wilson recovered, he vowed to build himself up, and did so with an unremitting dedication to exercise and physical challenge. He layered muscle on himself by lifting barbells and tossing a medicine bag. He went out for football his junior year at Davenport High and was cut straight away. But in his senior year he made the team as a running back. Then he made the academy team.

Clay set no records, but in an era before platooning he played every minute of every game for three years. In his last game, he broke his wrist in the third quarter, but played until the contest ended. Hargrave recalled Clay’s obsessive drive during the games and his pushing his teammates. He also remembers Clay telling him once that he hated football.

“To tell you the truth,” Hargrave said, “football wasn’t much fun for us other players because Wilson was in the game.”

Clay used the same techniques courting Margaret. “He lay siege on me like I was a medieval fort,” she laughingly told my wife. “I agreed to his marriage proposal as an act of surrender.”

Margaret Banning may have been the first woman Clay ever showed an interest in. She claims it was because they were negative images of each other. While Wilson at nineteen was blustery, abrupt, opinionated, and a bit stumbling, Margaret was poised, subtle, and charming. They did have one thing in common, willfulness. Wilson wore his on his collar, but Margaret hid hers under layers of social skills.

She was the daughter of a wealthy founder of the St. Paul and Spokane Railway Company, which was later bought out by the Great Northern. She and Clay met at a social held at the Spokane River Club when the cadet was home on Christmas leave in 1911. His was the third name on her dance card, and after their dance, he refused to release her hand, telling others on her card that their turns had been canceled. “He was the only fellow in the dance hall in uniform,” Margaret said, “so the other boys thought he could order them away.”

On the following day, Wilson arrived at the Banning home in a horse-drawn buggy, unannounced and uninvited. When the butler inquired of his mission, Clay replied he was taking Margaret on a picnic. Six inches of snow covered the ground. Perplexed, then amused, Margaret let herself be shown into the buggy, where she found a pile of blankets and a wicker basket of food. They drove down the hill to sit on the river bank, wrapped in blankets “to eat the coldest meal of my life.”

Clay left the next day for West Point, but barraged Margaret with letters, which became increasingly presumptuous. She happily returned them. “He seemed so dashing, and I didn’t mind a little harmless flirtation in our letters. What could he do? He was three thousand miles away.”

She underestimated him. By the time he returned to Spokane that summer, it was understood he would ask her to marry him the first moment they were alone. “I became engaged to a man I had never kissed,” Margaret told my wife.

Apparently Margaret Clay made the descent from an heiress to the wife of a junior army officer without difficulty. But all her life, wherever they were posted, from Fort Bragg to Washington, D.C., she returned alone to Spokane for six weeks every summer, once again to indulge herself in the family’s fortune.

To my knowledge, he never dallied with other women, at least until he met Lady Anne Percival, and I’ll relay my spotty knowledge of that relationship shortly. The acid test probably came during the Great War, and I’ve heard the story from several of his friends from those days, including General Jones. During R&R in Paris, fellow officers of the 4th Artillery chipped in a total of three dollars to hire a prostitute to make a surprise visit to Clay’s hotel room. Clay apparently paid her another three dollars to sit chastely in a chair for thirty minutes, then tell his friends he was the best ever.

The artillery officers learned the truth when they offered the hooker yet another three dollars to provide details. I asked General Clay about the story. He shook his head, but volunteered pleasantly, “The palm of my right hand still shines from those days.”

I’ll share a few more glimpses of General Clay. Nothing endears soldiers to their commander more than stories about how the officer will take care of them, come hell or high water. A favorite among AEF troops was how during the bitterly cold January of 1918 Clay raided the priceless, antiquarian library of a French chateau. He ordered pages torn from thousands of books so the paper could pad the lining of his men’s uniform coats.

On another occasion, after a miserably cold day of dragging howitzers across the French countryside, his troops faced a long night bivouacked in a freezing pasture. Against orders not to disrupt the civilian population when at all possible, Clay led his men into the cozy confines of a nunnery near Soissons, herding the startled sisters of the Holy Trinity into the kitchen while his exhausted men sacked out in their cells.

But best remembered stories involve Wilson Clay’s restless drive and his ferocity as a commander. Hargrave laughingly told me how Clay stared at his watch during a one-hour truce called to remove the wounded from no-man’s land at Château-Thierry. Clay mouthed the passing seconds, then ordered a salvo launched the instant the hour was over.

Another time, German infantrymen breached the American line and began swarming toward Clay’s battery. Clay either did not receive or ignored the order to abandon his guns and retreat. Rather, he ordered the muzzles lowered to fire grapeshot pointblank into the advancing German lines, round after round, until the barrels were glowing. This next can’t be verified, and may have been embellished over the years, but I heard that during the heaviest incoming, with the Kaiser’s infantry visible through the smoke, one of Clay’s gun bunnies threatened to bolt. Clay held a .45 to the soldier’s temple and asked how far he’d like to go. The soldier hastily picked up the tongue of the shell sled and went back to work. Moments later the German drive stalled.

These snippets of General Clay’s life were traded back and forth among his soldiers. They were rolled over and savored, discounted and expanded. American soldiers might catch only a glimpse of their commander as he sped by in his jeep, might not ever hear his voice. But these yarns completed their sketch of him and made him larger than life.

Now, about Lady Anne Percival. I am loathe to bring her up, but some commentators have seized on her relationship with General Clay, suggesting she drastically impeded his judgment during the battle, that she became a “field wife” to the general, to use the Red Army term. I need to tread lightly here, because appearances were less than reality. At least, I think so. Let me lay out some of the evidence.

Lady Anne was the widow of Sir Roderick Percival, who was killed during a test flight of a Hurricane in 1939, and the daughter of Earl Selden, the world’s leading armor theoretician. There is some question whether the earl had ever been inside a tank, but his 1934 work Armored Warfare was a seminal study on its use. Generals Guderian, Rommel, and Brauchitsch admitted reading it, and it is still a standard work at the United States Army’s Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth.

The earl was in his seventies in 1942 and may have supposed his life’s work was behind him. Then the American general came calling. Clay’s first meeting with Earl Selden began simply enough. In a significant breech of decorum, Clay and I appeared without warning at his country home, Haldon House, in Surrey, southwest of London. After we were shown into his study and announced by his butler, Clay said only, “Earl Selden, I am an artilleryman. I need your help.”

The earl had a reputation for being curt and ill-natured. Yet he rose like a young man, beckoning us in. He remains the only man I’ve ever met who did not look ridiculous in an ascot and a smoking jacket. He had a raft of white hair, parted in the middle, and an ivory mustache sculpted with wax, the tips sharp enough to chip ice.

The room looked as if it had not changed since the age of Queen Victoria. Ponderous red swags hung on the windows. Much of the furniture was covered in tufted silk damask. A Bosendorfer piano, the dimensions of an automobile, was in a corner. Dried flowers were in an arrangement on the mantle, as if they had been there all that time. A dozen family photographs in silver frames sat atop the piano. The earl was a noted collector of Wellington and Peninsular War memorabilia, and three mahogany display cases were near a wall.

The session lasted three hours, with Clay and the earl hovering over a contour map I had brought along, using pins and tags. I had never before seen the general take instruction so passively. He had finally met someone who knew more about fighting a war than he did.

At eleven o’clock that evening a woman entered the study. It seemed that a stage light picked her up, illuminating her arresting features and creating an aureola around her hair and shoulders. Music might have swelled and applause rolled down from the seats. I have no other way of describing her entrance. She was followed by a small dog, a white and tan pekinese with a pug nose and bushy tail that swished side to side.

The general and I stood quickly. The woman’s hair was raven black, and she wore it bobbed and tucked in at her neck. Her skin was the color of frost. Her lips were burgundy and full, with a upward lilt, as if she found us Americans amusing. She was wearing an iridescent silk blouse that cast off numberless hues, making her seem illusive and transient. Her eyes shone with knowledge and wit as she drifted across the carpet to the earl.

She bussed her father’s cheek and bid him good night. Her voice was both mature and breathless, a mix of challenge and invitation. Yet all she was doing was saying good night to her father. The earl did not introduce her. Maybe he knew better. Even he could not take his eyes off her. The old man glowed with pride and, it seemed, wonderment. She began toward the door.

General Clay abruptly asked, “Earl Selden, may I borrow some brandy?”

“Why, of course. Rude of me not to have offered.”

Clay turned to her. “Will you have a refreshment with me, ma’am? Some brandy, perhaps?”

The earl almost coughed out his bridgework.

She replied, “I would enjoy that, Major.”

“It’s general, ma’am. General Clay.”

“Yes, undoubtedly.” She smiled. Her teeth must have had some sort of electrical work that made them glow from within. “Have Smalley call me when you and father have finished for the evening.”

“I wouldn’t want to tire your father,” Clay said quickly. “We’re done.”

The earl glowered at Clay in such a manner that I feared for the alliance. He harumphed in the proper British manner, then levered himself out of his chair.

As he passed us, he said, “Good luck, General.” There was a curious tone to his voice. Looking back, I think he was about to add, “You’ll need it,” but declined, perhaps thinking the general deserved whatever came his way.

Anne Percival was born in the home in which we sat, but had spent most of her youth in the East Africa Protectorate, later called the Kenya Colony. Earl Selden owned a cotton and coffee plantation christened New Surrey, so named because it was about the size of the English county. Lady Anne’s upbringing was supervised by her mother and two nannies, one a Welsh woman and the other a Kikuyu. The earl visited infrequently, preferring the study of armor to farming.

A number of young women from Africa entered Wycombe Abbey, the girls’ school, in 1915, most of them tomboys, admired and snubbed for their worldliness, their equestrian ability, and their smattering of native phrases. But Anne Percival also brought a sparkling intellect and relentless spirit and soon developed a scarcely concealed sensuality and provocative candor. A few of the teachers at the school still roll their eyes at her name. She was a confidante to many, a ringleader for all, a girl who broke up cliques and reformed them at will, and a prankster who laughed longest if the joke was on her. She organized a strike against the school’s kitchen over the porridge, and it is believed she organized the throng of girls who tied their Latin teacher to a chair and left her in a room all of one night, to be found by a janitor the next morning. The school sighed with relief when she left, but she was widely and fondly remembered by her classmates.

Lady Anne was married four times. General Stedman once said she “used up her husbands and tossed them aside.” Her first was Edwin Wooleridge, son of the Fleet Street press magnate, whom she left after three years, “having taught him everything and learned nothing,” as she put it, according to Stedman. Her second husband was Baron Fairchild, who thought life on his estate in the Cotswolds might domesticate his new bride. Instead, she wore him down to nothing over the next several years, then returned to the family apartment in London, some say in triumph. Next she married into the Grimaldi family, to a nobleman who had more money than stamina. She lived in Monaco for six years, but left him a juiceless husk. I remember reading about the controversy over the unprecedented annulment in Newsweek.

Her self-prescribed station in life was at the elevated center of everything, whether it was a small conversation, a dinner party, or a gala ball. She demanded, and received as her due, the attention of anyone near her. One might think ill of anyone else for such a requirement, but she wore this mantle with grace and amusement. She had a way with the self-deprecating comment, disarming and endearing.

I have heard that Lady Anne’s father was in a way relieved that she had been widowed, rather than divorced of her last husband, because the usual storm of controversy that followed her would not whip up this time. I don’t know how she took the death of Sir Roderick, but it did not long slow her travels or deter her from her social rounds.

It is popularly believed that Lady Anne devoted most of her time to sexual intrigue, stealing in and out of the bedrooms of the powerful and wealthy throughout England and the Continent. I have it on good authority that this was untrue, mostly. But she did nothing to quell these whispers. She enjoyed the notoriety, and everywhere she went she caused an uproar, much as the oars of a skiff leave expanding rings in the water as the boat moves along.

In all the time I served General Clay, I committed only one act that was disloyal to him, other than recording some of his gamier comments in my journal. After it became clear that he and Lady Anne intended to see more of each other, I discreetly asked a friend of mine, a subordinate of General Lorenzo who must remain nameless, to investigate the lady. His report was fascinating, but not alarming, at least in terms of a possible security leak.

A so-called journalist recently suggested that Anne Percival displaced the general’s aide, me, as his late-night confidant, as the person with whom he could relax. This was flatly untrue, and an affront to my war contribution, however meager. But she did fill a barren space in the general’s life at that time, one that neither I nor his wife in the States could do.

Yes, her beauty was such that it befuddled men who gazed on her. And, yes, she nourished her titillating reputation. But in General Clay she found someone she could not at once charm and vanquish, who would not join the parade of the dazed behind her. For both of them, the attraction was the sheer intellectual challenge that this refusal presented.

They began that night. After the earl had shuffled off, she poured the brandy, two snifters, not three. She gave him a glass, trying to pin him against the back of his chair with her eyes. I had apparently leached into the wallpaper, vanished without leaving a trace. It was not necessary to clear my throat politely, reminding them I was in the room. I was already gone.

She had opened the joust, calling him a major, but he had done his homework. “Anne Percival,” he rolled her name around in his mouth. “You go by Percival these days? One could lose track.”

She tilted her head and laughed, sounding like a carillon. “I thought I would wait until Roderick’s body cools before I take another name.”

She lifted the snifter to her lips, watching him over it. I had a vision of her as a bidder at a thoroughbred auction, calmly assessing musculature and lineage. The pekinese was at her feet, panting happily.

She said, “I’m having a gathering next Sunday here to celebrate a friend’s birthday. Sixty or seventy guests. Tell me, will the Germans get this far by then, or should I postpone it?”

I had never heard anyone speak lightly of the impending invasion. The British had laws against it, I thought.

She went on, “I would invite you, General, but you would be distracted and wouldn’t be fun at all.”

“I’ve heard the Wehrmacht called many things,” Clay replied, “and distracting is the kindest.”

They talked for another hour. General Clay brought to the conversation the same intensity he used in command. It was a scintillating tour de force. They worked Oscar Wilde, tsetse flies, Abraham Lincoln, and Idaho potatoes into their talk, and it all made marvelous sense. I laughed aloud several times, but they weren’t playing to me.

At midnight, she shook his proffered hand, and they said good-bye. I followed General Clay to the jeep. As we walked along the hedge toward the vehicle, he seemed surprised to see me. He said, “I thought you were waiting in the jeep.”

After the war, a few reporters suggested we left the earl’s home the following morning instead of at midnight. This is untrue. I have been asked many times the nature of General Clay and Lady Anne Percival’s relationship. I have faithfully set forth their first encounter. I will just as candidly describe their later meetings. You, and history, must judge their relationship.

The prime minister’s quarters underground were spartan by any standard. A cot covered with an olive wool blanket was against a wall. Every room in the complex seemed to have a wall map behind a curtain, and Churchill’s was no exception. On a desk were several telephones and a set of pens. A glass-fronted bookcase was near the desk, and I imagine the floor between them was well trod. Churchill led Clay to a card table, on which was another phone. He lifted it to call for refreshments. I remained by the door, the loyal retainer, until the prime minister frowned for effect and motioned me to join them. I fairly sprinted.

“You were a military history instructor at West Point for a time, I know, Wilson.”

“I was, Prime Minister.”

“Then you, better than perhaps anyone but me, understand the effects of weather on a military operation.”

“I do,” Clay replied. “And perhaps even better.”

Both men sat back in their chairs while an orderly entered to place tea on the table. General Clay tapped a foot against the table leg, his warm-up. The flashing silver service was jarringly out of place in the room.

The prime minister blew over his tea before taking a sip. “After winds destroyed the Spanish Armada, England took for its motto, ‘He blew and they were scattered,’ and the channel winds became known as the Protestant Winds.”

A hard opening serve. Fifteen-love.

General Clay nodded sagely. “The English debt to the weather is certainly great. At Blenheim in 1704, a thick mist hid the Allied approach, and the French and Bavarians suspected nothing.”

Fifteen-all.

“Not as great as you suspect, Wilson. A hard rain before Agincourt saved Henry V, because the French cavalry charge became mired in mud.” Churchill lifted his tea cup again. His eyes were alight.

Thirty-fifteen. My silent count always seemed to work.

“At least as great as I suspect, Prime Minister. Napoleon told Admiral Trevill, ‘Let us be masters of the channel for six hours, and we are masters of the world.’ But channel gales arose, and helped defeat Napoleon’s proposed invasion of England. The weather forbade him those six hours.”

Thirty-all.

“Weather has not always been our ally, Wilson. The heat during the Third Crusade prior to the Battle of Arsuf debilitated Richard I’s troops.”

Forty-thirty.

“Are you suggesting Richard lost that battle?” Clay asked.

Nice backhand. Deuce.

“I would not lead you astray. But you of course know that contrary channel winds kept William the Conqueror in port for six weeks.”

Advantage Churchill.

Clay used his cup as a prop. He never drank tea. A few seconds passed.

“You were about to say something?” Churchill goaded.

“This jabbering has parched my throat,” the general answered lamely. He raised his cup.

The prime minister’s serve was vicious. “During the Seven Years War, British troops were surrounded by forces of the Nabob of Bengal at Plassey. They were severely outnumbered, but were saved when rain ruined the enemy’s powder. The British had thought to cover their own powder with tarpaulins.”

Game, set, match, Churchill.

After a long pause, Clay admitted defeat, but not gracefully. “I have too much on my mind to fill it with minutiae, Prime Minister. Others might, but not me.”

Churchill grinned at me. “Aides usually keep diaries. Do you, Colonel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Be sure to include this exchange, then. I don’t want history to miss this one.”

“It would be an incalculable loss, sir.”

Clay asked me accusingly, “Siding with the people who hung Nathan Hale, Jack?”

Churchill helped himself to more tea. “I don’t always play games with the past, Wilson. I use it to understand our plight.” He brought out another cigar. “What do you suppose is the most-invaded island in the world?”

Clay thought for a moment. “Ceylon.”

The prime minister nodded approvingly. “Yes, Ceylon. Great Britain is no Ceylon. A century and a quarter have elapsed since a foreign country seriously threatened England on her own soil. And 1797 was the last time the British infantry in England went into action.”

“That would be the small French invasion at Fishguard.”

Churchill waved his cigar with approval. “We have had our share of invasions, as you know. Forty-nine to 1798. But fewer than most islands. Our isolation has been our security. Waterborne invasions shatter the calm and complacency produced by long periods of unchallenged national existence. The Incas in the sixteenth century. China and Japan in the nineteenth.”

Churchill rolled the cigar in his mouth. “The threat of an invasion has faded from our national consciousness. And so you see us awkwardly struggling with it in the war cabinet room. And you see my countrymen coping with it daily.”

When he pushed his cup away, we knew our visit was over. Clay and I stood quickly.

After hearing Churchill time and again on the BBC, I thought his voice foreign in the depth of its sadness. “War is a tragedy anywhere and anytime. But for an Englishman, war on the home soil is more than tragedy. It is an alien conceit. The image will not form in the mind. How does one prepare for the unthinkable?”

General Clay had no answer. The prime minister walked us to the door, the gravity of his words seeming to slow him. He lifted his chin. “But we shall see. They haven’t hurt us yet, not much.”

For once, the great man was wrong. At that moment, the disasters that became known as the Three Blows were underway, and they would bruise Britain and America to the bone.

6

Troops called the ship the Gray Ghost because its Cunard colors had been painted over with camouflage gray. The RMS Queen Mary was the queen of the express liners. The liner and her sister ship, the Queen Elizabeth, were Great Britain’s most prestigious and visible symbols of maritime might. Before the war it won the fabled Blue Ribband for the record Atlantic crossing, just under four days.

Since 1940 it had been a troop transport, shuttling Australians, Canadians, Britons, and Americans around the world. On this voyage it sailed east from New York carrying 10,554 United States soldiers and a crew of 910 officers and men, the first time in history more than ten thousand persons had voyaged on one ship. The weight of Queen Mary’s passengers was such that the troops were ordered to remain perfectly still as they sailed over the Holland Tunnel, to prevent the GIs from gathering on one side to bid farewell to New York City. A list of even five degrees would have caused the ship to scrape the top of the tunnel.

The captain had not known the Cunarder’s precise course until it passed the Ambrose Lightship, when he opened sealed orders given him at the shipping office. Gourock, on the Firth of Clyde, near Glasgow.

I spoke with Private Dennis Rawley four months after the war ended. He had boarded the ship in New York carrying the same equipment as everyone else: a helmet, a canteen, a full field pack, cartridge belts, two barracks bags containing summer and winter uniforms and a few personal belongings, and his Ml rifle. He was handed a blue button and told to attach it to his uniform blouse. The ship was divided into three self-contained, vertically separated areas, red, white, and blue, and the soldiers were restricted to their portion of the ship. Blue was the stern.

Private Rawley was frightened at the beginning of the trip. Rumor had it that Hitler had offered the equivalent of a quarter million dollars and an iron cross with oak leaves to the U-boat captain who sank the Queen Mary. But Rawley had been told that twenty-four oil-fired water tube boilers pushed the ship through the water at almost thirty knots, faster than anything the Germans had afloat. For most of the journey, the Queen Mary would not bother with convoys. It would simply outrun the Kriegsmarine. Nevertheless, his fear returned when 150 miles out of New York the four destroyer escorts signaled “Good Luck” and fell away.

Cunard billed the Queen Mary as the “Stateliest Ship Afloat,” and Rawley had expected his trip to be in the lap of luxury. By the time he found his standee bunk, jammed with a hundred others in the dry swimming pool, the private was sorely disappointed. Miles of plush Wilton carpeting, all the fragile fittings, over two hundred cases of crystal, china, and silverware, the better furniture, and 2,100 stateroom doors were in storage in warehouses along the Hudson. Thousands of canvas bunks, stacked six high and separated by only eighteen inches, had been installed on the promenade deck, the ladies’ drawing room, the squash court, and every other conceivable place above and below decks. The Queen Mary’s two thousand portholes and windows had been blacked out. Austin Reed’s famous tailor shop in the Main Hall had been made into a stockade. Other shops had been converted to military offices. The cocktail bars had been transformed into dispensaries and the main ballroom into a hospital. Steel blast shutters were installed above the bridge windows. Hundreds of sandbags protected vital areas of the superstructure. Little luxury to any of this, he thought.

Topside, among the louvers and exhaust ventilators, were a six-inch gun, five three-inch high-low angle guns, thirty-four 40mm and 20mm cannons, four Browning heavy machine guns, and four antiaircraft rocket launchers. Daily drills made for quite a show, and large crowds gathered, especially for the rockets.

A degaussing girdle which neutralized magnetic mines had been installed on the ship, along with an Asdic underwater noise-detection system. A mine-sweeping paravane system, consisting of two torpedo-shaped devices secured by cables to a winch on the bow, were designed to cut the mooring cables of submerged mines.

On the third day out, at the same time General Clay and I were having tea with the prime minister, Private Rawley was sitting on a bench in the prewar first class dining room, which served as the enlisted personnel mess. The mess seemed to be in chaos. Meals were served continually from 6:30 in the morning to 7:30 at night, two meals a day in six staggered sittings. While one group ate, another waited in line near the first group’s shoulders. The mess was a din of clanging kits and silverware and shouted conversation that rose to storm level. A choking haze of cigarette smoke filled the room.

During that meal the private sat next to a left-hander, who kept bumping Rawley’s elbow, spilling his peas back to his tin. Before he could swallow his last bite, a line of new arrivals walked up behind them and demanded their turn at the tables. Rawley shoved an entire biscuit into his mouth and rose from the table.

He returned to the crap game on B deck. The rule against gambling was universally ignored. Rawley estimated that at any given time there were four hundred crap and poker games on board. Christ, it was fun, meeting those fellows, rolling the dice, telling filthy jokes, and chewing each other up. The gamblers hadn’t cared if Rawley didn’t know anything about craps. He settled down among six others of C Battery, 49th Field Artillery, laying a dollar on the line. The shooter, from the Bronx, knew all the lingo and kept up a mesmerizing patter as he tumbled the dice in his hand, then rolled them out. He was on a streak, with a pile of bills in front of him big enough to use as a pillow. Another seven, a natural, just like before the meal. The shooter swept up Rawley’s dollar. The private put down his last dollar against the shooter. Learning had been expensive. The dice rolled. A four. C Battery cheered. Four was a tough point.

“Little Joe, coming out,” the shooter urged, rattling the dice and tossing them. Sure enough, each die showed two spots. The men groaned. The shooter jubilantly pulled the bills to him.

“Busting out saved my life,” Rawley told me. “I didn’t have one thin dime in my pockets, so I left the game and went up number four companionway to A deck, then aft toward the three-inch gun mounted on the former Veranda Grill. The ship’s emergency steering gear was under the gun. I had no reason to go there, other than I didn’t have anything else to do.”

Rawley walked toward a lifeboat, one of twenty-four aboard the Queen Mary, each with a capacity of 145 people. It didn’t take a slide rule to figure out that, if worst came to worst, seven thousand soldiers would go into the drink. Twice daily abandon-ship drills were held only to give the troops something to do, Rawley believed. The lifeboats were elevated on davits and hung over the side of the Queen Mary. He leaned over the deck’s starboard rail and ran a hand along one’s keel.

The private had an open, guileless face, with broad cheekbones and a mouth that tended to drop open. Wind ruffled his sandy hair. He stared at the horizon. Before this journey, Rawley had never before seen an ocean. There was a lot of it, he concluded. All of it scary.

He didn’t like to dwell on disaster. Thinking about it only invited it to happen. He grinned at himself and pushed crazy ideas out of his head. He leaned over the rail, glancing forward. The ship’s curved hull hid the bow and formed its own vertical horizon, a pleasing sweep of steel.

That horizon suddenly buckled, as if it had been shaken out like a blanket. Rawley gripped the rail. “I saw the hull quiver, and for a second I thought it might have been the return of seasickness I suffered the first day. Or maybe the ship’s hull was somehow reflecting the Atlantic’s waves. I just kept staring at the ship’s side. A guy behind me was playing a ukulele. He didn’t miss a note. Funny, the things you remember. And then the second torpedo hit.”

Ambush is the preferred technique of all navies. There was speculation later that the U-boat knew of the Queen Mary’s route, that New York’s resident community of Axis spies had determined the ship’s course and the sub was lying in wait. But less than a dozen people knew the precise zigzag course the Queen Mary would take, and none of them was even remotely a suspect. In fact, the Queen Mary had sailed entirely by coincidence into U-414’s periscope crosshairs.

The submarine had been the northerly boat of a rüdeltaktik, or wolf pack, a tactic introduced in 1941, when the Kriegsmarine began losing many of its seasoned U-boat commanders. The wolf pack demanded fewer skills of its skippers. When a convoy was spotted, the sub tailed it and alerted shore-based HQ, which guided the pack to a convoy. Not until the pack had gathered were the torpedoes launched.

U-414’s commander would have identified Queen Mary on sight. So fast was the liner that he may have had just enough time to square away his sub and flood the tubes. He launched, in sequence, four torpedoes before the first struck the ship.

Private Rawley felt the second impact. The ship rose and fell, not enough to topple anyone, but the crowd was abruptly silent. The ukulele stopped. Troops ran to the rail to peer at the ship’s hull.

“I still couldn’t see anything wrong,” Rawley recalled. “But the ship began to slow. The soldiers around me started to yell and crowd me at the rail.”

Although the crews remained British and were paid by Cunard, after Pearl Harbor the Queen Mary had come under direct operational command of the United States in a reverse lend-lease arrangement. Consequently, a U.S. Navy board of inquiry conducted the first investigation. A principal focus was the reason the ship had sunk so quickly. The board concluded that due to unparalleled aiming or luck, the second torpedo coursed into the first torpedo’s blast hole, ripping through the additional steel plating that had been placed around the engine room. The Queen Mary was wounded to its core.

Water poured into the engine room and E deck and the ship began listing to starboard. “What did I do?” Rawley asked me. “Hell, I climbed up the rail and stepped into a lifeboat. Training or no training, I wasn’t about to be left behind. It took about sixty seconds for that boat to fill, and another two torpedoes hit the Queen Mary during that time.”

U-414 was a Type VIIC submarine with four tubes, carrying fourteen torpedoes. The Kapitänleutnant must have known this was his prize of the war. After the first round of four torpedoes, the U-boat turned several degrees starboard and launched four more. At 1,019 feet, the Queen Mary was one of the largest targets afloat. Six of the first eight found the ship.

With water roaring into it at midships, the Cunarder slowed quickly. By the time U-414 had loaded the third round of four torpedoes, the Queen Mary had slowed to five knots and was listing twenty degrees. The Kapitänleutnant could take his time closing in on the ship. Three torpedoes of the third launch tore into the open wound midships. The fourth hit but did not detonate. It didn’t matter.

“A hundred and forty-five capacity,” Rawley snorted. “What a laugh. Must have been two hundred on that lifeboat when they began lowering it. Frantic troops still on board the ship were beaten away from the packed lifeboat. And was I ever in for a rude surprise.”

I admit I was startled when Rawley held up his left hand. He laughed when my eyes widened. His fingers were only an inch long. They had been severed at the second knuckles. He said, “I was holding onto the goddamn cable when the lifeboat started down. It ran my hand right into the pulley, pinching the fingers all off. Still have my thumb, though.” He waved it. “At least I can still hitchhike.”

Rawley said he yowled and shook his hand as if it were on fire, splattering the nearby soldiers with blood. One fellow near the lifeboat’s bow calmly collected the private’s fingers in his cap and passed them to Rawley. He tossed them away in horror and supposed they became fish food. The private was in such pain he had no recollection of the boat reaching the water or the scramble to break out the oars. Beginning a slow roll, the Queen Mary loomed over Rawley’s boat, filling the sky. He remembers the massive hull coming for him, ready to crush him.

A soldier lost his grip on the liner’s rail and plummeted some hundred feet into Rawley’s boat, killing himself and another he landed on. Other lifeboats dangled from their cables, descending slowly to sea level. The cable on the end of one boat spun off its winch, dropping the boat’s bow and pitching soldiers into the water. Rawley’s boat made haphazard progress away from the liner as the oarsmen struggled with their strokes.

“Christ almighty, my hand hurt, but even so I remember the shouting from those above me, trapped on board. They were being pushed against the rail as a mob ran up from the lower decks. The railing broke in a couple places, and men were pushed off the deck, a stream of them, falling into the water. And I heard what sounded like a long scream, almost a siren, spooky as hell. I learned later it was air being forced up the Queen Mary’s ventilators as water flooded the lower decks.”

Rawley and the others on his lifeboat watched as the Queen Mary’s top deck and stacks tilted toward them. Thousands of troops ran madly about, searching for an escape. As the angle of the deck increased, they began sliding toward the starboard rail, then tumbling into the air and cartwheeling into the Atlantic. Smoke still poured from the three stacks.

The Queen Mary settled onto its side, troops cascading off all the while. The sea foamed with soldiers. Because of the ship’s sudden list, lifeboats on the port side could not be lowered. Only ten boats made it away from the doomed liner. Rawley’s boat had less than half a foot of freeboard, and waves were already cresting into the craft, so there was no turning back to rescue anyone. The lifeboat pulled away from the Queen Mary. A corpsman gave Rawley a shot of morphine.

The liner quickly settled into the sea. Rawley’s memory faded as the drug took effect, but he recalled thinking the Queen Mary looked like a setting sun lowering itself into the water. Dennis Rawley told me his lifeboat was found by a U.S. Navy destroyer at dusk that day.

The soldiers and crewmen rescued by Allied navy craft, primarily from lifeboats, numbered 1,922. A few others survived by clinging to flotsam. Most never made it topside. Over 9,500 troops and crewmen went down with the Cunarder, four times the number lost at Pearl Harbor a few months before. Every city, every town, every country crossroad across the United States seemed to have lost sons. The Queen Mary entered the American consciousness. And the sinking was a glimpse of the fury to come.

The Battle of Scapa Flow began with a brilliant feint. At the same moment the U-414 launched its first torpedo at the Queen Mary, RAF sentry Perry Orvin felt his right leg collapse under him. He bounced on the ground and lay there a moment before feeling any pain. Only then did he look at his calf. A bullet had passed through it. He had not heard the shot. With the first tentacles of shock reaching for him, he remembered his duties and reached for his Lee Enfield.

“I swear I had looked down the hill the moment before I fell,” he told me after the war. “I didn’t spot a thing. Nothing to see, actually.”

The commandos of the 10th Marineabteilung had been concealed below Orvin’s duty station all morning, their brown and white tarpaulins camouflaging them. At precisely one o’clock, they left their hiding places and began running uphill toward the Chain Home Low (CHL) radar station on Wideford Hill on Mainland Island. Their first shot brought Orvin down. The commandos must have thought they had killed the sentry, because they moved quickly over the rocks and sparse grass toward the installation’s barbed wire perimeter. Orvin heard the tinny rattle of a Schmeisser submachine gun. Fighting back the cloud of shock, he swung his rifle toward them and quickly emptied the clip. Three of the commandos fell.

Orvin told me that the remaining Germans must have been exceptionally well trained, because only three of them returned fire, while another five remained at the fence, hurriedly cutting through it with wire cutters.

Dust kicked up around the RAF sentry. A bullet bit into his shoulder, breaking his collar bone. Another plowed along the length of his back, leaving a shallow trench that would require 120 stitches. Orvin reached for another clip, blinking repeatedly against the encroaching darkness. He snapped the clip into place, but faded into unconsciousness before he could fire again.

Orvin’s sergeant, Claude MacArthur, a Scot from Dundee, was passing the time of day with two radar technicians, leaning against a warning sign on the west side of the site, his rifle slung over his back, when he heard the shot that felled Orvin. He threw down his cigarette and grabbed the rifle off his shoulder, with no idea what was happening. A burst from a Schmeisser blew down the technicians and ripped into MacArthur’s shoulder, spinning him to the ground.

Lying there, his neck at a sharp angle, blood pouring from his wound, he watched the commandos race across the field between the fence and the CHL hut. As they neared the wood door, another technician stepped out and was cut in half from blasts from several submachine guns. The first commando to reach the door threw in a stick grenade, then dropped to the ground. The shack’s door and windows erupted.

OKM (Oberkommando der Marine) ordered the commando raid presumably because radar stations were extremely difficult to destroy from the air. The 350-foot-high lattice masts were porous, and Luftwaffe bombs would have sailed through them. A blast nearby would have done little damage to the mast. The height of the tower inhibited dive-bombers. The control rooms and electronic gear were underground. Even direct hits would have had little effect.

Leaving one raider at the door, the commandos charged into the hut. MacArthur heard submachine gun fire from the cement stairway inside, then, fainter, from the control room. MacArthur tried his left arm. Pain flared from his shoulder to his waist. The commando on watch saw the movement and loosed a half-second burst at MacArthur. The technicians’ bodies caught most of it, but one bullet punched through MacArthur’s left boot.

Seconds later the Germans emerged from the hut and separated into teams, running to the mast’s stanchions. One commando unrolled wire from a spool. They wore wet suits, backpacks, and ammunition belts resembling Sam Brownes. Strapping explosives to the antenna’s posts took only a moment. All the while, MacArthur’s hand crept to his rifle. One of the Germans shouted an order, and they retreated to the breach in the barbed wire. MacArthur lined his rifle at their backs.

“I pulled the trigger,” he told me in his thick Scot’s brogue. “The rifle butt bounced against my shoulder, and I yelped with pain. Madder and madder, I jerked the trigger again and again. And, so help me, I did not hit a one of them. They disappeared down the hill. I wanted to weep.”

The charges were attached with electrical cord to a timer. Three explosives packages detonated at the same instant. With the caterwaul of wrenching metal, the mast sank in on itself, its guys at first preventing it from toppling to one side. Cross pieces twisted and buckled as the tower shrank like an accordion. With new slack in the guys, the mast began to totter.

“The worst of it, to tell you the truth, was watching that tower make up its mind where it wanted to fall, then choosing me.”

It landed less than an arm’s length from Sergeant MacArthur. “The bullets couldn’t kill me, but fright nearly did.”

He was found moments later by other sentries who had run up Wideford Hill from the direction of Kirkwall. One had a walkie-talkie and alerted headquarters. The commandos were three hundred yards offshore in their raft when a Spitfire made its first strafing run. The pilot made two more for good measure. The commandos’ bodies washed up on Mainland’s shore, but none of them was whole.

In the two months before S-Day, radar stations on England’s east and south coasts continually saw signs of substantial enemy muster. The Luftwaffe kept planes aloft to confuse the defenders about possible aircraft concentrations, and this was also true over the German-held airports in Scandinavia, the nearest to Scapa Flow. However, the Home Fleet’s base had been chosen with the possibility of enemy air strikes well in mind. Luftwaffe bases at Sola, Bergen, Herdla, and Vaernes, all in occupied Norway, were three hundred miles from the flow, six hundred round trip.

The fleet at Scapa Flow had been relatively safe because the Junkers Ju 87B, the dive-bomber that was the edge of the German sword during the invasion of France, had a range of only 620 miles with added external fuel tanks. In other words, the Junkers, nicknamed the Stuka after the abbreviation of its role name (Sturzkampfflugzeug, or, roughly, dive-bomber) could make it to the flow, but had no time to engage if the pilot wanted to return to base. With its pinpoint dive-bombing, the Stuka was the most deadly aircraft against Royal Navy ships, but the vast distances of the North Sea protected the Home Fleet.

Similarly, although the Luftwaffe’s high-altitude bombers possessed the range, their required escort fighters did not. A Messerschmitt, for example, could fly only eighty minutes before its tanks went dry. Even when crossing the far narrower English Channel, a Messerschmitt was left with only twenty minutes over English soil.

Within ten minutes of the destruction of the CHL station, both RAF squadrons from Wick airfield assigned to protect the Home Fleet were circling the flow, searching the horizon. At full complement, the squadrons would have had twenty fighters on the line plus two in reserve. Because of losses, each Wick squadron had only nine serviceable craft. After forty minutes without enemy contact, the Spitfires and Hurricanes began returning in rotation to Wick for refueling.

The feint was the delay that forced the RAF fighter to return to the airdrome, twenty-five miles south of the flow on the Scottish mainland. When half the fighters were refueling, the Luftwaffe struck the Home Fleet.

The sky above the flow suddenly filled with enemy dive-bombers. Even as the planes began their runs, sailors aboard the Royal Navy ships doubted their eyes. The massive cranked wings and spatted undercarriages meant these were Stukas. But Stukas simply could not be over Scapa Flow.

Oberleutnant Franz Stenzel’s bomber powered almost vertically out of the sky. His target, HMS Rodney, was dashing south toward the Sound of Hoxa and the open sea of the Pentland Firth, white water churning behind it. Stenzel had memorized the battleship’s features. Three triple sixteen-inch turrets, all forward of a massive superstructure. Twelve six-inch guns, all aft. A peculiarly high freeboard.

“An ugly ship,” he said into his mask.

His weapons officer, Sergeant Fritz Cohausz, replied over the engine’s whine, “It’s in my sights, ugly as it is.”

Stenzel told me after the war that he was glad for the engine noise. It hid the tension and fear in his voice. The air in his mask smelled of engine oil. Engine vibration rattled Stenzel’s teeth. He had a cramp in his buttocks.

The oberleutnant was posted to Staffel 4 of II StG (Stukageschwader, or dive-bombing wing) of Luftflotten 5 (Air Fleet 5), stationed at Herdla. Stenzel knew as well as the sailors he was falling toward that a Stuka could not possibly be over Scapa Flow. That is, he knew his plane would not make it back. The small belt of flare-gun cartridges around his calf was little comfort. He was also wearing a cloth and leather flying jerkin, much easier to take off than a flight suit, should his uniform become water-logged and begin to pull him under.

His plane was of a masterful design, carefully balanced and a delight to fly. As he plummeted toward the Rodney, Stenzel changed trim, which automatically adjusted the air brakes. The Stuka produced an unnerving scream, the plane’s hallmark. The dive-bomber’s vertical approach was fairly slow, allowing for precise aiming. Stenzel glanced through the window in the floor of his cockpit, then at the lines inscribed on the canopy to gauge the angle of his dive. The Rodney’s multiple pompons hammered the air around him, but because of the steep dive, could not draw a bead. The battleship grew in front of him.

At the last possible instant before a pull-up would have been futile, Sergeant Cohausz released his 1,100-pound bomb from the cradle beneath the fuselage. Stenzel pulled back on the stick. He rolled the plane to starboard as he climbed, hoping to confuse the Rodney’s gunners.

The bomb soared into the forecastle, forward of the first sixteen-inch battery, tearing open the six-inch steel plating, mangling the decks below and setting them on fire. The Rodney would have survived the blow, had not the rest of Staffel 4 followed Stenzel in. The next two bombs hit midships between the tower and the funnel, almost tearing the battlewagon in two.

The fourth bomb missed aft. The pilot, with a Spitfire on his tail, probably lost concentration, and when he tried to pull up, he crossed into the Spitfire’s tracers. The Stuka disappeared in a ball of flame, which quickly blew itself out, leaving parts of the wings and fuselage fluttering toward the sea.

Stenzel and Cohausz still had a 110-pound bomb under each wing. The pilot banked his Stuka south, thankful the British pilot had chased after someone else. A Stuka was almost helpless against a Spitfire. He skimmed over the water, turning in a tight circle. This time he came at the Rodney from sea level, at an angle toward her damaged foredeck where AA fire would be less. At three hundred yards he began firing his two 7.92mm machine guns in the wings.

The Rodney’s decks were blanketed with oil-fed black smoke from the blazes, and the ship was losing speed. Stenzel lifted the Stuka’s nose, and Cohausz released both bombs. They detonated against the control tower and bridge, showering the deck below with fire and metal shards. Other Stukas followed Stenzel’s plane as it cruised over the crippled ship and through the wall of smoke, then raced east. They left the Rodney a burning hulk.

Early that morning, Oberleutnant Stenzel had been assured by his wing commander that the genius of the plan would reveal itself to the pilots after they were safely rescued. Stenzel doubted it then, and he doubted it thirty minutes after his bombing run when he pancaked his plane into the sea. The Stuka was risky to ditch, since waves tended to catch the wings and flip the plane. Stenzel told me after the war that his successful water landing was due only to luck, as it wasn’t a maneuver the Luftwaffe allowed one to practice. He and Cohausz quickly pushed themselves out of the cockpit and jumped into the water, knowing the plane would sink rapidly. Bobbing in the chop, they inflated life jackets, and Stenzel opened a dye packet he carried in his suit. The orange color spread over the water. By the time Stenzel looked over his shoulder, his plane had disappeared.

Unlike the RAF, the German air force had a dedicated sea-rescue service, the Seenotflugkommondos. Most of its float planes, Heinkel He 59s, had been moved to the Norwegian coast for this operation. Within ten minutes, Stenzel heard the drone of a Heinkel, sonorous compared to the wail of his Stuka engine. The plane landed nearby, and within moments Stenzel and Cohausz were lifted aboard, where they joined four other Stuka pilots and weapons officers.

His wing commander was a good judge of his pilots. Only then, safe in the belly of the Heinkel, did Stenzel fully appreciate the Luftwaffe’s plan. To reach Scapa Flow, his Staffel had been sacrificed, but the maneuver caught the British completely unprepared. Stenzel laughed suddenly and shook Cohausz’s hand.

U-502 led the pack through the Strait of Hoxa. Its commander, Kapitänleutnant Hans Fromm, had been assured that the submarine nets across the Strait would be removed at 1:30, but he was not told how or by whom. Sub nets conveniently disappearing? It didn’t sound likely. He swung his periscope to starboard, then port. The sub was midway between Stranger Head and Hoxa Head. His U-boat would not be the first to enter the flow. During the night of October 13–14, 1939, Günther Prien and his U-47 slipped into the basin and sank the battleship HMS Royal Oak, a major blow to British prestige.

“Sub depth?” Fromm asked.

“Two meters, Herr Kaleun,” the chief engineer answered, using the abbreviation for Fromm’s rank.

“Prepare to surface.”

A bell rang throughout the submarine. The stokers jumped to their diesel engines.

“Blow the tanks, Chief,” Fromm ordered. He heard a long hiss of compressed air.

“We’re up, sir.”

“Horizon report.”

His arms over the periscope handles, the second officer replied, “Land to the west, eight hundred meters. Some distance to the east. We’re dead center, Herr Kaleun.” A moment later, the officer exulted, “I’ve found the lights, sir.”

“Open the hatch.”

North Sea air spilled into the submarine. Fromm gulped it gratefully. First up the ladder were three lookouts. The commander followed them.

He stood forward on the bridge, leaning against the magnetic compass. The sky and sea in front of him were filled with what Fromm knew would be recorded as one of history’s most ferocious battles. Luftwaffe planes—there must have been a hundred of them—filled the sky, diving in and out of curling black smoke. A few were being chased by Hurricanes and Spitfires. Tracers arced across the sky, and clouds of AA fire dappled it. The flow boiled with the battle.

“There they are, sir.” A spotter pointed dead ahead.

Fromm allowed himself a smile. Two navigational lights floated on the surface of the sea, directing him. The Kapitänleutnant looked aft. Six submarines were following him in a precise line through the gap in the sub net.

Once through, Fromm and the spotters returned below. U-502 dove, but stayed near the surface, with the first officer directing them from his post at the periscope. The pack moved past Roan Head into the flow at periscope depth, then bore northwest in a line abreast.

Before departure from Narvik in northern Norway, Lieutenant Commander Fromm had been told only part of the battle plan. The Führer der Unterseeboote (flag officer commander for submarines), who had flown from Berlin for the briefing, had assured him that once the submarines were inside the flow, the Royal Navy would come to them. After twenty minutes in line abreast on the east side of the island called Flotta, the admiral was proven correct.

“Target, sir,” the first officer called from the tower. “Enemy position off bow left. Angle forty, speed twelve knots, range three thousand meters.”

Fromm climbed into the tower to relieve the first officer at the attack periscope. He sat astride the periscope saddle with his face hard against the rubber cup. His feet pressed pedals allowing him to spin the periscope and saddle left or right. A lever at his right hand could raise or lower the scope.

Fromm called out, “Stand by tubes one to four for surface firing.”

The tubes were flooded. The first officer manned his position calculator, which was connected with the gyrocompass. He adjusted the torpedoes’ steering mechanisms. When the submarine’s course was altered, the new position was automatically changed for the torpedoes.

“Comparison, now,” Fromm said. “Variation, zero. Open torpedo doors.”

The first officer called, “Tubes one through four ready to fire.”

“Connect tubes one and two.”

“Aye, sir.”

Fromm whispered, “My God, it’s the Nelson.”

In his sight was the Rodney’s sister ship, same silhouette, same battery of sixteen-inch guns, over 1,300 sailors aboard.

The chief engineer yelled from the sound room, “Herr Kaleun, I’ve got an earful here.”

Fromm ignored him. His prize was too close. “Report angle.”

The number came from the control room below.

The commander said, “Tubes one and two, fire.”

“Fire, one and two,” the first officer answered.

A blast of air propelled the torpedoes from the submarine.

“Starboard ten degrees,” Fromm ordered. “Connect tubes three and four.”

“Aye, sir,” from several.

The chief engineer shouted, “Herr Kaleun, check ninety degrees to port. We’ve got something coming at us.”

The periscope motor hummed. Fromm looked north for an instant, but kept what he saw to himself. He spun back to his prey.

“Give me the angle.” He waited several seconds more. “Fire tubes three and four.”

“They’re off, sir.”

Fromm called, “Flood. All hands forward. Let’s get under.”

But it was too late, both for the Nelson and U-502. As the first two torpedoes hit the battleship midships, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Garrity plowed into the submarine’s quarterdeck, its prow slashing into the engine room, lifting the submarine almost out of the water, then breaking it in two like a board snapped over a knee.

Fromm was pitched off the periscope saddle to the deck grating. He slapped the alarm button. The first officer climbed into the tower. “We’re through. The aft section has vanished.”

“Call the abandon ship.”

Of the fifty-one officers and crewmen aboard U-502, nineteen, including Fromm, were eventually plucked from the waters of the flow. They spent the remainder of the war interred in Scotland.

Here, too, the trade-off worked to the Germans’ advantage. A U-boat for a battlewagon. The Nelson cruised under its own power into the Pentland Firth south of the flow, but there it went down, smoke billowing from it until the tip of the ensign staff on the stern slipped below the surface.

The Battle of Scapa Flow was over in sixty minutes. The toll was dreadful. The battleships Rodney and Nelson, cruisers Sussex and Norfolk, six destroyers, four corvettes, and twelve other ships including mine-sweepers, net-layers, depot and repair ships, and an oiler were sunk or gutted. Four British submarines were also caught on the surface and destroyed.

The Luftwaffe lost every plane it sent, 123 dive-bombers. Nine U-boats also failed to return to Narvik, victims of Royal Navy destroyers or mines. But it was a cheap price to pay to break the Royal Navy’s back.

Victoria Haselhurst was strolling through Eaton Park when the second destruction of Norwich began. The first had been by the Danes, who razed the town in 1004. Now it was the Germans’ turn.

Not that the people of Norwich, in the county of Norfolk, had been complacent through the centuries. Norwich citizens had taken part in the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 and Kett’s Rebellion in 1549. And an ancient poem pointed to their importance in any invasion: “He who would old England win / Must at Weybourn Hoop begin.” Even so, this war had largely spared them.

Norwich was a town of less than a hundred thousand people in East Anglia, northeast of London, eighteen miles inland from the North Sea on the River Yare. Little in the town had interested the Luftwaffe, until the waves of Dorniers and Heinkels appeared over their town during the same hour that the Battle of Scapa Flow raged.

Haselhurst worked in a boot-manufacturing plant. She was a striking woman, with blond hair, cut short so it would not get caught in machinery, and blue-gray eyes that spoke of Viking ancestry. When the air raid sirens had begun ten minutes before, she had left the plant for the park, rather than descend into the factory’s musty basement with all the old people and their smells and dull chatter. She preferred the park’s oaks and elms. And most of the plant evacuations were false alarms anyway.

This one certainly was not. She had never imagined so many planes. She recognized the flying pencil shape of the Dorniers from the airplane recognition chart at work. Above them were escort fighters, dots against the blue sky.

It seemed to her the bombs would all miss the city, for they fell from the planes’ bellies too early. Could the Germans be bombing the old manor house south of town? But as they fell, the bombs followed the planes forward, reaching for the town. They were tiny things, wiggling in the air, dropping in batches. They came by the thousands. She told me after the war that for a moment she was oddly pleased that the town had finally merited some attention. She was later ashamed by the thought.

Fascinated rather than fearful, she watched as the bombs, still appearing harmless, fell in tight patterns that opened as the bombs descended further. Several escort Messerschmitts banked out of formation to face approaching fighters, although she could not see the RAF planes.

The bombs hit with a peculiar bubbling noise, nothing like she expected, splats rather than blasts. Waves of flame flickered from rooftops. They were incendiaries, designed to set the town on fire. Each bomb was a gray cylinder, a little over a foot long and weighing two pounds. The first clusters hit along Cecil and Townclose roads, then worked their way north into the ancient neighborhoods of crow-stepped gabled buildings and half-timbered houses, made to burn. Victoria watched silently, raising her hand to shade her eyes. There was nothing she could do.

George Reed’s experience during the Norwich fire raid was more immediate. He was a member of Norwich’s Auxiliary Fire Service, and when the warning siren sounded, he was filling sand bags from a mound of dirt a lorry had left earlier in the day. He descended to the ARP building basement carrying his shovel.

He waited patiently for the all-clear, picking at a callus on his hand, glancing at the air raid warden sitting across the room, envious of his uniform. The sirens forced the people of Norwich into the cellars several times a week, and it always came to nothing.

Reed had once been in London during a fire-bomb raid. He stood quickly when he recognized the fluid sound of an incendiary hitting the stones of the street. A man and a shovel could usually put out the fire caused by one of these cylinders. He ran up the stairs toward the street.

A fire was burning fiercely in the center of the road. The blackened canister was off to one side. Reed dug his shovel into the dirt and ran to the fire. A dozen shovels’ worth might extinguish it. Just as he tossed the dirt, another canister ripped through the ceiling of the nearby chemist’s shop. Fire flashed through the first floor, billowing out the windows.

Reed changed direction, thinking the street fire would burn itself out in several moments. He carried the shovel toward the chemist’s. A third canister landed near a fruit vendor’s cart half a block away, setting it on fire. Another hit the roof of the ARP post. In quick succession, small bombs landed in a weedy lot at the end of the block, on the roofs of the solicitor’s office and a pensioner’s hotel, and in the flatbed of a truck parked across from the ARP post. Then a cylinder splashed onto the cobblestones four feet from Reed.

Fire crawled up his pants. “Believe it or not, we AFS volunteers had been trained for just this situation,” he recalled. “I dropped to the street and rolled around, suffocating the fire, then kicked my pants off as fast as I could.”

He suffered severe burns on his right leg, and the purple scar was still vivid when I spoke with him after the war. He rose unsteadily to find that fires were growing rapidly all along the street. Forgetting his leg, he ran to the post’s basement door and yelled a warning to the ARP warden. Then George Reed joined a growing stream of people abandoning their town.

Incendiaries rained down on Portersfield and Whitehall roads and crossed Earlham Road, and at least two dozen found Heigham Hall, setting all parts of the old mansion ablaze. The next run of planes came in closer to the center of town, and the clusters landed on Victoria Station, the Norwich Hospital, and city hall. The Lutyens War Memorial and the Guildhall, dating from 1407, were caught by the bombs, as were hundreds of common-walled homes. The skyline in Norwich was quickly topped by fire. Only Norwich Cathedral, with the second tallest spire in all of England, rose above the flames.

Victoria Haselhurst had been raised in Ipswich, forty miles south, so she felt shamefully unconnected to the roaring fires. But, after all, her parents were safely south. The loss was not hers, not really.

She would learn later that the loss was indeed hers. Ipswich, the chief town of Suffolk, was receiving the same rough treatment from the German bombers. The canisters fell across it, too, in a swath to the west of the town center.

In both Norwich and Ipswich, the westerly winds worked for the Luftwaffe, prodding the flames across narrow streets and onto more and more buildings. Victoria’s parents fled the approaching firestorm, but her home, in her father’s family for two hundred years, was consumed. As Victoria watched the Norwich fire, she did not know that the Ipswich fire had reduced her and her family’s possessions to the clothes on their backs.

Eighty percent of the buildings in both towns were destroyed. Fires burned for a week. Because the canisters produced no concussion, casualties were surprisingly light, 1,554 for both Norwich and Ipswich. Most people ran ahead of the flames. To appalled English citizens, the destruction of those lovely towns seemed senseless.

The Defense Committee understood the Germans’ tactic, however, which was to flood the area with refugees fleeing the conflagrations. Homeless, frightened, confused people choked the roads of Norfolk and Suffolk. The task of reinforcing British troops along the coastlines of those counties had suddenly become much more difficult.

Victoria Haselhurst watched the bombers recede. With Norwich engulfed in fire, she began walking south along Blue Bell Road, skirting the town. She heard the steady singing of the all-clear behind her.

Forty miles was a long way to walk, but she hoped to inveigle a ride, her usual method of traveling home. Hitchhiking was virtually unknown in England before the war, but it had become common. She paused for a last look at the town. A band of orange flame rose above it, and higher yet was a vast plume of black smoke. Due to the melee of S-Day, she would not see her parents again for two months.

7

“If I ever write a report about you, I’m going to put this in it,” General Clay grumbled as he levered himself out of the jeep and walked toward a cottage that had a thatched roof, a narrow wood door with a rough iron bolt, and small, leaded windows. “The Hun might be hours away, and I’m more lost in the goddamn Sussex countryside than the Wehrmacht divisions ever will be, thanks to you.”

The general routinely accused me of causing all the snafus in his war effort, everything from coffee that was cold to delays in merchant marine convoys, sometimes charging that a particular blunder had “set out the red carpet for Hitler.” I had nothing to do with any of them, and he never failed to grin. He did so then, as he pushed aside a gate and walked toward the cottage at the side of the lane.

After meeting with the prime minister, we had flown toward an airfield eight miles north of Brighton. Our destination was II Corps’ headquarters at Adisham, between Deal on the channel coast and Canterbury, but from the air we discovered that Luftwaffe bombs had just pockmarked the dirt runway. Engineers with dump trucks and a grader were filling in the holes as we flew over.

Captain Norman searched for a few moments before finding an oat field long enough to land on and with furrows running lengthwise. He touched the Cub down gently. Our British driver was back at Adisham, so the general and I commandeered a jeep from the 127th Field Artillery Regiment and began toward corps headquarters. I drove, the general gave directions, and five minutes later we were lost.

Before he could knock on the door, a boy wearing a striped shirt and shoes two sizes too large appeared from behind a corner of the cottage. He frowned at the general and stepped back in retreat.

“Hold on there, son,” Clay ordered. “Can you tell me where Adisham is? It can’t be far from here.”

The boy was about seven. He squinted up at the general. “I could, but I daren’t.”

“You daren’t?”

The boy scratched his head. “Mummy and the reverend say not to tell strangers where they are.” His hand remained in his mass of unruly brown hair, apparently forgotten. “You could be a German.”

“Look, kid—” Clay checked himself. He knelt down and continued sweetly, “Lookee here, lad, I’m wearing the uniform of a general in the United States Army. Do I look like a German to you?”

“It could be a ’sguise,” he said.

“Holy Christ,” Clay blurted. “Kid, I’m going to hand you over to G2, and then we’ll see how quickly you talk.”

The boy lifted his chin defiantly. “Mummy does not allow naughty words around here.”

The cottage door opened a few inches. The boy’s mother leaned out hesitantly. Her eyes widened when she recognized the visitor. “Why, you’re General Clay.”

“Could be a German, Mum,” the boy cautioned her.

Clay touched his cap. “Afternoon, ma’am. My driver here, who will be reduced to second lieutenant as soon as I can push the papers through, has gotten us lost. I’d appreciate directions to Adisham.”

“Of course.” She stepped from the doorway and raised a hand to gesture, but paused. “Would you care for a bite to eat first?”

I was surprised when the general said he’d be pleased to. He told me to use the jeep’s radio to alert HQ Adisham where we were and to tell Gene Girard, commander of II Corps, to meet with him as soon as possible. The woman informed me of our location, an intersection near Shepherd’s Close. I went back to the jeep and lifted the radio handset from its pocket. Using that day’s code names, I relayed the general’s instructions.

When I returned to the cottage, the boy opened the door for me. A table was at one end of the sitting room, and the general was already cutting into a small piece of beef. Several slices of bread were also on his plate. An apple and an orange, a cup of strawberry jam and another of butter, and two biscuits were on another plate. The woman was in the small kitchen scrambling several eggs.

She was undoubtedly serving her honored guest every carefully hoarded morsel in her kitchen. Standard fare for the English was dried eggs from America, powdered skimmed milk, which was called Household Milk and tasted like cardboard, bread made from gray wholemeal flour and with the texture of plaster, called the National Loaf, and the nearly indigestible Woolton Pie. Sugar, fruit, meat, coffee, and tea were only occasionally available.

Homemakers improvised. They made a jam resembling chutney from carrots, used cheese rind for flavoring, added corn flour to stretch dried eggs, filled sandwiches with potato crisps, replaced cooking fat with glycerin and paraffin. The green dye that marked meat unfit for human consumption was often cut out before the meat went into the pot. Rather than waste an old joint, cooks scraped away any maggots, and the meat was roasted again. Bananas were so rare that children, unfamiliar with them, often tried to bite through the skin. Not only humans endured the shortages. Dogs were fed potatoes, and a new law forbade giving bread crumbs to wild birds.

And here was General Clay gobbling down her entire larder while the boy stared steadily at the biscuits. She stepped in from the kitchen with the eggs and a slice of bread on a plate. “I’m low on meat today, I’m afraid, Colonel. I hope these eggs will do.”

She pulled out a chair opposite the general. Distressed, I sat down and lifted a fork. She nodded encouragement. I chewed slowly, trying to appear grateful. General Clay continued to eat with gusto, apparently oblivious that he was devouring a week’s food.

If this home were typical, food would not be the only privation. German propaganda leaflets were used as toilet paper. No photographic film was available, so an entire generation of British children was not being recorded. Jam jars were used as glasses, and spoons were so scarce restaurants had taken to chaining them to their tables. Only newly married couples were given priority dockets to purchase bedding, and even then a pair of sheets might cost nine guineas. To save fuel, citizens were urged to remove bulbs from all but essential sockets, to fill the tub only to five inches, and not to heat food. Many homes tried cooking with a hay box, where heat was generated from decomposing hay or grass. The list of unobtainable items was endless.

“What’s your name, ma’am?” General Clay asked around a mouthful.

“Evelyn Blaine,” she said as she sat in the third chair at the table. “My husband is Lieutenant Jeffrey Blaine of the Royal Navy.”

She said it confidently, as if Clay might have known him. The general did not pick up on it. He reached for the orange and peeled it carelessly, letting drops of juice fall to his plate. She was a striking woman, unhampered by the lack of lipstick or other cosmetics, which had almost disappeared earlier in the war. Perfume had vanished, but she had the scent of roses about her. Her face resembled one on a Victorian brooch. Her skin was the pale color of milk glass, but her peaked lips were a youthful red. She had fine, even teeth. Mrs. Blaine apparently disdained the Victory Roll hair style, because her hair swept across her forehead in the Veronica Lake fashion. She wore a pinafore that might have been made from black-out cloth and was tied around her waist with a strip of cloth. Elastic had disappeared.

“He’s on the Argyle,” she said. “Would you know of the ship, or where it is or what has happened to it?”

Clay shook his head. “I’m sorry, no. But if it’d been sunk, I’d have heard of it.”

She brightened and returned to the kitchen for a coffee pot. She emptied it, pouring each of us half a cup. The general blew on it for a moment, then drank half her weekly ration in several quick swallows. Longingly, she watched it go.

“If you’re a general, why aren’t you fighting with your soldiers?” the boy asked.

“Thomas,” his mother warned.

“Generals don’t really fight,” Clay replied, lowering the cup.

“Well,” Thomas persisted, “shouldn’t you be in front of them, leading them?”

The general pushed his empty plate away. Normally he would have used such a question to dredge up minutiae from his inexhaustible repertoire of military history. But this time his audience was a child. I thought we’d be spared. I was wrong.

“You bring up one of the great dilemmas for any military commander, Thomas. Where should he be during battle? At a rear headquarters, where he is able to best communicate with line and reserve troops, and where he can maintain contact with his superiors? Or at the front, where, leading in person, his presence will lend courage and stamina to his soldiers and he can make instant decisions?”

“But he might get killed,” the boy said. On a cupboard behind Thomas were his gas mask cannister and air raid tin, which, if it were like the tins of other English children, contained several comics, a sweet or two, and a favorite toy to keep him busy during a raid.

“It can happen, all right. Gustavus Adolphus was mortally wounded leading troops on a rescue mission to his hard-pressed left at Lützen in 1632. But these days, generals don’t lead the charge into battle or engage in hand-to-hand fighting. Vendôme at Oudenaarde in 1708 and Charles XII at Poltava in 1709 fought in person and were the last to do so.”

I couldn’t help myself. “What about Marshal Ney at Waterloo?”

He glowered at me. “Ney was deranged at the time. He doesn’t count.”

“Washington visited the front lines at the Battle of Princeton,” I ventured.

“I’m talking about Europeans,” he argued. “Washington doesn’t count, either.”

“What about La Marchant at Salamanca? He fought like a common soldier.”

“La Marchant was Wellington’s subordinate, not the commander, so you get no points on him either.”

“And George II at Dettington,” Evelyn Blaine joined in. “He was the last British monarch to lead troops into battle. And didn’t General Cardigan himself lead the charge of the Light Brigade?”

Clay threw up his hands. He turned to the boy and said solemnly, “Thomas, let this be a lesson to you. Your mother and Sergeant Royce have encircled my position, cut me off from reinforcements, and soundly whipped me.”

Mrs. Blaine laughed. Her son joined in, if only because of Clay’s scowl of defeat. She pushed the biscuits toward the general. He finished one in two bites.

She looked at him with a perplexed and affectionate expression. In the previous months, the Americans had swarmed over the British Isles, leaving wide swaths of candy and nylons and cigarettes and casting forth goodwill and optimism. The young American soldiers with their brazen exuberance and sheer cockiness seemed the incarnation of Hollywood films. To the English, accustomed to doing without and making do and scarcely complaining at missing husbands and lovers, the Americans were bigger than life. American troops, who were paid four times as much as their British counterparts, arrived on English soil laboring under heavy loads of money and luxuries and all too willing to part with them, grinning wonderful prewar grins all the while.

Who could blame English families for inviting American soldiers into their homes for something to eat, knowing that more often than not the soldier would reciprocate with a plump carton of Camels or Lucky Strikes? Who could blame English girls for not refusing invitations into American service clubs, with their rich ice cream, sugar-coated doughnuts, and intoxicatingly aromatic coffee? And the Americans didn’t mind if the girls put a few extra pastries into a handbag for the family. Americans even looked taller, healthier, and they smelled better. These exotic cousins from overseas were to be stared at and wondered about, and Mrs. Blaine could not help herself.

I heard the sound of a jeep, and a moment later a knock at the door. Major General David Lorenzo did not wait for an answer, but pushed open the door and strode quickly toward the table.

The G2 asked abruptly, “Have you heard, General?”

Clay stared at him, perhaps unwilling to admit he was not the first to know anything. Lorenzo leaned over the table and spoke in a low voice, too agitated and hurried to exclude Mrs. Blaine. More vehicles rolled up outside.

Clay interrupted, “Gone? The Queen Mary? Our troops?”

Lorenzo nodded and went on, telling him also of Ipswich and Norwich and Scapa Flow. He did not yet know the full damage, but could tell the general enough to shake him. Clay gripped the edge of the table. Mrs. Blaine’s face turned ashen.

He was still talking when Gene Girard walked into the cottage, followed by his executive officer, Major General Felix Arden, who was carrying a map that flowed behind him and a cardboard map tube. I heard yet more jeeps and maybe a few trucks. Arden tacked the map to a wall while Girard joined Clay and Lorenzo.

The door pushed open again, and Major General John Hammond, commander of the 35th Infantry Division, entered the room, followed by a short parade; Hammond’s deputy, Major General Mark Keyes; Hammond’s chief of staff, Colonel Henry Culligan; and Colonel Walter Pelovik, his G4. They crowded around the table. Arden pulled a larger scale map from the tube and laid it over the table, dishes and all.

Thomas and I were squeezed out of the circle, so we left our chairs and retreated to the fireplace. Mrs. Blaine held her own, though, and nodded wisely at several comments by the officers. The boy’s face reflected his amazement and gratitude. His age would not keep him out of the war after all.

Next into the room was the 35th Division’s signal officer, Colonel William Brice, and two men from his signal company. One carried a portable telephone pack, and another a wire roll. In the past ten minutes, they had strung a wire, laying it loosely along the roadside and guarding it with Signal Corps troops the entire mile to the nearest telephone poles. Ground communication was much more secure than wireless transmissions.

I’d seen all this before. General Clay was a low pressure zone, creating weather systems of men and machinery wherever he went. His subordinates collected around him, posting him on developments and seeking his instructions. AEF’s advanced command post was wherever its commander happened to be.

Lorenzo repeated his news, and the group was silent for a moment. Lieutenant General Girard’s eyes blinked rapidly. He was a reed of a man, so thin he appeared ill. The skin on his face was stretched tightly over flaring, spatulate cheekbones, and with his severe mouth and notched jaw, his head reminded me of a skull. Despite his appearance, Girard was known for his fondness for Spanish sherry and sophomoric pranks, an odd combination.

Hammond was roughly handsome, with brown hair streaked with gray, and a thick build. He was one of those go-getters Clay put into the battle slots. His restless eyes, forward stance, and rapid gestures broadcast an eagerness to enter the fray, much like a Staffordshire terrier at the end of a taut leash. I once overheard him tell General Clay that he’d leave England a hero or in a box. I had expected Clay to instruct Hammond that he would best serve his men alive and that the AEF could not afford to lose him. Instead, Clay said, “Good for you.”

The 35th Infantry was comprised of the 69th and 70th Infantry Brigades, each with two regiments. The division also contained the 60th Field Artillery Brigade and tank and tank destroyer regiments and battalions. But its core was the infantry, the dog soldiers, the vanguard of the army’s combat capability. Clay was an artilleryman, but he well knew that a battle was not won until the disputed terrain was occupied by foot soldiers.

They got down to work. An argument quickly ensued, and from the sound of it, General Hammond feared he would receive neither his medal nor his box. Clay was proposing that certain regiments of the 35th be held back from the beach. As it was, the 35th was spread along the channel coast from Rye Bay to Hythe, and included the stony cape of Dungeness, which thrusts into the channel like a swelled appendage. Behind Dungeness were the Walland and Romney marshes, windblown and inhospitable, but lower than the cape and protected from the channel by sea-thrown shingle ridges.

After a moment, Clay said, “Then we are agreed.” He glanced sharply at Hammond, who had agreed to nothing. Clay won all the arguments. “The 425th and 406th will not continue their reinforcement of the seawall, but will remain here and here.” He punched the table map with a finger, to tank battalions, which, with the rest of the 35th Infantry, had disembarked at Gourock only a week before and were still moving into place.

Disposition of Allied troops would have been an easy matter had there been sufficient numbers of them. Just build an impregnable wall of men and equipment. Trouble was, despite the flow of American men and material into Great Britain, scarcities were still ominous. Units that looked strong on paper were in fact undermanned, underequipped, and green.

In spite of the meeting at the war cabinet room hours before, where the unconquerable seawall was reapproved, General Clay continued to hold many of his units away from the channel beaches. He was aware of the gamble. But no one knew better, because the brutal dynamism of the German blitz attack, known in the German manuals as Flächen und Lückentaktic (tactics of space and gap) had never been defeated.

Clay stood from his chair and motioned General Keyes to follow him from the table. Clay whispered a few words to the 35th’s deputy commander and returned to the group with a small smile. Keyes lifted the portable telephone and spoke into it for a moment, then returned to the discussion. David Lorenzo made small marks on the hanging map as the maneuvers were decided.

“General Clay,” one of the signalmen said, “Highbrow has been patched through.”

Clay walked to the phone. Highbrow was General Alexander, Clay’s superior. I supposed the code name came from Alexander’s rising eyebrows.

“Yes, sir,” Clay said into the phone.

The commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke for a moment. Clay responded, “You know my position on that.”

Another pause, then Clay said, “All right. In light of that, I agree. But only one, correct?… Good.”

He passed the telephone back to the signalman. “Because of the Scapa Flow raid and the bombings of the East Anglia towns,” he announced, “ACCSS had decided to release the British XI Corps to the east to reinforce the Suffolk and Norfolk North Sea coast.”

“Are we dancing to the German tune, sir?” Hammond asked.

“Christ on a crutch, John, if I knew that, they’d crown me king, and I wouldn’t have to put up with this crap.” Clay calmed himself with the comfortable motions of lighting a Pall Mall. “We must act on our best information, which is that the German is softening up the east coast with a purpose in mind.”

“And we’ve still got the Canadians in reserve near London,” General Arden pointed out.

“So I agreed to the release, not that my vote makes any difference anyway.” He inhaled gratefully on the cigarette. “Is that all? Good. Everyone is to be there tonight, all divisional commanders. I want them to hear me.”

They rose from the table and began to file out of the cottage. Clay might have nodded to Mrs. Blaine, but I wasn’t sure. He stepped outside. Precious little thanks, I thought, for eating them out of house and home. Trying to compensate, I thanked Mrs. Blaine profusely and bade her good-bye.

The peaceful country lane had been turned into a staging area. A number of jeeps, two AA trailers towed behind scout cars, several three-quarter-ton Dodge trucks, and a signal corps mobile post crowded the road. A massive 2.5-ton 6 x 6 rolled around the parked equipment, leaving a deep rut in the pasture next to the road. The truck stopped in front of the cottage.

While General Clay had a few more words with Girard and Hammond, several soldiers began unloading provisions from the 6 x 6. With his thumb, Clay directed them to Mrs. Blaine’s cottage and continued with his conversation. This enormous vehicle belonged to the 110th Quartermaster Regiment, which fed and clothed the 35th Division. The driver leaped down from the cab to grab a wood case and follow the others into Mrs. Blaine’s home. They repeated the trip a number of times.

I heard General Hammond ask, “So you don’t think its wise to tell the chiefs about the Rangers?”

“Hell, no. They’d just worry it to death.”

“I asked for that command, and didn’t get it,” Hammond said.

Girard said lightly, “Take the dagger out of your teeth, Mark.”

“They’re tough enough without you,” Clay added.

Hammond responded with a rare smile. “I’m off then. See you in a few hours.” He and Girard climbed into jeeps and sped away. Several vehicles followed their commanders, churning up dust trails.

The last of the quartermaster’s troops left the cottage. Clay waved his appreciation, then knocked on Mrs. Blaine’s door. He pushed it open.

Astonished, she was standing next to a mountain of supplies that almost covered her sitting room floor. There were boxes and bags and cans, all of them containing food: tins of ham and turkey, crates of oranges and apples and potatoes, cans of peaches and pears, boxes of cookies and candy; flour, sugar, baking soda, syrup; fruitcakes, pound cakes, marble cakes, honey cakes; sausages, a crate of eggs, beef jerky, and cases of beer; hard rolls, hardtack, and headcheese. Thomas was already digging wildly into a sack of Hershey bars.

General Clay smiled. “Try to save a little for my next visit, Mrs. Blaine.”

So that’s what he had requested of General Keyes. Clay climbed into the jeep, and I got behind the wheel again. Behind us, the signal company was rerolling the telephone wire. Because Girard and the others had come to us, we no longer needed to visit II Corps’ headquarters. We pulled away from Mrs. Blaine’s cottage, heading back to our plane.

After a while, General Clay growled at me, “Enough of your idiot grinning already.”

Across eastern and southern England that afternoon, soldiers and civilians waited.

Arnie Fowler always had a crowd around him. He was the pitcher who had led Cincinnati to a hundred wins in 1940. He could have turned his flat feet into a 4-F like some other baseball players, but thought it undignified. He was as much a celebrity in the 23rd Infantry Regiment as he had been in Ohio.

He took on all challengers at dummy grenade throwing, five dollars a throw for a chance to best his distance. His arm was so strong he could launch it overhand like a baseball, rather than put it like a shot, the army technique. He’d collected over three hundred dollars in his week in England. He didn’t feel like he was taking advantage of his unit, because he didn’t charge for autographs or for standing arm in arm with some hick while a snapshot was taken. On that day, their lieutenant had banned the contest because of the invasion alert.

Fowler remembers spending the time trying to convince fellow soldiers that he had pulled a muscle in his arm, hoping they’d lay down more money on the grenade toss when the alert was lifted. He also remembers their not buying his story.

Geoffrey Hurst was a guerrilla, that is, if a short course at Osterly Park, home of the Earl of Jersey, taught by, among others, three Spaniards, made one a guerrilla. And if reading T. E. Lawrence’s passages about guerrilla warfare in Seven Pillars of Wisdom made one a guerrilla. Both of which Hurst doubted. Hurst was a British Army captain, head of an auxiliary unit, under the aegis of GHQ Home Forces. In theory, the auxiliary units would emerge from hiding after the invasion to inflict as much damage as possible on the Germans before returning underground or, more probably, being killed. He had twenty men under him chosen from the Worthing Home Guard. Hurst was a veteran of Africa. His troops were overeager and woefully ignorant of what might come.

The captain thought the guerrilla force was an unproven caprice of General Stedman, commander in chief, Home Forces. Guerrillas have little effect on an advancing army, so Hurst viewed his possible role as secondary, even cowardly. He knew the British Isles had a long tradition of guerrilla warfare. English guerrilla bands had operated from fenlands and forests after the Norman victory at Hastings. The Welsh carried out a long guerrilla war after the Edwardian conquest. The Scots became masters of the art in the centuries after Robert Bruce’s triumph over the forces of Edward II at Bannockburn in 1314. And the British had been reminded anew of the potency of guerrilla tactics by the Boers. Still, Captain Hurst thought there was something distasteful about it all.

He was doing his best. Members of his cell had been selected for their resourcefulness, their abilities in fieldcraft, and their knowledge of the terrain near Worthing. Initially they had trained on weekends, but now, with increasing invasion alerts, they gathered each day near Highdown Hill, two miles inland from the channel.

At first, his unit’s weapons were limited to Great War bolt-action rifles, coshes made of lengths of ribbed garden hose with a few inches of lead piping in the ends, iron pikes that appeared to date from medieval times, and bizarre homemade booby traps, an insulting mishmash of arms. One of Hurst’s so-called guerrillas, sixty-five-year-old Roger Leeds, was president of the Worthing Archery Club and insisted on appearing at each training session with a homemade longbow, and not even Hurst’s laughing in the archer’s face kept the bow at home. “We were so short-handed, I even had a woman in my unit. Adrienne proved herself, though, bless her memory.”

At least Hurst had not had to maintain a straight face, as had the auxiliary unit captain at Nottinghamshire, when the proud workers of the London Midland and Scottish Railway presented the unit with an enormous catapult capable of hurling a four-gallon Molotov cocktail a hundred yards. The catapult had been dubbed “Larwood,” after the Nottinghamshire fast bowler. All was not hopeless, though, because lately Hurst’s auxiliary unit had been issued high explosives. Perhaps the auxiliary units were finally being taken seriously.

That afternoon Captain Hurst’s unit was training with a Flame Fougasse, saving their explosives. The Fougasse was a forty-gallon barrel containing tar, lime, and petrol. A small charge propelled filings into the drum, igniting the mix, which shot out of the barrel in a molten, sticky liquid. Hurst’s unit had installed four of these weapons, which his men had happily called a battery, at a bottleneck on a road. The barrels were dug into the roadside banks and camouflaged with branches.

Hurst stepped from behind a tree, gave a short blast on a whistle, and ran to the barrels. His Home Guard troops emerged from the woods to join him, propelled by pathetic eagerness to inflict mischief on the enemy. That’s all those weapons would do against a Panzer. Warm things up a little. Create a nuisance.

His men pretended to yank cords that would ignite the weapons. One actually shouted out, “Whoom!” then waved his hands imitating the flaming mass that would erupt from the drums. A child at play. Hurst rubbed his chin sorrowfully. No, these fellows had never seen a panzer. He waved them back into the woods to do it again.

There was no eagerness or enthusiasm in the bunker above Minsmere Beach. Private Kevin Kenway of the 140th Infantry Brigade, 47th (London) Division, thought his eyeballs might fall out of his head if he had to stare one more minute through the binoculars. His view was of the North Sea off the Suffolk coast, a “particularly large expanse of nothing,” he told me after the war. The beach was firm, with only a slight grade to it, perfect for amphibious operations. Maybe this would be like last month, where the stand down came after four days.

Kenway’s post was forty feet above the waterline on a hill that rose abruptly from the sand. His elbows rested on a wall of sandbags as he kept the binoculars in place. Vickers machine guns were on both sides of him. The beach was criss-crossed with concrete and wood obstacles. Barbed wire followed the high-tide mark. Below him, engineers worked furiously to add to the beach defenses.

He lowered the binoculars to rub his eyes. A mistake.

“Hold there.” The lieutenant walked purposely along the sandbags toward Kenway. “Private, have I not set out your duty with some precision?”

“Yes, sir,” Kenway replied.

“Have I not instructed you on the use of those binoculars?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What makes you think this is a summer holiday?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Then you keep those binoculars at your eyes, sweeping the horizon until I relieve you. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant walked away.

“Cheeky bastard,” the machine gunner to Kenway’s left said quietly. “I hope he never finds himself in my field of fire. I’d be tempted.”

Kenway nodded his thanks for the support, then brought up the binoculars. Nothing but North Sea.

Private Douglas Stubbs had also stared at the water much of the afternoon. His view was of the English Channel from a fortified dugout just above the high tide line at Pett Level. Near Hastings, cliffs bar easy access to the interior, but at Pett Level, seven miles up the channel from Hastings, the cliffs are inland, inside the shingle and marsh. Just like Private Kenway’s area 110 miles to the northeast, Stubbs’s beach also seemed designed to invite the invasion. Pett Level rose gently from the channel waters. Here, too, the beach was jammed with menacing boat traps and dannert wire. Stubbs squinted at the blue horizon.

“Clear your barrel, Stubbs,” his sergeant ordered.

“Ready?” Stubbs asked Private Rupert Mitchum, his belt feeder.

“Go,” Mitchum answered.

Stubbs was the squadron machine gunner. His weapon was a .30-06 Browning M 1919. The cylindrical barrel jacket with the circular cooling holes, the flash hider, and the long butt with the pistol grip and carrying handle gave the weapon a more deadly appearance than the Browning M 1917 with its water cooling mechanism, the parent design. But Stubbs’ weapon was awkward. Americans did not have a light machine gun of much merit and would not get one at any time during the war.

Stubbs respected the machine, nevertheless. He was frightened day and night, but during those seconds when the sergeant ordered him to clear his barrel he felt transcendent. The power of the Browning flowed two ways, out the barrel as bullets and out the grip and into his body as a manic energy.

He looked left and right, along the lines of soldiers of the Third Platoon, Able Company, 2nd Battalion, 9th Infantry Regiment. “Firing now.”

He raised the barrel and loosed a two-second burst. The belt of shells was sucked through Mitchum’s hands into the gun and the nozzle flash was visible even in the afternoon sun. The gun bucked in his hands. He released the trigger.

Two or three times a day the sergeant called for firing along the line. He used it as an antidote to fear. It worked every time for Stubbs. He let go of the grip, still shaking from the Browning’s power. He grinned. He was invincible.

Perhaps Corporal Jamie Shaw should have had better reason to feel invincible. He was, after all, the driver of one of the new M4 Sherman tanks. Fifteen inches lower than its predecessor, thirty-three tons, with a power-operated traverse and a maximum armor thickness of three inches. Road speed of twenty-four miles per hour. Three machine guns and a cannon. His tank, parked under trees on the outskirts of Cuckfield, near the road between Brighton and London, was an iron womb, offering him hope for the days to come. His crew had christened the tank Cock of the Walk, which was painted on both sides of the hull.

Shaw was with the 69th Armored Regiment. He would have joined the infantry, but his father had insisted on armor. James Shaw, Sr., had served with the 1st Light Tank Brigade in the Great War and thought it an upright calling for his son. Passing time plays those tricks on old people.

And, truth to tell, the close, dank belly of a Sherman was a fine place to be, until it started moving. And Shaw started puking. Jamie Shaw suffered motion sickness every time he engaged the Sherman’s gears. He kept a waxed bag between the dual clutch pedals, and within ten minutes of any outing, he would be jettisoning his lunch. The other four crewmen had not caught on, because he could vomit and drive at the same time (quite an accomplishment in a Sherman, he assured me after the war) and because the Chrysler engine’s scream, the tread’s metallic clanking, and the vehement cursing that goes on in all tanks every moment they are in motion drowned out his retching. At the end of each training exercise or convoy, he stuffed the vomit bag into his uniform pants and snuck it outside.

On that afternoon, prepared for the invasion, Shaw had carefully placed three bags near the clutch pedals. Three bags will outlast the goddamn Nazis, no matter how tough they are, he figured.

Second Lieutenant Del Mason had stood in the mess line for an hour, a long, dusty, winding procession inching toward the pots, which were so hot they steamed even in the afternoon sun. Mason’s company always had a little extra space in line because other soldiers hesitated to get too close. Mason was with Company C, 66th Chemical Mortar Battalion, attached to the 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Motorized Division.

All Allied and German divisions had chemical companies. Even though use of chemical and biological weapons was forbidden by a 1925 Geneva agreement, production of such weapons was allowed.

The mess was in a field east of Royal Tunbridge Wells, midway between Hastings and London. The pasture was crowded with soldiers, but they always stood apart from troops of the chemical companies, lest their mysterious weapons were contagious. Chemical Warfare Service officers were easy to spot. The design on their collar badges consisted of crossed laboratory retorts.

Not that Mason disliked the chemical service. It had an honorable history. Germ warfare dated back to the fourteenth century, when the Tartars catapulted rotting corpses of plague victims into the besieged Crimean city of Kappa to spread the disease. There was a professionalism to the service Mason appreciated, and always the sense that a mistake might be his last, which lent an air of importance even to training. He appreciated the amount of equipment he had to master: eyeshields and gas masks, M1A1 collective protectors (which drew contaminated air from outside a gas-proofed shelter to purify it for circulation within), dust respirators, protective covers and ointments, water-testing kits, and medical supplies. And, of course, the gas itself.

The 66th was provided with two chemical weapons. Phosgene shells were proven by the Germans at Flanders in December 1915. When exposed to the air, phosgene becomes an extremely toxic cloud that smells of green corn or newly mown hay. The other chemical was tabun, a colorless, odorless nerve gas that frightened even Mason. Mason was an expert in the delivery system, the 4.2-inch rifled mortar which could also be used for high explosive shells. All divisions had chemical battalions, and like them all, the 66th was also versed in smokescreens and flamethrowers. Quite an arsenal, Mason thought approvingly.

When he reached the first mess table, Mason playfully slapped the shoulder of the officer in line next to him, his friend Lew Tunney, then said to the ladler, “Private, will you get me a tin of flour?”

“All I’ve got are beans, sir.” He threw a ladleful into Mason’s kit.

Mason smiled winningly. “What I’m asking is that you take a few steps into the tent and find me a small amount of flour. It won’t break the quartermaster.”

The private shrugged and handed the ladle to another private on kitchen patrol, then disappeared into the mess tent. He had returned by the time Mason and Tunney were taking their bread from the pile. He handed the lieutenant a pound of white flour.

“Come on, Lew, let’s put them on their ears.”

Mason and Tunney grinned broadly as they walked across the field, dodging groups of soldiers eating their late meal. Mason joined one of his CWS squadrons. Most had finished the food and were smoking and talking. Two played mumblety-peg with a knife. Mason put his kit on the ground. He and Tunney passed around handfuls of flour, and gave instructions.

The squad was alert, waiting for the signal. “Now,” he called.

Mason and Tunney and the twelve others threw the flour into the air with quick motions, then loudly began coughing and gagging. Mason stood unsteadily, clutched his throat, then dropped to one knee, his tongue extruding between his teeth. Tunney screamed, tore at his hair, then fell to the ground. Others groaned and shrieked, rolled their eyes, sank to their hands and knees, then collapsed. Above them, the flour was a cloud of fine, malevolent-looking powder slowly drifting away. Their uniforms were dusted with it.

“I might as well have yelled, ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater,” Mason told me after the war. “I’ve never seen so many people move so fast in my life. Those guys eating next to our platoon knew we were CWS, and they jumped and ran like they had turpentine on their butts. Elbows and assholes flew. They left behind rifles and packs, spilling their mess kits, shouting warnings.”

That day, the lieutenant lasted only thirty seconds before he broke into maniacal laughter, joined instantly by the rest of the CWS platoon. They rolled with it, slapping each other, this time choking in earnest, with laughter.

“No one else got the joke, though,” he recalled. “It took the other troops half a minute to understand what we’d done, and then they started calling us assholes and shitheads and jerkoffs and everything else they could think of. I mean, they were pissed. In fact, my unit, Company C, was known as Shithead Company for the rest of the war. Ask anybody from the 4th Motorized—they’d know who the Shithead Company was.”

Later I did, and they did.

Mason ended his story on a sober note. “Lew Tunney and I must have laughed for another hour solid. But then, we didn’t know what was coming, not really.”

Neither did others waiting for the invasion. RAF Lieutenant Richard Ormsby tried to nap for a while that afternoon under his Spitfire at Digby, as he did many afternoons. His squadron was being held in reserve for the invasion. All sixteen planes were hidden under camouflage nets a hundred yards from the runway. Just the week before he had completed his course at the Operational Training Unit, and been assigned to 46 Squadron. Because of the ammunition shortage, he had never fired live rounds. It worried him.

Allen Lewes had deserted his Northumberland coal mine once before to enlist. He had been tracked down and forcibly returned to the mine. That afternoon he deserted again, heading south. He’d be damned if he’d have to explain to his children why he hadn’t fought the Germans, how the Essential Work Order had kept him digging coal. Some army unit, desperate for soldiers, would take him, he was sure.

Shirley Parker was a Wren, a plotter at Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, twelve miles northwest of the City. Her station was the plotting table in the filter room. The information sent to the filter room was gathered from CHL stations and Observer Corps posts via the Observer Corps Center at Horsham. Parker wore a headset, and she moved markers representing aircraft, red for enemy, black for friendly, with numerals to show estimated height, arrows to indicate direction, and a reference number displaying the plane’s particular formation. Above her on a balcony, officers watched the table. They determined which planes were friendly, hostile, or doubtful. Their conclusions, the filtered information, was relayed to the Fighter Command operations room, and to group operations rooms and sector operations rooms of affected RAF sectors. More clearly than anything else that day, Shirley Parker remembered that the Luftwaffe was allowing her a respite. Unbelievably, she had time to remove her headset and sit for a while. Better than anything else that day, she recalled how pampered she felt to have time to rub her aching feet.

U.S. Army Captain Jonathan Goodrich’s troops manned two 9.2-inch guns dubbed Winnie and Pooh. They were stationed east of Hastings, in a bunker of two-foot thick reinforced concrete atop fifty-foot cliffs that dropped straight down to the beach. Again and again he ordered the drills, timing his men as they loaded the gun. It was back-breaking training for these troops of the 15th Field Artillery Battalion, 2nd Division, and his gun crew had begun to gripe. He kept them at it, stopwatch in hand.

Doctor Sylvia Hathan was an anesthesiologist at the tiny hospital in Kirkwall, on Mainland Island in the Orkneys. When the raid on Scapa Flow began, she had been monitoring a Royal Navy sailor whose right tibia had been shattered in a fall from a gangway, a noncombat injury that had occurred that morning. The fracture had required a plate, and by the time the surgery was completed, the dive-bombers were gone. She rose from her stool to walk into the hallway. She had been concentrating and had not heard the delivery of the wounded. She was startled to see the hall jammed with broken and bleeding sailors and airmen, and litter bearers bringing in even more. “I remember that moment vividly,” she told me. “It seemed like such a terrible beginning.”

At Little Common, near Bexhill on the channel, Father Rafael Rodriguez took part in an enormous holy communion in a sheep pasture. He was not surprised at the turnout of American soldiers, because the same lines had occurred last month during the alert, and probably would again next month, if this one turned out to be another false alarm. Communion wafers were in short supply. Father Rodriguez had to snap them into quarters. Nobody complained.

Many recalled that day as long and lingering, as if the daylight were afraid to fade. The heat held until late in the afternoon, and despite a few high clouds, the air over much of England was magnificently clear, making distant landscapes seem closer. The sunshine, the droning insects, the idle breeze, it was a day to lull the senses, a day for long walks and casual reflections.

But not for the million Allied servicemen and women tensely waiting for the enemy horde.

“These guys are the hardest on the planet,” General Clay told me as we walked from the Cub across the grass runway near Margate, at the tip of the Thames estuary, an area called the Isle of Thanet. “Don’t accidentally piss off one of them, or not even I’ll be able to save you.”

He strode ahead of me and called out, “Colonel Yates, good to see you again.”

Don Yates saluted smartly and extended his hand to the general. His men had been leaning against their packs and parachutes, hovering in small groups. They wore night field uniforms, black pants and jerseys, and many had already applied burned cork to their faces. They quickly closed around us. The Rangers seemed loathe to part with their weapons, and they brought them as they gathered. They were draped in British sten guns, ammunition belts, knives strapped to legs, BARs and heavier machine guns, grenades, 60mm mortars, the works. I even saw a sawed-off shotgun across one Ranger’s stomach.

These were the soldiers of the 1st Ranger (Infantry) Battalion, formed recently at Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland. They were all triple volunteers: first for the army, then for parachute training, finally for the Rangers. They did nothing but train. Cliff-climbing, demolitions, small arms, unarmed combat, ambush techniques, signal, parachuting, camouflage, all grueling. The dropout rate was high. Those who remained were reduced to human sledgehammers.

I once saw Joe Louis rise from a sofa and walk across a hotel lobby in San Diego. I’ll never forget the economy and vitality and utter confidence of even those simple movements. The Rangers were the same. There was a lupine air to them, a trace of mocking in their smiles, and a boisterous strength derived from their competence. One glance at these soldiers, and you knew they were unbreakable.

General Clay had considered using OSS operatives for the mission. The OSS was trained in behind-the-line insurgency, while the Rangers were typically to be in front of the enemy. But Clay insisted on Rangers when he found he could not assure himself full operational control over the OSS. “Too murky an outfit for my tastes,” he had told me.

Parked near the runway were three transport airplanes, usually called C-47s. The model began service in 1935 as Douglas Sleeper Transport and was known to the British as the Dakota and to the Americans as the Skytrain. Flown commercially, it was called the DC-3, a remarkably durable, well-designed transport. When altered to carry paratroopers, as these three were, the planes were christened C-53 Skytroopers. They were powered by 1200hp Pratt and Whitney Twin Wasp radials. The planes could take an enormous amount of punishment, and new pilots were advised, “Fly the largest piece back.”

“We weren’t expecting you,” Colonel Yates said. “We’d have prepared a salute or something.”

“Horse manure,” Clay replied loudly. “You Rangers don’t have time for that. Leave the parade ground crapola to others.”

There was nodding all around from the 120 soldiers in the group.

General Clay rose to his full height and locked his hands behind his back. “Colonel Yates has fully briefed you men. I don’t have to tell you that you’re in for a hell of a night. Everything you’ve learned and all your guts are going to be called into play in the next few hours.”

The Rangers were rapt. General Clay’s presence meant their assignment, code named Green Thumb, was urgent and critical, not just a fancy of an anonymous, dilettante major general somewhere up the chart.

Clay continued, “You men have gone through hellish training. You’re going to have the chance shortly to use all of it.”

The general took a few steps along the line of Rangers, looking at them right in the eyes, one after another. He roughly grabbed one Ranger’s shoulder, then another, as if testing their mettle. “You soldiers are the best we’ve got, the best in history. I wouldn’t send you in if I didn’t know you will get what I want and come back out. You won’t let me down.”

Clay cleared his throat. “I want you to know how proud I am of you, and that my thoughts and prayers will be with you.”

That was enough. He turned to go, but was stopped by a question yelled from the back of the group.

“Sir, we’re scheduled to jump at four hundred feet. Can we use our parachutes?”

The Rangers roared.

Clay didn’t miss a beat. He faced them again and with a poker face said, “Soldier, with the shortages back in the States, you’d consider wasting all that silk? And here I thought you guys had iron balls.”

They laughed and whistled and applauded. I learned later that the question came from Ranger Sergeant Aaron Hirschorn, whom I interviewed after the war.

The general and I walked back to the Cub. I asked in a flattering way, “Sir, do you wish you were going with them?”

“Not on your goddamn life.”

8

General Clay met with his commanders as a group every other day. For security reasons, the location was changed each time. That evening’s assembly was held at a manor house called Bilswell, near Storrington, fifty miles south of London in Sussex. The house was of the Lutyens style, with diamond-paned windows and numerous tall brick chimneys. Around the house were orchards and farmland.

Corps and division commanders and AEFHQ staff crowded the sitting room. Most had arrived early for informal meetings. General Clay worked the room, speaking with each of his commanders, prodding and encouraging. Voices were surprisingly loud, and I heard a few laughs. Several congratulated him on single-handedly bringing down the Messerschmitt. At the meeting four days before, and again two days before, when the tides had been propitious for a southern invasion, the tension had been more apparent, and the meeting more subdued.

General Clay finally took his place near the east wall, and the room fell silent. I stood to his right, notebook in hand. On his other side was an AEFHQ secretary who would take down verbatim everything said. In a chair near the stairway was British Army Brigadier Arnold Graves, the AACCS liaison officer.

Clay began without prelude, “You’ve received briefings regarding events today, which the prime minister called the Three Blows. In a telephone conversation with him less than an hour ago, he told me that historians will regard this afternoon’s disasters as the ebb tide in the Allies’ war. He said that our fortunes have turned, and the worst is now behind us. Mr. Churchill may be an optimist, but I agree that it is unlikely we’ll hear worse news than today’s.”

There were several nods in the room. In an overstuffed chair on Clay’s left near the secretary was Lieutenant General Alex Hargrave, commander of I Corps. He tamped his pipe with a finger. Hargrave was small-boned, with fine, almost delicate features. He had been one of Clay’s classmates at West Point. His first words to me after I had been introduced as Clay’s aide were, “The stories I could tell about Wilson.”

In the Great War, Hargrave had been an infantry captain and was taken prisoner during the second battle of the Marne. Some said those few months’ exposure to the German military as a POW made him a bit of a Prussian. He was supremely confident in his own abilities, while often affecting a put-upon attitude with his subordinates. He was fastidious in his personal appearance, and his words were clipped. “Damn near a German accent,” Clay once told me. “I’m surprised he doesn’t wear a dueling scar.”

Near Hargrave were his division commanders. The 2nd Infantry head, Burt Jones, sat stiffly, as if uncomfortable in a chair, where his shoe platforms could not help.

The 4th Motorized’s Major General Horace Singleman was next to Jones. Singleman had a structural engineering degree from Texas A&M and once told me he “was a born bridge builder.” He enjoyed complaining that his military career had prevented him from constructing a bridge or anything else. Singleman was an exception to General Clay’s rule that a commander should not carry more weight than his troops. Singleman’s belly comfortably sagged over his belt.

The final I Corps divisional commander in the room was Major General Roger Franks of the 1st Armored. Almost seventy years old, Franks had been a brigadier during the first war. Clay had twisted arms at the War Department to bring Franks back to active duty, saying the AEF needed at least one commander with war experience as a general officer. Franks walked and gestured with a younger man’s energy, he grinned quickly, and he wore an expensive wig, all designed to belie his age.

General Clay said, “I conferred a short while ago with David Lorenzo regarding the latest on when and where.” For several moments he relayed what was known about the Wehrmacht’s 8th and 28th Divisions, believed to be moving north into Belgium, then added, “A report came in tonight that a unit of the XII Waffen SS, which had been in Westphalia on the Rhine, is marching, or has marched, northwest toward the Hague or Amsterdam.” Clay motioned toward Lorenzo.

The G2 filled in, “The XII Waffen SS is made up of the Walküre panzer and the Westland panzer grenadier divisions. We have fairly reliable ground reports only on the Walküre’s march, but we assume OKW is not detaching divisions, and that the entire XII Corps is moving toward the North Sea coast.”

General Clay then told them of the midget submarine and the German agent who was killed and the other who escaped on the east coast. He went on, “A lot of you hope deep down in your bones that the Germans will hit our channel beaches, but it is looking less likely, as you can see with these new German troops movements. More likely, several of our divisions will be called on to join the Canadian and British corps in reserve and patch up failing lines in East Anglia or further north.”

The general paced. “Irrespective of where the German lands, he will try to isolate London immediately. So you, Hal and Roger, are to be prepared to move north quickly when you’re released to Arthur Stedman’s Home Forces. Stedman is good. You can rely on him.”

Clay spoke a while longer on preparations to move north, noting problems that would be caused by refugees clogging the roads and the destroyed bridges and the Luftwaffe overhead. I made notes as he issued orders. Hal was Brigadier Hal Larsen, commander of the 2nd Armored, who had replaced Major General Richard Duvall, killed one week before when Duvall’s jeep had tried a U-turn in a mined pasture. Larsen had been Duvall’s deputy. He was stocky, with a high forehead and a suggestion of blond hair. He wore tortoise shell glasses.

Sitting near Larsen were the other II Corps division commanders, John Hammond of the 35th, whom we had met with at Evelyn Blaine’s home, and Major General Roderick Carsen, commander of the 5th Infantry. Their superior, II Corps commander Gene Girard, was perched on a folding chair near the fireplace.

Cigarette and pipe smoke hung heavily in the air. A fan had been placed near a door that opened to a garden and rose trellis. I could hear chatter from AA personnel, who had been posted on the manor house’s drive and on nearby Merrywood Lane.

“What’s the chance they’ll come tonight?” Hammond asked Clay.

“Churchill and General Barclay put it at fifty-fifty.”

“That’s what they said last month,” General Carsen said. He was the tallest man in the room, over six feet four, and as thin as a plank. He and Hammond wore .45s on their hips. For a hundred years, general officers had eschewed personal weapons. The style was reversing.

Clay said, “Some Defense Committee and Combined Intelligence people think the landing will be next month. June’s weather is more reliable than May’s. And they argue that the most critical German shortage is of dedicated landing craft. CIC maintains the Kriegsmarine is producing only about ten of them a week, and that if the Germans come tonight or tomorrow they’ll still have to rely on canal barges for amphibious operations. Barges aren’t seaworthy and offer little protection from shore fire. Yes, another month would give them a better landing capacity. But I still think it’ll be within forty-eight hours.”

Clay rubbed his jaw. “And yes, the Germans may be selling me a bill of goods, just like last month, when they made us think they were coming. It’s the same tactic Alexander used at the Battle of Hydaspes.”

Gene Girard moaned loudly, which was followed by soft laughter from others in the room.

“As you all undoubtedly recall, Porus, with his chariots, cavalry, elephants, and infantry, had a strong defensive position behind the River Jhelum. But Alexander crossed the fast-flowing river nightly, simulating amphibious attacks by noisy demonstrations all along the river bank. Eventually Porus tired of policing these diversions. And you all know what happened next.”

No one in the room said anything. Several seconds elapsed. I saw my duty and I did it. “I don’t recall what happened next, sir.”

Mark Hammond mouthed a word at me. I think it was “toady.”

“Alexander poured five thousand cavalry and six thousand infantry over the river onto an undefended landing place eighteen miles upstream from Porus’ main position. Undefended because Porus simply got tired of challenging Alexander’s feints. That’s not going to happen this time.”

That probably put me back up to captain or so.

“They’re coming,” Mark Hammond said. “The Scapa Flow disaster tells us that more clearly than if they’d written us a letter. It was no noisy diversion.”

Clay nodded. “The Home Fleet’s mission was to cut off reinforcements and supplies for the German wave, giving time for Allied ground forces to confront the first Germans ashore. Because the Fleet was largely destroyed this afternoon, we’ll no longer be able to burn the German sea bridge. So I think the Germans’ surprise attack on the Orkneys, with all the risks they took, means they are coming tonight or tomorrow night. Never have things looked better for them.”

Clay stopped his pacing and drew himself up in front of his commanders. “Now I want you to remember a couple of things. Despite all our education and training, we won’t know what in hell hit us when the German comes. We’ll be faced with developments we aren’t prepared for, maybe haven’t even thought about. So above all, avoid rigidity. Our army has a tendency for stasis in doctrine and execution, a legacy of the German Baron von Steuben, who shaped our American revolutionary army. Throw out this German’s thinking and we’ll throw out the Germans. The secret of the blitzkrieg is not German material superiority, but their enemy’s tactical inferiority. With the Wehrmacht, shock predominates over fire. Shock can only be met with flexibility. Improvise, think on your feet, don’t get locked up by doctrine. This will be your tactical advantage.”

Clay inhaled slowly, then said, “And take risks. You must have the spirit to gamble. There is an inexorable law in war that he who will not risk cannot win.”

He lifted his spectacles from a pocket, examined them, and dropped them back. “By selecting your battalion and regimental leaders, you’ve already done much of your job. We should learn from the German army’s troubles at the Somme in 1916, where their major problem was telephonitis, too much use of telephones to interfere on the battle line. Trust your judgment in your choices, and let your commanders do their work.”

Clay took two steps, then squared himself again. “And go with your instincts. When the German war machine arrives, the time for study and reflection will have passed. Act, don’t delay. Doing nothing is standard for an army. Acting is the exception. Move into a breach. Exploit a weakness. Move now, not later. A good plan ferociously executed right now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.”

Hammond nodded fiercely.

“We are a newly assembled team,” the general said. “Most of you have not waged war with me before. You will find that I can excuse mistakes and I can live with quirks of command style.” Clay’s voice rose. “But I will not tolerate a hesitation to engage the enemy, to inflict mortal damage on him. I demand savagery. You are to be as fired up as the foot soldier reduced to using his bayonet.”

For a moment I thought I’d hear a chorus of “amens.” But the room was silent. Even so, the commanders’ faces reflected a renewed confidence.

The general concluded, “Your strength and stamina and aggressiveness will rub off on your men, and will make up for whatever they lack in experience and material. Remember, there are no poor soldiers, only poor commanders.” The general’s gaze swept the room like a scythe. “I don’t think there’s a poor commander in this room.”

Clay adjourned the meeting with, “That’s all, gentlemen. God willing, we’ll all meet again in two days.”

The men rose quickly. Some lingered for a few more words with General Clay, but most were anxious to return to their units. The speech worked. Although the officers had been shaken by news of the Three Blows, they left the meeting reinvigorated.

But God was not willing, and this group would never meet again.

Years may pass before the full story of Green Thumb can be told, before all the documents and the eye-witness accounts are collected and assayed, and before the darkness and confusion can be pared away from that night. Some things have been buried, and may remain there forever.

The U.S. Army General Staff School taught that surprise was the deadliest of all weapons. Clausewitz wrote that surprise was the most important element of victory, and noted that Napoleon, Gustavus Adolphus, Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander owed the brightest rays of their fame to swift surprise. General Clay wanted to follow their shining lights.

For months the Allies had cowered behind the North Sea and English Channel, waiting at the Germans’ leisure, reacting rather than acting, putting out fires rather than starting them. General Clay’s turn had come. His operation, Green Thumb, was to be a stab at the Wehrmacht heart.

Ranger Sergeant Aaron Hirschorn’s bravura got him into the C-53 Skytrooper, but it did not help him during the crossing. “I swear,” he told me later, “I had to pee the entire trip.”

Big talkers and big laughers, the Rangers in Hirschorn’s plane were silent. The sergeant was loaded with weapons and equipment. Normally a parachute landing is the equivalent of a ten-foot fall. Carrying the extra weight, the drop would seem like twenty feet. Colonel Yates had confided to Clay that ten or twenty percent of the Rangers would suffer ankle or leg injuries from the fall.

“My mouth was dry the whole trip,” Hirschorn remembered. “I couldn’t have spit if I had wanted to.”

Green Thumb’s target was OKW’s forward command headquarters near Zottegem, in Flanders, Belgium, one hundred miles east-by-southeast of the Isle of Thanet airfield. Excited with his plans of the operation, General Clay had asked me, “Jack, do you know who said, ‘Always attempt the unexpected’?”

I thought carefully, then replied, “Charlie Chaplin?”

“Jack, goddamn it, it was Frederick the Great. Sometimes I think you are headed for the loony bin.”

The Rangers’ mission was to destroy the German invasion command post and to bring back plans detailing the time and place of the invasion. With success, the Rangers would force the Germans to postpone their operation, giving the Allies more time to prepare.

Lieutenant Ronald Betts remembers being thankful the engines filled the Skytrooper’s cabin with a loud roar. Otherwise his platoon would have heard his knees knocking together. Betts was the tallest man in his unit, and on training jumps the jumpmaster always put his hand on the lieutenant’s helmet to make sure he didn’t coldcock himself on the way through the hatch.

Private George Lukowski sat next to Betts on the two-by-eight plank. In long shadows cast by pale red overhead lights in the cabin, the soldiers, with their camouflage paint and gear, were hardly recognizable. He felt a quick jolt of fear. Maybe these men weren’t his mates. They were as alien as Martians. Then Private Howard Lance leaned onto one cheek, crowding the entire line of Rangers, and loosed one of his patented farts, louder than the Pratt and Whitneys. Lance was rewarded with raucous, tension-cracking laughter. Yeah, this was Lukowski’s crew.

To reduce the mission’s radar profile, the three Skytroopers were unescorted. They flew fifty feet above the water, one of the Green Thumb’s riskiest maneuvers. Moonlight strained through high clouds to illuminate the waves. To avoid spotters on land, the route was direct, with no diversionary zigzags south over Artois or north over the Schelde estuaries. Undetected, the Skytroopers breasted land at Ostend, forty-five miles from Zottegem. Fifteen minutes later, the light on the forward bulkhead came on. The jumpmaster barked orders to stand and attach static lines.

Just as the jumpmaster pushed open the hatch, an AA shell burst near the starboard wing, then another, higher but closer. The plane lurched. Rangers toppled against the cabin wall, but quickly regained their feet. A number of them made a point of grinning broadly. Most grabbed a hand rail above their heads. Lukowski was reminded of a crammed subway car in Manhattan, his hometown. There was no further antiaircraft fire.

The Skytroopers had been guided to Zottegem by a navigational beam system similar to the Luftwaffe’s dog leg. The beams were accurate to within miles, not yards, so the pilots depended on the Belgian resistance to set four bonfires, a rectangle marking the landing zone. The pilots had been accurate. Ahead was a rectangle. Because the Germans enforced blackout regulations, no other lights were visible.

“Check lines,” the jumpmaster called over the engine nose.

Lieutenant Betts yanked his static line. He also glanced for the final time over his shoulder at his parachute pack. His constant fear was that his pack would open as he fell, and, instead of the chute, out would come a couple of sandwiches, a canteen, tent staves, and a sleeping bag. No, this was his chute pack.

The line of paratroopers crowded together. Betts was first, Lukowski behind him. The jumpmaster wore a headset. He palmed Betts’ helmet, then yelled, “Go!”

The stick sailed out the hatch. Night jumps are instantly disorienting. Lukowski told me after the war that he couldn’t tell if he was cartwheeling head over heels or dropping in a perfect spread eagle. He felt his harness’s tug as the silk opened above him. The sky was filled with chutes.

Sergeant Aaron Hirschorn dropped from the second Skytrooper. He swung lazily under his chute, feeling motionlessness, unable to find the horizon. Then he saw the first plane’s Rangers below him. He was immeasurably reassured. He finally saw the bonfires. He swore he’d someday shake that pilot’s hand. The sergeant lifted his submachine gun into his hands, prepared to fire back at muzzle flashes on the ground.

Betts landed in a pasture thirty yards from Lukowski. The lieutenant dragged his chute to the row of trees at the edge of the field. There was no time to bury them. The platoon formed up around him. Lukowski’s knee had rapped his chin on landing, and he had bitten deeply into his tongue, filling his mouth with blood. Even so, he was better off than two of the platoon. Emil Johanson’s leg had snapped, and Dennis Smythe had severely twisted an ankle on the field’s furrows. They were helped to the trees. Johanson refused morphine. He and Smythe would join other Rangers assigned to the pasture’s perimeter. The Skytroopers would be returning in forty-five minutes.

Two Belgians ran up to the Rangers. They may have been a father and son, and they gestured wildly. “New Germans” was apparently all the father could say in English. He whispered it over and over again, fiercely, making a huge circle with his arms.

Colonel Yates appeared out of darkness. He questioned the resistance fighters in halting French. Words poured from both father and son. Yates’ mouth turned down. He stabbed at his map, demanding information. The father stared at the colonel as if Yates were daft. The Belgian exhaled loudly, shook his head, then pointed east. The Rangers hastily began toward the low rise to the east, toward OKW’s advance headquarters at Viscount Henri Le Marten’s chateau, and toward disaster.

More so than day operations, night attacks require a limited objective and particularly accurate daylight reconnaissance. Certainly the destruction of the chateau was a modest goal, but the last successful recon flight had been two days before.

During the intervening time, the 44th Panzer Regiment had moved into the Zottegem area. The Rangers were expecting a Wehrmacht guard company at the chateau. They were not anticipating three tank battalions, each with two companies of Type III battle tanks and a company of short-gunned Type IVs, and assorted self-propelled antitank guns and PZ II flame-throwing tanks. The Rangers had tripped over a wasps’ nest of 120 armored vehicles.

An investigation by a U.S. Army commission after the war determined that the 44th Panzer was in transit and had just happened to bivouac that evening near the chateau. They settled in the cattle pastures east and north of the viscount’s residence not by plan, but only because Zottegem was as far as they had been able to move that day.

“The Rangers’ luck just plain ran out,” Private Lukowski concluded later.

The drop zone was five hundred yards west of the chateau, across several pastures and a barley field that straddled a hill. Yates knew the chateau was surrounded by formal gardens and that a forested area was to the south. The Rangers split up. Two platoons broke into squadrons and fanned out toward the hill. A third platoon, forty-eight men, including Betts and Lukowski, marched southeast, skirting the hill to come at the building from the south.

The Rangers knew they would not be able to land and move toward the chateau undetected. Too much noise overhead, too many Wehrmacht sentries on the ground. Speed was to compensate for lack of surprise during the approach to the headquarters. The soldiers loped along, some carrying almost a hundred pounds of equipment.

Just before the lead platoon crested the hill, small arms fire sounded from the north. Clumps of dirt jumped near them. Five Rangers branched off to deal with it, running at an angle to the sound.

Viscount Le Marten’s home was an eighteenth-century stone structure at the end of a long courtyard. Two other sides of the courtyard were framed by unadorned annexes, built at right angles to the main wing. At the end of the northerly annex was a chapel, with stained glass in the small windows. At the head of the courtyard was a drawbridge lodge that had a lantern turret atop a rounded roof. The moat had been filled in at the turn of the century. Several outbuildings—an apple press house, stables, tool sheds—were arranged to the west of the main compound.

Colonel Yates and his soldiers gained the hilltop for their first view of the chateau, now only a hundred yards in front of them. Despite the blackout, yellow light shone through several windows. In the darkness, they could see the dim outlines of three trucks and several Kübelwagens, the Wehrmacht’s equivalent of the jeep. In the courtyard were a number of black sedans, almost invisible in the darkness. Two of the automobiles were racing across the lowered drawbridge. Their headlights off, they turned south on the Gent road. Sounds of a firefight came from the north, several rifle shots followed by the stammer of a submachine gun. Hirschorn tripped over a rock and pitched forward. He rose quickly and wiped dirt off his Bren gun.

Lieutenant Betts and Private Lukowski’s platoon entered the southern woods without incident. The ash and oak trees had been planted there a hundred years before by a prior viscount to give his bedroom windows a view. Betts kept an arm in front of him to ward off low branches. He high-stepped over exposed roots. Someone cursed behind him. After a moment they could see several lights of the chateau through the trees.

That is when the sound began, the unmistakable clanking and growling of a tank. Then another, and finally a chorus of them, hidden somewhere in the darkness ahead. Betts called it a “cold-to-the-bone” sound.

One of the tank’s drawbacks is that it cannot do anything silently. Its engine roars, its gearbox grinds, and its treads rattle. Branches crack underneath, hatches slam, the turret whines. The machine blows smoke and kicks up dust. The massed tanks of the 44th Panzer began doing all this at that moment.

Lukowski had been assigned to set up a machine gun post at the edge of the woods to cover the Rangers’ retreat. He did not trust the American Johnsons, so was carrying a .303-inch Bren light machine gun, with its drum rear sight and angled grip beneath the butt, fitted with a bipod.

Lukowski was stocky, almost six feet, two inches, and weighed close to 220. “I’m a big Pole, and the army figured I must be dumb as an ox. So they made me a machine gunner. They didn’t think I knew that the average life expectancy of a machine gunner in the Great War after he first pulled the trigger was fourteen seconds. I’m lucky I could read and write, or they’d have given me a flame-thrower. Those’re the real dummies.”

Lukowski lowered himself to the ground a hundred yards south of the chateau. The Ranger behind him dropped several magazines and followed the others toward the building. “That was Timmy Bridges,” Lukowski told me. “Last I ever saw of him.”

The private had not been told of the topiary. When the moon broke through the clouds, a camel, two horses, an elephant, and an enormous goose took shape between Lukowski and the building. Even during the German occupation, the sculptured bushes had been carefully tended. Lukowski had never heard of such things. For a moment he wondered if that loud bray, which at first sounded like armored vehicles, might be these animals. He resisted an urge to loose a few shots into the camel. More Rangers ran past Lukowski.

Sergeant Hirschorn led his squad toward the chateau from the west, over a series of hedges. The throaty, ominous rumble of armored vehicles filled the night. He heard commands shouted in German. Several Wehrmacht sentries rounded the building’s northwest corner and raised their rifles. They were brought down quickly without the Rangers breaking step. The soldiers had been told to keep moving, that to drop and dig in would be to die.

A four-wheeled scout car next appeared at the corner. It fired both its 2cm cannon and MG 22, tearing up the manicured lawn in front of the commandoes. A Ranger bazookaman launched his rocket-propelled projectile, the back-blast lighting the garden like a flashbulb. The scout car erupted with flame and fragments.

The Germans were all coming from that corner. Two more bazookamen kneeled to wait. A heavy machine gun, a Maschinengewehr 34, opened up from the chateau’s flat roof. Fire was returned, but half a dozen Rangers fell before it was silenced with another bazooka round that entered the third-floor window and erupted skyward.

Lights went out in several of the chateau’s rooms. Lieutenant Betts, who had reached the elephant, saw muzzle flashes from several windows. Another Ranger machine gunner opened up, holding the Bren against his hip, pouring bullets into one window, then the next. Ejected casings hit Betts’ arm and cheek. The window flashes stopped.

Betts waved his troops forward again. Twenty yards separated them from the chateau when the 44th Panzer arrived in force.

So many tanks rolled across the Gent road and into the garden that their procession resembled a freight train. They came in a column and quickly dispersed into a north-south line, six of them at first, more crowded than they would be on a battlefield. The southerly tank, a Pzkw III with regimental HQ markings on its turret, began to spin clockwise when a bazooka round shattered a tread. Their MG 34s blazed, plowing up the grass and everyone on it.

The bazookamen fell. In a crouch, Betts ran toward their weapon, which was lying on the grass near their bodies, but the lieutenant was met with the snout of another tank, poking around the chateau’s southwest corner. That tank, and the others behind it, meant only that Colonel Yates’ two platoons coming from the west had already been torn apart. Betts turned a full circle. More Rangers were down than remained standing, and they continued to fall, powerless against the unexpected onslaught.

Betts called a retreat, but was unsure anyone heard him over the snarl of tank machine gun fire. He motioned back to the woods. Several Rangers near him sprinted south. The lieutenant waited another few seconds, hearing the snap of bullets streaking over him. He could see no other Americans still on their feet. He turned to run.

A bullet shattered his wrist, then another shot through the meat of his forearm. Yet another creased his side. The ground around him seemed to be in a mixer, tossing and rolling as bullets dug into it. The tanks did not deign to fire their cannons. Nothing in the garden was worthy of a German armor-piercing shell. His wounded arm flapping behind him, Betts sprinted between the topiary animals toward the woods.

George Lukowski saw him coming, a mad hurdler frantically jumping over hedges. Two other Rangers made it back as far as the elephant, then a spray of bullets caught them, throwing them against a hedge. Lukowski waited until his lieutenant reached his post, then opened up with his machine gun.

“I might as well have been pissing into the wind,” he told me.

Betts slapped him on the helmet with his good hand and yelled, “Let’s get out of here.”

Lukowski abandoned his weapon. They ran blindly, bullets nipping at their heels like unruly terriers. The private collided squarely with a tree trunk, breaking his nose and jaw and lacerating a cheek. With his good hand, Betts helped Lukowski to his feet, and they staggered on.

In the pasture west of the chateau, Aaron Hirschorn felt his life seeping away through a wound in his back. He had no memory of how he had been wounded, only of waking and of hearing the pounding of automatic weapons and the cries of fallen men. He might have been out sixty seconds or thirty minutes or longer, he did not know. His back was hot. When he tried to reach around to feel for the wound, pain coursed up his arm. He tried to rise, and collapsed. Again he tried, and this time found his feet. He hobbled away, around the bodies of three Rangers piled like firewood.

Right on time, forty-five minutes after the drop, the Skytroopers landed on the field, one after another. The marker fires were still blazing. Perhaps the pilots had seen the melee at the chateau and had come down anyway, hoping for survivors. They had landed into the wind and had taxied the full length of the field to take off.

Not one Ranger met the planes. Instead, several Wehrmacht tanks rolled onto the hill and finally had a worthwhile use for their cannons. It was the work of a few seconds, an unfair match. The C-53s were ripped apart by the blasts. Fuel ignited in red and orange mushrooms. After a moment, not even the planes’ skeletons remained, just pools of fire on the pasture and unrecognizable pieces of charred metal.

From the edge of the woods, Betts and Lukowski saw the planes disintegrate. Lukowski tied a bootlace around the lieutenant’s wounded arm to stanch the bleeding. They returned to the woods.

They walked south all night, first through the woods, then across pastures and bogs. Sirens sounded behind them. A dozen times they threw themselves into ditches or ran into glades when vehicles passed on nearby roads. Betts began babbling, hallucinating, and at times Lukowski had to pull him along. At the first light of dawn, they entered a dilapidated barn and dug into a haystack. They ignored the yapping of a farm dog. Lukowski did not expect Betts to live another hour.

Nor did the private expect to be shaken awake by a man speaking Flemish. The farmer tried to clean Betts’ wounds, and wrapped a length of cloth around Lukowski’s head to prevent the private’s fractured jaw from dangling. Several hours later, about noon, members of the Belgian Resistance arrived in a hay truck to take the Rangers to a safe house in Deinze.

Sergeant Hirschorn’s story is shorter, because he knows little of it. His memory of that night is patchy. He stumbled along, he fell. He struggled to his feet and walked again, then fell. Over and over again. He has no recollection of being found by a Flemish dairyman, nor of being handed over to the underground. When I spoke with him twelve months after the war, he still carried pieces of shrapnel in the muscle tissue near his spine.

A number of Belgian farmers claim—and I believe them—to have seen eighteen or twenty Rangers being loaded into trucks near Viscount Le Marten’s chateau. Most wore bandages, head dressings, or slings. The trucks turned toward Gent, and those Rangers disappeared. There is no record of them. No German I spoke with after the war knew of their fate or would admit to it.

Only Betts, Lukowski, and Hirschorn survived Green Thumb. One hundred twenty-three Rangers and pilots perished.

General Clay had told his commanders that the Three Blows was the worst news they would hear. Not so, not for Clay. I was with him later that night when he was told the Skytroopers had vanished. He seemed to shrink before me. Then his face contorted. He turned away and for a moment I thought he might weep. But that passed.

Never again, not through S-Day and the calamitous days that followed, would I see the general as stricken or as vulnerable.

9

General Clay and I walked across the garden to his trailer. Our last meeting had just broken up. It was 1:30 in the morning. At West Point, the general had suffered an ankle fracture falling from a horse. He still limped late at night or when he heard bad news. As we crossed the grass, the hitch in his gait was pronounced. He had been unable or unwilling to speak of the Rangers since we had learned of their fate.

He pushed aside the blackout curtain over the door, and we entered the caravan. He lowered himself onto the settee and removed his shoes. I made him a scotch and water, stood by while he threw it back, then got him another. This one he put on the floor while he rubbed his ankle. I sipped a scotch.

“Some day the goddamn army will issue a decent shoe,” he said.

“There aren’t any reporters here, sir,” I chided. I was with him when he bought those brogans on Bond Street.

“Sorry. I forgot.” He picked up his drink and slumped back in the settee. “Jack, you’re a military historian. Someday you should do a study on what separates a brilliant commander from an adequate commander. What do you think?”

“Well, presumably there are—”

“Some say there are only two professions in the world where the amateur excels the professional. One is military strategy, and the other is prostitution.”

He had asked, and I was determined to answer. “Many reasons—”

“But I don’t buy that,” he went on. His voice was just above a whisper, and it was tainted with sadness. He was searching for his own weaknesses. “I side with Marshal de Saxe, who said talent in war is like talent in painting, poetry, and music. But tell me, why was Stonewall Jackson able to throw a handful of troops between vastly superior forces and win a victory at Second Manassas, while Germany’s von Kluck, using the same tactic at the Marne, was unable to duplicate Jackson’s victory?”

Clay sipped his drink. “Jackson was a great soldier. Von Kluck only a good one. What is the difference?”

“Well, I think—”

Clay went on, “If I only knew I’d—”

He was interrupted by a knock at the door.

He scowled, then shouted, “If you aren’t bringing me word of the invasion, go away, goddamn it. I’ve had enough for one day.”

From outside the trailer came a tentative, “May I speak with you, General?”

We both recognized the voice. Clay slammed his glass onto his desk, stabbed his feet into his shoes, and jumped up from the settee. He brushed unseen crumbs from his pants. “Jesus,” he whispered.

I also scrambled from my chair, then squared my necktie and cleared my throat.

General Clay opened the door and curtain. The king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland entered the caravan.

“It’s late, I know,” George VI said. He was carrying a leather valise. “I have been touring the forces, bucking them up and all.”

We saluted smartly. The American Revolution was not as successful as George Washington may have hoped. Americans still feel an overwhelming urge to bow or curtsey before English royalty. I stood awkwardly, shifting my feet, wondering what was proper. His majesty motioned us into chairs. He sat on the settee.

We had met the king a number of times at Buckingham Palace and at Lord Louis Mountbatten’s ancestral estate. Clay was no more familiar with the formalities than I was and referred to the king only as “Sir.” I think they were fond of each other.

His majesty withdrew a document from the valise. I could see “Top Secret” stamped across the top page. He stared at it glumly for a moment.

George VI endlessly visited British troops, being seen and lifting morale. His code name when he traveled usually was General Lyon, for Lion of the Empire, I suppose. As tactfully as possible, Churchill had asked the king to go to Canada to preserve the monarchy during the coming invasion. The king had countered by ordering Churchill to flee to Canada with the government at once when the Germans came. Both understood each other and had refused each other. George was a slight man, with a substantial nose and a lean face. He was wearing the uniform of a general of the British Army. Shy, with a stammer, George was well loved by his people.

“I have brought you a translation of several documents Churchill gave me this morning.” The king passed the folder to General Clay. “I have never before seen anything as frightening.”

Clay’s eyes raced down the first page. It was titled “Orders Concerning the Organization and Function of Military Government in England.” He turned to the second and said, “It’s a blueprint for the occupation.”

“The Germans have plans to install a Reichskommissar of Great Britain, probably Ribbentrop,” the king said. “That document shows they will run England with brutal efficiency. It will be a war on our civilization. They plan to deport all able-bodied males between the ages of seventeen and forty-five to the Continent, where they will be interned in camps.”

When Clay turned to the next document, the king said, “The Germans are going to establish a Military Economic Staff.”

“The Wehrwirtschaftsstab England,” the general said.

“It will have commands in London, Birmingham, Newcastle, Liverpool, and Glasgow. That organization will denude England. All stocks, such as food, petrol, automobiles, and lorries, even horses, which are not being used by the army of occupation, will be transported to Germany. Factories will be dismantled and sent into Germany. Research laboratories, cloth mills, mining equipment, all go, to be reconstructed in the Reich. There are even plans to cut down English forests, shipping the lumber to the Continent.”

Clay said, “They want it all, don’t they? Here are orders to transport to Germany all stones, cut or uncut, precious or semiprecious. But there is an exception for coal in household scuttles.”

“In return, they will give us the Gestapo, which they are going to call the German Secret Police for Great Britain. The Gestapo has drawn up a list of 2,300 names and addresses of British citizens who will be hunted down and arrested—writers, trade unionists, industrialists, police officials, religious leaders, professors, and the nobility. They call it the Special Search List, G.B.”

“I presume your name is on the list,” Clay said lightly.

“Rest assured, it is.” He smiled briefly. “And they are not overlooking anyone else. They have targeted Jews, freemasons, refugees, socialists, communists, and liberals, in which category they include Parliament. Glance down until you find the Boy Scouts, and read that.”

It took the general a moment. Finally he read, “‘The Boy Scout movement represents a camouflaged but powerful instrument of British cultural propaganda and an excellent source of information for the British Intelligence Service. The liquidation of the Austrian Scout movement produced proof of, among other things, the link between the Scout movement and the British Secret Service.’”

“It would be laughable, were they not serious, General Clay. We already have experience with a German occupation, as you know. They have for several years occupied the Channel Islands. On orders from Whitehall, the islanders offered no resistance to the Germans. Still, all British citizens were deported to camps on the Continent. We know where most of them are, but the Jews on the island, twenty of them, have disappeared. Our inquiries through the Swiss and Red Cross produce nothing.” The king inhaled slowly. “The Germans plan not just to occupy us, but to end England, to bring to a conclusion our millennium of statehood.”

We were silent for a moment. I finally asked, “Would you like something to drink, sir?”

“No, thank you.”

The general reached for his glass.

The king then quickly said, “Unless you are having something.”

I figured that after an adulthood of it, his majesty might be tired of single malt Scotch whiskey. I poured him Jim Beam, neat. He sipped it gingerly, as if he feared I had given him Kentucky moonshine. He nodded his approval and took a heartier drink.

“Do you know anything about the men who are coming? Von Rundstedt of Army Group A and Rommel of Group C?”

The general swirled his drink. “Von Rundstedt is a Prussian through and through. He excels in preparation, and his army is the most drilled and polished in German history. He is an odd combination of arrogance and pliability. He is thought to be susceptible to Hitler’s persuasion. He was retired from the army after the Fritsch-Blomberg crisis, but was able to return. His Panzer spearhead broke through at Sedan and cut off the British Expeditionary Force. Von Rundstedt’s mistake, as you know, was to persuade Hitler to halt the ground offensive, to leave the destruction of the BEF to the Luftwaffe, which never happened. Despite that error, there is every evidence he’ll be a tough customer.”

“And Rommel?”

“Rommel was seen three days ago in Amsterdam, at Army Group C headquarters. Since entering the German army in 1910, he has excelled at every level of command he has held, from platoon on up.”

“I’ve read a translation of Rommel’s textbook on infantry tactics he wrote between the wars. Have you had the chance?”

“Why, yes.” Clay was surprised. George VI was the titular head of the British armed services, but was not known as a military theoretician. “In fact, I assigned it to my division commanders, so I hope Rommel will be surprised when he finds some of his own tactics used against him. The most telling insight into his character is that he commands from the lead tank. His command of the 7th Panzer in the sweep across France was brilliant, using some of those tactics you read about.”

The king said wearily, “I suppose we can expect no less from him in England.”

“He’ll do the unexpected,” Clay replied. “He’ll drive his troops, and, above all, he’ll be fast. His plan will be to hit the beach running and not stop until he gets to the Irish Sea.”

“The German people believe Rommel is invincible,” his majesty said. “Is he?”

“I know better, and so does Rommel. His invincibility is a creation of the German propaganda machine, with assistance from the British and American press. He is a fine general, and that’s all.”

“Better than our Allied commanders?” The king plainly wanted reassurance.

“Erwin Rommel has his talents. On the battlefield, he seems to know precisely which second to commit himself. He is persistent, a talent in itself. And he has what Frederick called the coup d’oeil, the ability to grasp salient features and advantages of terrain at a quick glance.”

“This doesn’t sound promising for us, General.”

“Rommel has another gift, sir,” Clay said gloomily. “His men will follow him anywhere.”

“Surely any general insists on no less.”

“There’s more to it than just ordering the troops. A mysterious charisma is involved, and I’ve tried to understand it and tried to develop it in myself, if I may admit. Our General Grant was a brilliant tactician, but Union soldiers didn’t love him, as they did Pap Thomas. Ludendorff was an effective chess player with his units, but German soldiers worshipped Hindenberg. Confederates respected Longstreet, but they would have followed Lee into hell. Rommel has what Lee and the others had. Their devotion to him will cost us, I’m afraid.”

The king seemed perturbed. “Then what are Churchill and Barclay and you and the others going to do about him?”

Clay smiled grimly. “General Rommel hasn’t passed through this war invisibly, sir. He has left tracks, and I’ve studied them. It took Napoleon’s enemies twenty years to learn his tactics. Rommel won’t have that luxury.” Clay glanced at the wall, and said in a low voice, as if to himself, “I know Erwin Rommel better than his mother does.”

Now it was the king’s turn to smile. “You speak with some confidence, General.”

Clay retreated into modesty, an occasional ruse, dragged out with some effort. “Well, we’ll do our damnedest, sir.”

“I know you will, General.” The king finished his drink and set the glass on the desk. He rose and stepped to the door. Deep lines of worry under his eyes seemed etched into the skin.

We stood also. Forgetting deference and tact, Clay asked, “Sir, you haven’t said what you were doing in our neck of the woods tonight.”

“Kings go anywhere they want, anytime they want. It’s one of the better benefits of the position.” He smiled quickly. “And the prime minister said you might need a boost, after news of the Queen Mary and all.”

“Well, I’m grateful. It has been a boost.”

“Good night, then, General.” He nodded at me, then left the trailer. His driver, bodyguards, and other retainers had been waiting in the garden.

Clay undid his tie, pulled it through the collar, and said to me, “I thought monarchs were always preceded by trumpet fanfares, so they can’t sneak up and startle us common folks.”

He began with the buttons of his uniform blouse. “I’m hitting the hay, Jack. This’ll be a long, nervous night for all of us. Let’s hope tomorrow is a little brighter.”

“It will be, sir,” I answered without conviction.

I left him in the trailer. Because I had been summoned in the middle of the night many times before, I stood by on the gravel for a few minutes in case he remembered something else for my notebook. Only a slit of light was visible below the blackout curtain on the window of his bedroom. When the light blinked out, I started toward the manor house. It was two in the morning. I wondered if I’d sleep. The anxious waiting was grinding at me.

But our long wait was soon to end.

The largest armada in history had just set sail for the English shore.