D-Day as seen by a legend
June 6, 2024
My introduction to the story of D-Day didn’t come from Saving Private Ryan or The Longest Day. I learned about the events of eighty years ago from the book above, a collection of war reporting for The New Yorker by the great A.J. (Joe) Liebling. It belonged to my father, who also had other New Yorker stars like James Thurber and Joseph Mitchell on his bookshelf. But Liebling’s account of D-Day is still the finest I’ve ever read.
By that point in the war, he had covered the Nazi conquest of France, sailed on a Norwegian tanker from London to New Orleans, and dived into a foxhole with German machine-gun bullets flying all around at an airfield in North Africa. On June 6, 1944, he was aboard an LCIL or Landing Craft Infantry, Large in the Allied armada converging on Normandy.
As Liebling put it, “The word ‘large’ in landing-craft designation is purely relative.” These vessels were both lightly armored and slow, a bad combination in the face of the hellish enemy fire they received. Their task was to land troops in the midst of what turned out to be the deadliest fighting of the day.
The following are excerpts from Liebling’s piece. His language is tight, vivid and straightforward, with no hyperbole, flag-waving, or musing about what it all meant. He simply reported what he witnessed, and he had a very sharp eye. This is what it was like for one correspondent aboard one ship at H plus 65 (7:35), just over an hour after the first troops hit the beach.
The shore curved out toward us on the port side of the ship, and when I looked in that direction I could see a lot of smoke from what appeared to be shells bursting on the beach. There was also an LCT (Landing Craft, Tank) grounded and burning…At about the same time something splashed in the water off our starboard quarter, sending up a high spray…
Kallam (the ship’s medic) and I flattened our backs against the pilot house and pulled in our stomachs, as if to give a possible bullet a couple of extra inches of clearance…Something tickled the back of my neck. I slapped at it and discovered that I had most of the ship’s rigging draped around my neck and shoulders, like a character in an old slapstick movie about a spaghetti factory. The rigging had been cut away by bullets.
…Something hit the ship with the solid clunk of metal against metal-not as hard as a collision or a bomb blast; just “clink.”…A sailor now came running up the stairway from the cabin. He grabbed me and shouted, “Two casualties in bow!”…[Another] sailor came by and one of the men in the gun crew said, “Who was it?” The sailor said, “Rocky and Bill. They’re all tore up. A shell got the winch and ramps and all.”…There was a shooting-gallery smell over everything and when we passed close under the (battleship) Arkansas and she let off a salvo, a couple of our men who had their backs to her quivered and had to be reassured.
(The next day) On the morning of D Day-plus-one, the LCIL was like a ship with a hangover. Her deck was littered with cartons of tinned rations left behind by the land fighters she had carried to the Norman shore. There was a gap where the starboard ramp had been and there were various holes in the hull and hatches to mark the path of the anti-tank shell that had hit her while she had been on the beach. Everybody aboard was nursing a headache.
I remember, on the afternoon of D Day, sitting on a ration case on the pitching deck and being tempted by the rosy picture on the label of a roast-beef can. I opened it, but I could only look at the jellied juice, which reminded me too much of the blood I had seen that morning, and I threw the tin over the rail…Altogether H plus 65 on Easy Red Beach, Omaha was an even bloodier mess than we knew at the time, and I am glad we didn’t.
A few months later, Liebling wrote from the newly liberated Paris, “For the first time in my life and probably the last, I have lived for a week in a great city where everybody is happy.”
By the way, “Mollie” wasn’t a woman. He was an American of Russian ancestry who had called himself Molotov and whose buddies shortened the name. Mollie was quite a character; as one GI put it, “the greatest natural-born foul-up in the Army,” but an asset in combat. The book that bears his name seems to be out of print. Fortunately lots of Liebling’s writing on the war, good food, boxing, and other subjects is still around.
Originally published at http://daveswanauthor.wordpress.com on June 5, 2024.
