Branscomb saw the sweep of troops south and immediately offered her clubmobile as part of the caravan. “You can imagine my distress,” she told me after the war, “when eight soldiers of the 4th Highlanders boarded the van.”
She paused in her story for my reaction, but I had none.
She repeated emphatically, “The 4th Highlanders.”
When I shook my head, she replied, “Why, we were warned about the 4th Highlanders from the minute we arrived in Great Britain. They were a notoriously rowdy Scottish regiment, the bane of us innocent American girls.”
What happened in the canteen? I asked.
“Well,” she said, “nothing at all. They were dead tired and so anxious to get south that they sagged to the floor of the van and didn’t say anything at all, or do anything at all, except eat all the doughnuts.”
I teased her, “To have the 4th Highlanders all to yourselves and them too fatigued to raise a finger must have been a cruel disappointment.”
A touch of color graced her cheeks, then she smiled. “A little disappointing, I must admit.”
Woodrow Smith’s ancestors had been blacksmiths since before records were kept. “I believe that’s how we got our name, Smith,” he told me. His shop was near Cambridge, and I visited it after the war. The building was under the dark shadow of an enormous oak tree. The day I found him was bright with sun, and when I entered his shop I could see nothing but the fire in the forge. His son manned bellows. Smith’s anvils and hammers might have been two hundred years old. He told me he had also begun repairing automobiles and lorries but regretted it, preferring to shoe horses.
He said, “I was working on a tractor wheel, trying to straighten it, when a tank brigade began rolling by. My shop filled with dust as their treads dug up the road. My boy and I walked to the door to watch them pass. Just then one of the brigade’s Mark VI tanks broke a tread, and the tank drove right off the tread, its road wheels sinking into the road, and the tread gathering behind it.”
The 20th Armored, 6th Armored Division, was critically short of parts, as were all British Army units. The tank commander crawled out of his vehicle, and, cursing mightily, ran his hand along the tank’s front hull, where spare treads should have been stowed. Too hurried to push the disabled Mark VI off the road, the line of tanks behind him detoured around it, crushing the fence and rose garden of the home across from the blacksmith’s shop.
“I wandered over to the tank to examine the tread. Then I said to the tank commander, a sergeant, ‘I can repair this.’ He looked at me as if I had just granted him a pardon.”
Smith rolled his cutting torch to Donald George’s dump-truck, towed to the lot in back of the shop two days before so the blacksmith could replace a universal joint. He cut a replacement tread out of the truck’s bed. Within forty minutes, Smith had sized and drilled the steel and installed it on the track.
“The tank commander saluted me, and he and his crew were on their way. And the next day, when I told Donald George how the hole in his lorry bed came to be, all he did was congratulate me for being clever.”
Thousands of private vehicles and their drivers were offered to the British Army. The civilians viewed themselves as part of the lineage of citizen armies dating from the time of Cromwell.
At the front, hearing of the vast march south, General Clay thought it would fail. “The Luftwaffe is going to tear them up.”
German fighters took their toll on the English caravans, but far less than Clay had anticipated because most German aircraft were providing air cover at the front and because of the volunteers’ dispersed routes.
Still, General Clay reflected the common wisdom on that day when he said, “We won’t last until they get here. The British reinforcements will be a day late and a dollar short.”
22
We were in the Cub when General Clay turned to me and held up a palm, fingers apart. “Jack, soldiers hold in scathing contempt commanders whose armies seep like sand through their fingers. And those commanders’ names are quickly lost to history.”
Lost, except to generals such as Wilson Clay, who study their humiliation and shudder at their fate.
He said, “Cadorna and Kerensky during the Great War and Gamelin of this one, so recently at the head of once-formidable forces, have already been forgotten.”
As the Germans ground toward London, Clay feared he was about to join them. The condition of the American Expeditionary Force that Sunday will long be debated, with Clay’s detractors claiming it was still fairly robust. They paint him as unduly pessimistic, on the verge of panic, mistakenly believing that his army was dissolving. I was with him during those hours and will report fully here. I gained an idea how ludicrous stories about a controversial man originate.
Not even his critics deny General Clay had an unerring instinct for appearing where the action was hottest. The general insisted on visiting the front. “I cannot order soldiers to bear risk without sharing it,” he said.
From London we flew to headquarters of the 1st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division, arriving at ten in the morning, the fourth day of the invasion. The regiment had initially rushed east toward the invader, but once the Wehrmacht wheeled into them, it was forced to retreat. When we marched into his tent, we found Colonel Alan Hebert packing his duffel bag. His jeep driver was waiting with the engine running. The colonel pronounced his name “Ay-Bear.” Enemy shelling was distressingly close, and the ground shivered under my feet. Hebert’s shaving mirror swayed on the tent post.
An artillery veteran once told me to keep my mouth open during close shelling, lest my eyeballs pop out from a concussive blast. He may have been yanking my chain, but to be on the safe side I parted my mouth and left it that way. Doubtless I resembled a moron.
Clay said, “Colonel, your last report didn’t lead me to believe withdrawal was indicated. Explain your retreat.”
Perhaps startled by Clay’s unannounced appearance, Hebert stammered that the 4th Battalion had vanished and that he was without information on survivors, but presumed most were either POWs or casualties. His 3rd Battalion was pulling back in order. He was awaiting a report from his 5th Battalion and was going to meet with its commander at new headquarters at the rear.
General Clay questioned him. I am not a tactician, but overhearing them, I gained a clear impression from Hebert of puzzlement and passivity.
Clay demanded, “How many hours of ammunition remain?”
“I’m working on that, General. I’m waiting for—”
“And fuel reserves?”
His eyes flicked to the card table that served as his desk. “I’ve got Lieutenant Maynard checking on it, sir.”
“Franks ordered your brigade’s fuel to be resupplied by the 123rd Armored Ordnance two hours ago. Where is that convoy?”
“We are not in contact with them, sir,” Hebert answered. He spoke with a Louisiana drawl.
Small arms rattled nearby, followed by the blare of a heavy machine gun. A soldier yelled, but I could not make out his words. I heard the hollow bark of a mortar salvo.
“Colonel, I am relieving you of command.”
“Sir?” Hebert’s face was devoid of surprise. Apparently out of touch with the bulk of his command and ready to flee to the rear, he may have known it was inevitable.