“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.