The general was quiet for a few seconds, then continued, “All right. Let me know within an hour, General Barclay…. Yes, Prime Minister?… All right, I’ll listen to the BBC at nine o’clock tonight if I have time.”
Clay pursed his lips. “It won’t go to my head…. Yes, I understand that the flattering things you’ll be saying about me to the British people tonight are only part of your morale-lifting campaign and are not to be taken seriously by me…. We’ll speak again shortly, Prime Minister.”
Clay tossed the phone to his G2. “Jesus, I wonder what got under Winnie’s skin.”
I offered, “Perhaps it was having the Germans invade his homeland and having his people’s teeth called green, all in the same morning.”
Generals don’t listen to ADCs at times like this, fortunately for me.
He called out, “Pat, will you come here?”
AEF’s deputy commander trotted in from the living room signal station. The building had filled and was bustling.
It took Clay less than sixty seconds to outline his plan. He finished with “We are going to retreat in an orderly and fighting fashion, in short stages just in front of the enemy. We will inflict casualties as we pull back, and we will avoid any hint of a rout.”
He brought his gaze up from the map. “Pat, you are to relay this to Gene Girard at II Corps.”
“Yes, General.”
“You tell him in no uncertain terms that the 5th has got to come about.”
“Yes, sir.”
This was not the winking, chuckling commander who had reviewed his troops on the beaches the day before. General Clay always showed a harder face to his staff and intimates, except to me, because I was a proxy for him when he was talking to himself.
Hargrave and Neil went to their business. Clay grasped his hands behind his back and walked back into the manor’s main room. I walked with him. He said, “Short and sweet.”
“Pardon, sir?”
“Keep orders short and sweet. Never more than a page. Do you know why?”
Why bother replying?
He explained, “In the Great War, Haig’s chief of staff, General Kiggel, issued an order for attack consisting of fifty-seven goddamn pages, excluding appendices. Never issue an order that takes longer to read than it does to execute.”
“Yes, sir.”
He stepped around to face me directly. He locked me up with his gaze. This time he was not talking to himself. “Nothing is ever as bad as is reported to headquarters, Jack. Remember that.”
I believed him, despite all the evidence.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning of S-Day. The evidence was bad, and it would get worse.
I can recall General Clay and the prime minister’s argument about courage as if I had taken notes. It occurred in Churchill’s study at Chartwell a week before S-Day. The topic was whether a drunk can be courageous. An hour and a half I listened, contributing nothing but an occasional cough.
I sat near the Tudor doorway, in front of a table on which were several unidentifiable busts and a cigar box. Above me were rafters and beams dating from before the Renaissance. A bronze cast of Jennie Churchill’s hand was on the windowsill. Bookshelves lined several walls. Two desks were opposite each other across a worn Persian rug. The taller desk was for working while standing, with a slanting top in the Victorian fashion. Churchill was wearing his work outfit, a scarlet, green, and gold dressing gown. We were drinking three-ounce scotches, Churchill’s brand, Johnny Walker Red.
Churchill said, “But we do not praise a drunken man for his fearlessness. Valor must be sought. Shakespeare termed it ‘The pursuit of the bubble of reputation even at the cannon’s mouth.’”
“Shakespeare?” the general replied mildly. “The English writer?”
The prime minister’s glare could have burned through metal.
Clay ignored it and said, “Forethought is not a requirement of courage. It can be impulsive.”
“You are saying then, General, that an animal may be courageous?”
“Of course.”
“Rubbish. A dog in its ignorance is fearless, which is far less than courageous.”
The general countered, “Lincoln said, ‘Courage can be found in the suddenness of the moment.’”
“Which Lincoln?”
They went on and on, and believe me when I say history will forgive me for not recording it all here. General Clay always wanted the last word, and he invariably had to wait until he and I were alone again to get it. This time, as we entered the jeep, Clay said, “Palmerston, Pitt, Baldwin, they all liked the sauce. Now Churchill. Something about leading the English people turns a man to drink.”
I set out a portion of their debate on courage because on this argument the events of S-Day made me side with General Clay.
Five Congressional Medals of Honor were granted for exploits of the invasion, and two Victoria Crosses. I have read these citations and similar ones for German servicemen and have talked to some of the soldiers and sailors. These gallant acts may not have occurred had there been time to think of them. At least, that is the servicemen’s testimony. Let me mention a few.
A sure way to win our nation’s highest decoration for bravery is to fall on a grenade. Private Murray Cooperman did just that and lived to tell about it. Cooperman was a rifleman with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment at Pevensey Bay, the precise landing place of William the Conqueror 876 years earlier.
Cooperman said, “But unlike the Anglo-Saxon defenders, we had automatic weapons and bazookas, which can be helpful in those situations.”
His squad was defending a fortified house two hundred yards behind the beach. The survivors of the beach bulwarks were streaming past in stunned and wounded disarray.
“I remember that lull, between the last staggering American to clear our field of fire and the first Germans. Seemed like two hours, but it was five minutes. Then an enemy squadron appeared from behind some bushes, and they ran full bore toward the house, no cover, nothing. I opened up with my Ml, but I was a piss-poor shot and don’t think I hit a one of them. We had a light machine gun at another window, and that made them dive for cover.”
Cooperman went on, “But I give the bastards credit. They kept coming, using high grass, hugging the ground, as there wasn’t anything else to hide behind. I’d see an enemy’s helmet here, a quick movement there, a muzzle flash somewhere else, always closer, but never much of a target, like prairie dogs. They were providing cover for a grenadier.”
A spray of bullets hit the sill below Cooperman, some bursting through wood and plaster into the sandbags. The rifleman ducked, and more bullets coursed through the window, stitching the wall behind him. Cooperman’s sergeant went down with a pierced thigh. A grenade came through the window.
“The potato-masher can be thrown farther than an American grenade, but that German was right under the window. I don’t know how he got there. So I left my rifle and leaped across the room to fall on it.”
“What were you thinking?” I asked Cooperman after the war.
“I didn’t think.”
I was determined to get to the bottom of such a crazed act. “Surely something entered your head. I mean, a body just doesn’t fall on a grenade.”
“Yes, it does, and mine did. And nothing entered my mind, or I probably wouldn’t have done it.”
The stick grenade was silent.
“After about twenty seconds our medic crawled over. With my nose dug into the floor, I said to him, ‘These things got about a five-second fuse, don’t they?’ The medic said they did, and I said, ‘Well, I’m no chicken and this’s no egg, and my time is up warming this goddamn thing.’”