“Then get the hell off that stretcher and help me out.”
One of the corpsmen said, “Sir, Major Robley here isn’t fit to—”
Clay turned to him. “You carry the dead out of here and anyone too hurt to talk. You leave the rest to me. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Major Robley pivoted off the stretcher. I helped him to his feet.
Clay asked, “What’s your job, Major?”
Robley was in so much pain sweat had formed on his brow and was running down his face from under his bandage. He blinked his good eye. “I’m deputy commander, 19th Ordnance Battalion, 1st Armored.”
Clay pursed his lips. “Perfect. You are to bring me up to date on assembly positions.”
“Sir, I’m an ammo officer.”
“You ship metal rations to all your units, don’t you?” Clay asked brusquely.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you must know where they are.”
“Yes, sir,” Robley said doubtfully.
“Then get into the main room and prepare to brief me.”
Clay left the major and made his way further into the ruined building. I followed. In the kitchen we found another officer, a lieutenant who was lying on the checkerboard tile floor. He was on his stomach. A trail of blood crossed the black and white tile. He had crawled into the kitchen. A flying splinter had ripped a trench in his leg from ankle to buttocks. His eyes were open.
“Lieutenant, you look healthy, except for your leg. What’s your name and duty?” Clay questioned him.
The lieutenant looked up. “General Clay?”
Bracing himself on the edge of a cutting block, Clay knelt to him. “Your name and duty.”
“Lieutenant Chet Benson, liaison officer from the 1st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division.” His words were chopped with suffering.
“You are going to brief me on the 1st Armored’s attack order.”
The lieutenant groaned. “I’m going to die, sir.”
“You don’t have time for that.”
Benson gulped air. “I need morphine, sir.”
“I can’t rely on a briefing from a drug fiend, Lieutenant. A litter team will move you into the main room next to our charts. After we talk, we’ll see about a pain killer.”
The general made several more stops in the building, weaving around collapsed beams and stones and plaster, putting together his command. Assembled in the main room, the new 1st Armored HQ resembled a field hospital. Many were tended to by physicians and medics as they spoke with the general. Generals Lorenzo and Pinkney entered and immediately posted themselves at the restored map table. Clay wrapped his spectacles around his face.
Lieutenant Sessions met the deadline. Four minutes to launch hour, 1st Armored HQ was connected with its regiments, the remnants of the 4th Motorized, and the Canadians.
Clay paused as Lorenzo did his work over the map. He stepped back. He said to me, “The Canuck, Henry Bisset, and I came up with this counterattack last night.”
I was puzzled. “Where was I?”
“You were asleep. I looked in on you, but you seemed comfy, all curled up in your blankie, so I let you sleep.”
This was nonsense, but my face burned nevertheless. After the battle of Haywards Heath, I had retired at two in the morning, long after the miserable returns were in. I was exhausted, but General Clay had apparently worked through the night.
Lieutenant General Henry Bisset was commander of the Canadian I Corps. He and Clay had formulated the plan in the early hours of the day and had received approval from ACCSS. They named it Operation Redwood. At dawn orders had gone out to divisional headquarters. Now, after the disaster at 1st Armored’s HQ, Clay suddenly had to familiarize himself with Roger Franks’ implementation. For five minutes he listened to Major Robley and Lieutenant Benson. Then in the remaining minutes until launch, he issued a stream of orders. I logged them in my pad and carried them to the impromptu signal station.
Most of Lieutenant Sessions’ equipment had been placed on an ornate, leather-inlaid desk that had just missed being crushed by a massive beam. Signal officers were streaming in, bringing more gear and wiring it. David Lorenzo used coins to mark units on maps. The room began to look like a working headquarters.
Just before ten in the morning, the third day of the invasion, Clay stared at his wristwatch and counted off the remaining seconds. Then he said to Pinkney, “Go to it, Jay.”
Operation Redwood was underway.
Clay said, “Now we wait.”
A moment passed. He said, “The Germans call this maneuver Einkreisung, encirclement.”
I looked up from my pad, but he was talking to the air around us.
He went on, “The German is going to taste some of his own tactical medicine.”
I lowered my pad.
He said, “The Teuton loves this goddamn maneuver. Von Moltke, the brilliant Prussian field marshal, used it at Sedan on the River Meuse in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The maneuver is the very symbol of German military prowess, as if they invented it. Like hell. They stole it from Napoleon at Austerlitz.”
I should have remained silent. But, no. “Or maybe from the encirclement of the Royalist infantry at Naseby during the English Civil War.”
His jaw came out. “Or maybe from Genghis Khan at the Battle of Indus.”
I countered, “Or maybe from Hannibal at Cannae.”
“Jack, I have to take this crap from Winnie, but not from my ADC, who is five ranks below me and may go even lower.”
“Of course, sir.”
The general rejoined David Lorenzo. For the rest of the morning, Clay acted as a divisional commander. He made do with his battered ad hoc staff. When Lieutenant Benson fainted, Clay had a medic administer smelling salts, then prop him up at the map table. Clay spoke constantly with regimental commanders, guiding them from their assembly positions to the engagements.
I carried orders to the signalmen and their messages to Clay.
Occasionally, he would return to me, if only because it was more seemly than talking to himself.
At one point, he commented, “Armies move very slowly. That’s the shame of it.”
Later he said to me, “What the German won’t expect is the encirclement as counterattack. They don’t think that way.”
Still later he returned, his mouth moving before he reached me. “… so our aim is to prevent the German from turning yesterday’s tactical success into victory. Our counterattack has been launched while he is still dazed from our web, don’t you see?”
Operation Redwood was a double envelopment. The Wehrmacht was wheeling west from the beaches. AEF forces were grudgingly but surely giving ground. When Clay gave the order at ten that morning, the Canadians roared south from their position near London, and units of the 1st Armored drove north from the coast, all behind the Wehrmacht’s westerly moving line. The maneuver was an attempt to encircle the Schwerpunkt, to defeat it by cutting it off.
Clay predicted at one point that morning, “Redwood is going to cut the German throat, Jack.”
It should have. RAF Lieutenant Richard Ormsby’s ordeal at that moment tells why it did not.
I have mentioned that Ormsby spent many afternoons before the invasion napping under his Spitfire, his squadron too low on fuel and ammunition to go aloft for much training. His unit, 46 Squadron, and a handful of others, had been carefully hoarded, camouflaged under netting away from the RAF’s bomb-beaten runways, and were waiting for the moment when the RAF’s last line would be committed.
S-Day was that moment. But at the end of the day, 46 Squadron had lost half its fighters. On the third day of the invasion, at the start of Redwood, only four of the Squadron’s Spitfires were serviceable. By Ormsby’s own count, his Spit’s eight wing-mounted .303s had only forty shells in each of their belts. A couple of squeezes of the trigger. The armament officer had promised more, but lately there were more promises than shells.