The Brave Patriots Who Helped Save Europe from Hitler

By Madeleine Kearns

Sunday, May 26, 2024

 

Last summer, I was fortunate to participate in a trip round Western Europe, exploring some of the critical sites associated with the Second World War.

 

The trip included a stop at the Churchill war rooms in London and the Allied headquarters at Southwick House, where the date for D-Day was decided after two years of planning. From there, we journeyed across the channel by boat to Normandy, the 50-mile beach along the French coast, where on June 6, 1944, 160,000 Allied troops, 12,000 aircraft, and 7,000 sea vessels embarked on their perilous mission to save Europe from Nazism.

 

At Southwick House, the invasion maps are still on the wall, the clock set for D-Day, frozen in time from when General Dwight Eisenhower stared at it, agonizing over the details. As Andrew Roberts writes in our July issue of the magazine, when Eisenhower took the decision to launch the invasion, he was “smoking 80 Camel cigarettes a day and had blood pressure levels indicating hypertension.”

 

So much — too much — depended on the weather.

 

Not to mention weather girls. On June 3, 1944, her 21st birthday, Maureen Flavin, the Irish postal clerk in County Mayo, noted a rapid drop in pressure, indicating approaching rain or storms. This information, considered by the RAF meteorologist, Group Captain James Stagg, was the basis of his advice to Eisenhower to delay the invasion by 24 hours.

 

“Elite Pathfinder units arrived first, marking out the terrain,” Roberts writes. “‘The first Skytrains appeared,’ one observer later recalled, ‘silhouetted like groups of scudding bats.’ German flak hit the planes ‘like large hailstones on a tin roof’ as the paratroopers trod floors slippery with vomit and readied themselves before jumping down and down, thousands of feet, sometimes through cloud and fog.”

 

Not forgetting the courage of the British, Major John Howard was the commander of the glider-borne British infantrymen. Landing under cover of darkness at 12:16 a.m. on June 6, he and his men were knocked temporarily unconscious by their rough landing. After coming to, they proceeded to seize Pegasus Bridge, which was of vital strategic importance in the Allied invasion of Europe, despite being outnumbered by Germans.

 

The human cost of the landings was brought to life in an unforgettable scene depicted in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. And in real life as in movie depictions, individual bravery and leadership were critical for the mission’s success.

 

Take, for instance, 51-year-old U.S. Brigadier General Norman “Dutch” Cota, whose leadership on Omaha Beach turned things around for the 29th Infantry Division. Cota warned his men to expect the worst: “You’re going to find confusion. The landing craft aren’t going in on schedule, and people are going to be landed in the wrong place. Some won’t be landed at all. . . . We must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads.”

 

When Cota arrived on Omaha Beach at 7:30 a.m., he found that, as he’d predicted, the beach was in chaos under heavy German fire. Men were dying all around him. Overcast skies had prevented bombardiers from visualizing their targets. Cautious to avoid friendly fire, they dropped most of their explosives too far beyond the Germans’ beach defenses to be of any help to troops on the ground. The surviving soldiers of the 29th Infantry Division had taken cover under a low seawall, paralyzed in a terrifying stalemate. Cota immediately took charge, giving orders and moving the men off the beach.

 

We retraced the steps of Major Richard “Dick” Winters, commander of Easy Company (Company E), 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division on D-Day, made famous by the TV series Band of Brothers. Winters led 13 of his men in eliminating a battery of German gunners that was inflicting high casualties on Allied troops landing on the shore.

 

In the Ardennes Forest, we stood near the foxholes of a reconnaissance platoon of 18 men under the command of 20-year-old Lieutenant Lyle Bouck. In December 1944, Bouck and his platoon had successfully collected intelligence, noting German activity that turned out to be Hitler’s “last gamble,” a surprise attack. But the command failed to act on the information.

 

As brought to life in Alex Kershaw’s book, The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of World War II’s Most Decorated Platoon, Bouck ordered his men to hold off the German advance at all costs. Over eight hours they fended off three attacks from a German battalion of over 500 men, defending a strategically vital hill, which bought the Allies critically important time.

 

Bouck’s platoon surrendered only after they ran out of ammunition. The night they were captured, Bouck turned 21 years old. Later he said, “What a hell of a way to become a man.” Bouck and his men spent the rest of the war in a POW camp, which they were transported to in unmarked trains on a seven-day journey with no food or water, during which they were vulnerable to friendly fire.

 

It wasn’t until decades later that, as the New York Times reports, “special legislation was finally passed that enabled the Army to confer the Distinguished Service Cross” on all of the platoon members, making “the Lanzerath [Ridge] platoon the most decorated of World War II.”

 

The stories of lives nobly risked and sacrificed in military service to this great country are countless. This Memorial Day, I remember especially those old foxholes and well-kept graves in Belgium and France.