House in St James’s Square just after lunch. There, in a long dining room, with maps covered by curtains along the walls, he found himself facing six admirals and five generals, including General Bradley. Bradley interrogated him carefully on the beach-bearing capacity. ‘Sir, I hope you don’t mind my saying it,’ Scott-Bowden said to him just before leaving, ‘but this beach is a very formidable proposition indeed and there are bound to be tremendous casualties.’ Bradley put a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘I know, my boy, I know.’ Omaha was simply the only possible beach between the British sector on the left and Utah beach on the right.
As soon as the invasion troops moved off for embarkation, the civilian population rushed out to wave goodbye. ‘When we left,’ wrote a young American engineer who had been billeted on an English family, ‘[they] cried just as if they were our parents. It was quite a touching thing for us. It seemed like the general public seemed to know pretty much what was going on.’
Secrecy was, of course, impossible to maintain. ‘As we passed through Southampton,’ wrote a British trooper in an armoured regiment, ‘the people gave us a wonderful welcome. Each time that we halted we were all plied with cups of tea and cakes, much to the consternation of the Military Police escorting the column, who had strict orders to prevent any contact between civilian and soldier.’
Most troops were moved in army trucks, but some British units marched, their hobnailed ammunition boots ringing in step on the road. Old people, watching from their front gardens often with tears in their eyes, could not help thinking of the previous generation marching off to the trenches in Flanders. The helmets were a similar shape, but the battledress was different. And soldiers no longer wore puttees. They had canvas gaiters instead, which matched the webbing equipment of belt, yoke, ammunition pouches and pack. Rifle and bayonet had also changed, but not enough to make a noticeable difference.
The troops had sensed that D-Day must be close when twenty-four-hour leave passes were offered. For the less enthusiastic soldier this provided a last chance to disappear or get drunk. There had been many cases of soldiers going absent in the pre-invasion period, but relatively few cases of outright desertion. Most had returned to duty to be ‘with their mates’ when the invasion was on. Pragmatic commanding officers did not want to lose men to a military prison. They left it up to the individual to redeem himself in battle.
Soldiers noticed that officers had suddenly become much more solicitous of their men. Film shows were laid on in the closed camps. A more generous ration of beer was available and dance music played from loudspeakers. The more cynical spotted that quartermasters had suddenly become generous, an ominous sign. The poet Keith Douglas, a twenty-four-year-old captain in the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, wrote to Edmund Blunden, that poet of the previous war, ‘I’ve been fattened up for the slaughter and am simply waiting for it to start.’ Douglas was one of a number of men who harboured a strong sense of imminent death and spoke to their closest friends about it. It is striking how many turned out to have been right, and yet perhaps such a belief somehow turned into a self- fulfilling prophecy. Douglas went to church parade on the last Sunday. He walked afterwards with the regimental padre, who recorded that Douglas was reconciled to his approaching death and not morbid about it. In the view of a fellow officer, he was fatalistic because he felt that he had used up his ration of luck in the desert war.
Almost everyone hated the waiting and longed for the worst to be over. ‘All are tense and all are pretending to be casual,’ commented an American infantryman. ‘Bravado helps,’ he added. Many thought of their girlfriends. Some had married them in haste to make sure that they would benefit from a pension if the worst happened. One American soldier bundled up all his pay and sent it to a jeweller so that his English fiancee could select a ring ready for their wedding on his return. It was a time of intense personal emotion. ‘The women who have come to see their men off,’ noted a journalist shortly before, ‘nearly always walk to the very end of the platform to wave their elaborately smiling goodbyes as the train pulls out.’
A few men cracked under the strain. ‘One night,’ recorded a member of the US 1st Infantry Division, ‘one of the soldiers put on two bandoliers of ammunition and his hand grenades, grabbed a rifle, and took off. Nobody had seen him do this, but the moment they became aware, a search party was formed. The search party found him. He refused to give up, so he was killed. We never did know whether he just didn’t want to die on the beach, or he was a spy. Whatever he did, it was dumb. He was a sure dead man versus a maybe.’ Perhaps he had had a premonition of what lay ahead on Omaha.
While tanks and troops were still being loaded on to landing ships that Friday evening, Group Captain Stagg conferred again over secure landlines with the other meteorological centres. He had to give a firm report at the conference due to start at 21.30 hours, but there was still no agreement. ‘Had it not been fraught with such potential tragedy, the whole business was ridiculous. In less than half an hour I was expected to present to General Eisenhower an “agreed” forecast for the next five days which covered the time of launching of the greatest military operation ever mounted: no two of the expert participants in the discussion could agree on the likely weather even for the next 24 hours.’
They argued round and round until time ran out. Stagg hurried to the library in the main house to present a report to all the key commanders for Overlord.
‘Well, Stagg,’ Eisenhower said. ‘What have you got for us this time?’
Stagg felt compelled to follow his own instinct and overlook the more optimistic views of his American colleagues at Bushey Park: ‘The whole situation from the British Isles to Newfoundland has been transformed in recent days and is now potentially full of menace.’ As he went into detail, several of the senior officers glanced out of the window at the beautiful sunset in slight bewilderment.[1]
After questions about the weather for the airborne drops, Eisenhower probed further about the likely situation on 6 and 7 June. There was a significant pause, according to Tedder. ‘If I answered that, Sir,’ Stagg replied, ‘I would be guessing, not behaving as your meteorological adviser.’
Stagg and his American counterpart, Colonel D. N. Yates, withdrew, and soon General Bull came out to tell them that there would be no change of plan for the next twenty-four hours. As they returned to their tented sleeping quarters, the two men knew that the first ships had already left their anchorages. Stagg could not help thinking of the black joke made to him by Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Morgan, the initial chief planner of Overlord. ‘Good luck, Stagg. May all your depressions be nice little ones, but remember we’ll string you up from the nearest lamp post if you don’t read the omens aright.’
Early the next morning, Saturday, 3 June, the news could hardly have been worse. The weather station at Blacksod Point in western Ireland had just reported a rapidly falling barometer and a force six wind. Stagg felt ‘all but physically nauseated’ by the weather charts and the way the teams still analysed the same data in different ways. That evening, at 21.30 hours, he and Yates were summoned. They entered the library, its shelves emptied of books. Mess armchairs were arranged in concentric arcs, with commanders-in-chief in the front row and their chiefs of staff and subordinate commanders behind. Eisenhower, his chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, and Tedder sat on three chairs facing the audience.
‘Gentlemen,’ Stagg began. ‘The fears my colleagues and I had yesterday about the weather for the next three or four days have been confirmed.’ He then launched into a detailed forecast. It was a gloomy picture of rough seas, winds up to force six and low cloud. ‘Throughout this recital,’ Stagg wrote later, ‘General Eisenhower sat motionless, with his head slightly to one side resting on his hand, staring steadily towards me. All in the room seemed to be temporarily stunned.’ Not surprisingly, Eisenhower felt compelled to recommend a provisional postponement.
It was not a good night for Eisenhower. His aide, Commander Harry Butcher, came to him later with the news that Associated Press had put out a tape stating, ‘Eisenhower’s forces are landing in France.’ Even though the agency cancelled the story twenty-three minutes later, it had been picked up by CBS and Radio Moscow. ‘He sort of grunted,’ Butcher noted in his diary.
When Stagg went off to his tent at about midnight, having heard of the provisional postponement, it was strange to look up between the trees and see that ‘the sky was almost clear and everything around was still and quiet’. Stagg did not attempt to sleep. He spent the early hours of the morning writing up detailed notes of all discussions. When he had finished the forecast was no better, even though outside all remained calm.
At 04.15 hours on the Sunday, 4 June, at yet another meeting, Eisenhower decided that the twenty-four-hour postponement provisionally agreed the night before must stand. Without maximum air support, the risks were too great. The order went out to call back the convoys. Destroyers set to sea at full speed to round up landing craft which could not be contacted by radio and shepherd them back.
Stagg, who had then gone back to his camp bed exhausted, was taken aback when he awoke a few hours
