HANGING ON
By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994
John Talton spent the week before June 6 mostly in misery.
It had started on a high note with canned peaches and a morale-boosting visit from Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, the commander of the invasion forces for Omaha and Utah beaches. Bradley visited the demolition teams in the last day of May as they assembled the explosives they would carry on the beaches. Afterward, Bradley gave, them a case of canned peaches.
"What a luxury it was to have three or four slices of peaches," Talton recalled.
Then the misery began. Talton and his unit were sent to the harbor where they would board the boats for the invasion. The group spent cold nights sleeping outside and waiting, getting stormed on and soaked.
On May 31, the group loaded a boat carrying three tanks. The boat motored into the harbor and dropped anchor, where the group spent more Nights waiting and sleeping on deck and enduring the rain. Each soldier was given $15 worth of French money, stamped invasion currency, and a flier, signed by President Roosevelt, Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, that stated the invasion?s purpose: to save the world for democracy.
Most of the fliers ended up as toilet paper.
Talton, who was 24, was concerned less about democracy than he was about seeing action. "I wasn't half as worried about the enslaved people of Europe as I was about getting over there to get a piece of those Germans" I thought they needed a thrashing, or Japan. I didn't care."
The troops played craps to pass the time and ate canned rations.
On June 5, the day before the invasion, they pulled out. The sea was rough and the waves crashed across the deck all day, as the invading armada started to assemble off the English coast.
Talton clung to a steel cable to avoid getting washed overboard. He relieved himself in his pants and didn't think much about what might happen the next morning. "You were just thinking about hanging on."
.....
A shortage of landing craft had forced Eisenhower to postpone the invasion from May to June. The experts had told Allied planners that early June was the best time to attack because the weather was historically more settled then than at any other time during the summer. In June 1944, however, conditions would be more like the stormy weather patterns of winter.
A window between June 5 and 7 was picked because the tides and the moon were right. The tide was low, exposing German beach obstacles at dawn when the first waves of troops would land; the moon was late-rising, giving American and British paratroopers the light they needed to work by.
The invasion was originally set by Eisenhower and his staff for June 5; but the weather turned bad with low clouds, heavy winds and five-foot waves in the Channel. Eisenhower, on the advice of his weatherman, decided to delay for a day when he was promised a short break in the weather. If the invasion couldn't go on June 6 or 7, the next time the tides and moon would be right would be a month away. more...
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