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All the while, an air of tension was building. Everyone speculated about the date of the invasion, despite the posters that exhorted CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES and ended in an execrable pun, BE LIKE DAD. KEEP MUM. An American major general blabbed at a cocktail party, "On my honor, the invasion takes place before June 13." An angry Dwight Eisenhower ordered him reduced in rank to lieutenant colonel and sent back to the U.S. As the invasion was about to begin, Leonard Dawe, a physics teacher who composed crossword puzzles for the London Daily Telegraph, was grilled by Scotland Yard detectives. They could not believe Dawe was unaware that such words as Utah, Omaha, Neptune and Overlord, all of which had appeared in his puzzles, were code names connected with Dday.
As D-day drew closer, English civilians saw increasingly less of the Americans, or for that matter their own soldiers. As early as December 1943, residents were cleared out of coastal villages that the invaders needed for training and sent elsewhere for a year or so. Butcher George Hannaford recalls that when he returned home to the hamlet of Torcross at the age of 13, "a cowshed and a pigsty were demolished out back of my father's shop, and apple trees were down. It was a tank park there, I think." After April 1,1944, no unauthorized civilian travelers were allowed within ten miles of some eastern and all southern shores.
The armies then stepped up massive landing rehearsals against fortifications similar to those the Germans had erected in Normandy. Exercise Tiger, off Slapton Sands on April 28, ended in tragedy when German torpedo boats slipped into a line of landing ships and sank two. A total of 750 Americans died. Though a U.S. divisional history mentioned the incident as far back as 1948, it has attracted widespread attention only in recent weeks.
On the night of June 5, American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division boarded C-47s at Greenham Common and embarked on their fateful flight to Normandy. Today the airbase there is the scene of bitter protests by the British peace movement against the stationing of U.S. nuclear missiles. "Oh, how short our memories are!" exclaimed the writer of a recent letter to a local weekly, taking angry issue with the protesters.
After the anticipation of the pre-invasion weeks, the great battle "seemed almost anticlimactic," recalls Kathleen Frost, who as a clerk typed up some of the D-day orders. Today the beaches, lanes and fields of southern England are quiet again, ever-present plaques the prime mementos of the frenzied activity of 40 years ago. American ex-G.I.s sometimes visit, walk those familiar streets, stay the night. But the atmosphere cannot be recreated: the girls, the buddies, the excitement, all are gone. The old soldiers take solace in memory, and in the wonderful glow of victory.
—By George J. Church.
Reported by Arthur White/London