Yahoo Autos Storming Normandy in a World War II Jeep
This story was originally published on August 19, 2009.
It had a lot of names. Army quartermasters called it the "quarter-ton" because of its payload capacity. Willys-Overland labeled its version the MB, for "military, B-model." And the Ford Motor Company, which also built them, called it the GPW because, in the Ford parts nomenclature, G stood for government-contract vehicles, P for an 80-inch wheelbase, and W for the design license that Ford secured from Willys.
But the GIs had the last word, nicknaming the little hill jumper after a supernatural dog named Eugene the Jeep from the Popeye cartoons and comic strip.
America didn't march off to war in 1941. Befitting a country with what was then the world's foremost automobile industry, it drove. Armadas in the air and on the sea were meager compared with the vast armada that America's auto plants fielded on the ground-ground that still, more than six decades later, is considered sacred.
Jutting into the Atlantic Ocean like a hitchhiker's thumb pointing toward England, Normandy is a bucolic backwater of grassy livestock pastures and cobbled-limestone villages that rolls and folds like a rumpled green bedspread across France's Cotentin Peninsula. Its eastern beaches were just another chilly, perennially damp stretch of French coastline until June 6, 1944.
D-Day-in French, le Jour J-opened the murderously final act of Europe's last, great war. More than 23,000 airborne troops landed by parachute and glider. Five beaches-Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword, 70 miles from end to end-were stormed by 156,000 American, British, Canadian, and French infantry in some 50,000 vehicles. "It was as if the cities of Green Bay, Racine, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, were picked up and moved-every man, woman, and child, every automobile and truck-to the east side of Lake Michigan in one night," wrote historian Stephen Ambrose.
Waiting in the dunes, on the bluffs, and behind the impenetrable hedgerows were an estimated 50,000 German troops and foreign conscripts backed up by more than 600 tanks. They had spent four years preparing, girding the beaches with mines and obstacles and speckling Normandy with more than 900 concrete bunkers, machine-gun pillboxes, and artillery casemates. The world had witnessed epic battles on sea and on land but never a battle where such a titanic force came from one to attack the other.
Casualty figures are disputed, but by midnight on June 6, it is believed that about 4400 Allied fighters were dead. By the time Normandy fell almost two months later, at least 650,000 combatants and civilians were dead or wounded.
Sixty-five years later, this generation can't hope to see Normandy as the liberators saw it, nor endure what they endured. But anyone can drive exactly what they drove.
Any tour of Normandy wouldn't be complete unless it was done in a jeep, I somehow convinced my obliging saint of a wife, Tina. There are plenty of old jeeps to buy in Europe, simply because thousands were left behind when the troops came home. All that was known about the service history of the 1944 GPW we found for sale on a British website was that it had served in the postwar Greek army.
The seller had recently painted his GPW, a jeep before Jeep was a registered trademark, with the squadron markings and nose art of an actual American B-26 Marauder bomber. The aircraft, dubbed Rum Buggy by its commander because the crew loved rum and Coke, took a German flak shell through the right wing two weeks before D-Day. But the shell didn't explode, and the lucky crew survived Messerschmitt attacks and the resulting crash landing in England. If you're going to fall for a jeep based solely on a story, that's a pretty good one.
According to Ray Cowdery's encyclopedic two-volume jeep history, All-American Wonder, Ford billed the government $925 for this GPW. Nowadays they're a bit pricier. After some negotiation, about $16,500 changed hands, a decent price today for a decent war-era jeep. Especially one with the requisite essentials for a weeklong re-invasion of France.
Rum Buggy came with a shovel and an ax, a five-gallon jerrycan, a rifle rack, a five-piece radio antenna with a (nonworking) field radio, a first-aid kit, a grease gun, a steel-frame bustle basket on the tailgate for extra gear, and, particularly important when one is assaulting soggy beaches, a "winter top" including canvas sides and doors.
After some basic maintenance-everything on a jeep is stupendously basic-we hit London's M25 ring road doing a blatty, blustery 48 mph, heading for Portsmouth, the same seaport from which much of the 4100-ship flotilla set forth in the gloomy hours before D-Day.
Four years before the invasion, American military planners were obsessed with motorizing the heretofore largely horse-drawn army. Tiny American Bantam Car Company-it made only 1227 vehicles in 1939-unexpectedly wowed officials with its Blitz Buggy reconnaissance car in 1940. But the Army wanted industry's big guns involved, so it dismissed Bantam with a contract for trailers and tasked Willys-Overland in Toledo, Ohio, with the job of refining Bantam's prototype.
The only other bidder was Ford, whose own, hardly lovely concept was called the Pygmy. Ford was pulled in because it was Ford, and at the time, nobody built cars faster or cheaper than they did at Henry's house. Willys improved on Bantam's design, Ford licensed and finessed it, and the two automakers eventually built about 645,000 jeeps, with Ford producing about 282,000 and Willys around 363,000.
On the eve of D-Day, Ford's five jeep plants were crating up and shipping 1700 jeeps a week, a level the Army hoped would match the destruction rate. In combat, a jeep had a life expectancy of 90 days.
In line at the Portsmouth ferry terminal on England's south coast, we spot the first jeep like ours. It's an earlier model, perhaps a '43, also built by Ford. You can tell by the classic script "Ford" logo pressed into its tailgate. Later GPWs don't have the full logo, though a tiny script F can often be found in various body panels. (We've become jeep nerds.)
"They do have a way of getting under your skin," says Chris Bond of the North Staffordshire Military Vehicle Trust. He has invited us to camp at his club's site in Carentan in Normandy. "Especially when you get what we call 'jeep bum.' "
We've already discovered that a jeep's thin seat cushion feels no softer than a sack of rock salt after a couple of hours. Shorter and narrower than the original Mazda Miata, a GPW is puny even when sharing pavement with Europe's commuter cubes. Designed to carry a three-man patrol, it's almost two feet shorter, more than a foot slimmer, and, at 2400 pounds before armaments and gear, more than 1300 pounds lighter than a base 2010 Jeep Wrangler.
The Willys-designed side-valve "Go Devil" four-cylinder dates to the mid-1930s. Making 54 horsepower from 134 cubic inches (2.2 liters), it fires off a rapid rat-a-tatt-tatt from its single mid-mounted side pipe. Running on 68-octane gasoline, the mid-grade in 1944, the original government specs list a top speed of 65 mph in its top gear, third. But a jeep is far happier trundling along at 45 to 50 mph.
After showing our passports and reservation, we round the corner to the boarding area and find . . . Sturgis, in olive drab. A gaggle of wartime Harley-Davidsons with rumpled saddlebags and leather rifle holsters strapped to the forks are queued up, plus maybe another 50 jeeps, a few canvas-backed GMC two-and-a-half-ton supply trucks, and a square, cycle-fender Dodge command car.
Standing around are Brits dressed as American paratroopers, American infantrymen, American P-47 pilots, American MPs, American nurses, and American WACs (Women's Army Corps). Fellow jeep drivers wave or flash us the V sign, an obligatory salute that must be answered every time one passes another vintage jeep. In Normandy, it proved to be roughly every 37 seconds. An invasion is on, and to eyes accustomed to seeing such scenes in grainy black-and-white photos and newsreels, it all seems weirdly surreal in color.
On the four-hour ferry ride to Cherbourg on the western tip of the Cotentin, various "living history" reenactor units cluster together. Andy Duncan from Watford, England, is in a khaki HBT-a replica "herringbone twill" cotton shirt identical to ones issued to American soldiers in 1944. He says he switched from a British Army reenactor unit to the U.S. 2nd Rangers because "I like the uniforms better, they're more comfortable. Plus, I like the marching style. It's a bit more slouchy-like."
In another corner, about two dozen members of England's Screaming Eagles LHG (Living History Group) mill about excitedly. Some are still in their bony, historically accurate youth, but far more are pushing middle age and sporting well-tended beer guts. Later, in their full gear, they'll be playing 101st Airborne boys, the so-called Band of Brothers paratroopers from Ambrose's book and the worshiped HBO miniseries of the same name.
Strategically situated astride Nationale 13, then as today the main highway connecting Cherbourg's ferry docks with the rest of Normandy, Sainte-Mère-Église found itself ablaze in the chaotic predawn hours of D-Day. Real Screaming Eagles fell in and around the village square, where German troops were overseeing the dousing of a terribly timed house fire. A slaughter of Americans ensued. One 101st survivor, John Steele, famously snagged his parachute on the church spire as bullets zinged around him. Today, a uniformed dummy replica of Steele is still up there as a permanent monument. (Steele was shot in the foot and captured two hours later but eventually escaped. He died in 1969.)
We find modern Sainte-Mère-Église, population still just a couple thousand, in the throes of a street party. Throngs pack the square, along with kiddy rides, stalls selling grilled sausages and beer, and a stage on which the American Legion Band of Holland, Michigan, is ripping through Stars and Stripes Forever. Strings of American, British, and French flags and the 101st's screaming-eagle mascot overhang the streets. Somebody walks past waving Old Glory on a pole.
America is being loved by foreigners-no common sight these days. But everyone in the crowd is speaking in French, something that is probably Dutch, or with a Cockney accent. The village tourist office has only six American signatures in its guest book from the past few days.
But there are jeeps aplenty: ambulance jeeps, radio jeeps, yellow airfield jeeps, glider-born jeeps draped in camouflage netting and fitted with .50-caliber machine guns (so much for the pre-event warnings about snippy French police cracking down on deactivated weapons), steel-plated attack jeeps, gull-gray U.S. Navy jeeps, and amphibious jeeps that look like fishing skiffs on wheels.
Knapsacks, bedrolls, ammo crates, rifles, pots and pans, rope, radio cables, digging tools, medic bags, road signs to Berlin, and war booty such as German helmets are strapped, draped, lashed, and hung with precise haphazardness by owners eager to create an authentically bedraggled look. Some jeeps are flying American flags with the 48 stars of the time.
By far the most macabre jeep accessory is the wire cutter, a five-foot vertical steel bar notched and sharpened at the top. Shortly after D-Day, combat engineers welded them to front bumpers as a hastily improvised countermeasure to the steel twine that German units were stringing across trails to decapitate the crews in speeding jeeps.
After sharing a supermarket checkout line with a few Panzer troops, we follow out of town the thimble-shaped stone cairns marking the Voie de la Liberté, the 900-mile "liberty road" that today commemorates the Allied path of advance from Normandy to Belgium.
A 65-year-old jeep has delightfully direct, iron-levering-steel controls. You start it not with the key-accurately restored jeeps don't even have keys-but with a foot button on the transmission tunnel (or with a sharp wrist flick using the supplied crank). The spaghetti-thin steering wheel tugs and shivers with each road disturbance; the hydraulic, unboosted brake pedal is like stepping on a football.
The spindly shifter clicks into its three forward gears with a short, fingertip push and military precision. Two floor levers shift the transfer case from two-wheel drive to four and from four-high into low gear. There are no front hub locks to free the wheels of axle drag, so our mileage never exceeds the mid-teens. Germans loved capturing jeeps but complained bitterly about their fuel appetite.
We point Rum Buggy toward nearby Dead Man's Corner, a scene of vicious D-Day fighting and originally called "Dead Man in a Tank Corner" for the knocked-out Sherman tank that served as its crew's coffin for days after the battle. A restored Sherman tank is parked near the same spot, having just clank-clanked up the road.
At Dead Man's, we find a small museum and another 101st unit, dug into the same hillside as their role models were 65 years ago and having their pictures snapped by tourists. Looking up from his freshly excavated foxhole, nine-year reenactor veteran Robert Parton of West Sussex, England, says he and his 50 or so cohorts will spend the next three days guarding Dead Man's. Not surprisingly, neither Parton's wife nor his three kids are present. "Taking the wife to Spain in August," he explains.
Parton says it costs about $2000 to get fully outfitted as a World War II paratrooper. Luckily, everything is available at the annual D-Day flea markets. At the huge meet in Vierville-sur-Mer, just back from Omaha Beach, a pair of reproduction jump boots costs $118; an original helmet, $376. A German MG42 machine gun, needle sleek, smokestack black, and lawfully disabled, is $2100. The wheels came off the German army in Normandy, and some of them are for sale here. A German SdKfz 251 half-track wheel, no doubt rusty because of a long entombment in a local pasture, runs $140.
Situated on the Douve River between Utah and Omaha, Carentan was a town of 4000 vital to the Americans, who were trying to link their two beachheads, and to the Germans, who were trying to stop them. The battle lasted a week, American artillery lobbing 6000 shells into the town on one day alone, June 10.
Yet, when Carentan's modern-day citizens line the Place de la République to watch a column of about 200 reenactors march in, the Star Spangled Banner plays before La Marseillaise. It's the kind of gesture from the French that puts a lump in a Yankee's throat. Carentan's mayor, Jean-Pierre Lhonneur, tells the five U.S. vets sitting in the front row, "We are living in a peaceful country thanks to you."
In Normandy, history is more than what's on the History Channel. It's at Pointe du Hoc, the fortified promontory west of Omaha Beach that was bombarded so intensely that the craters still appear as a moonscape on Google Earth. It's at the German coastal battery in Azeville, where an unexploded 14-inch shell from the USS Nevada was only dug out of the grass in 1994, half a century after it sailed through the casemate's narrow gun port, punched a still jagged hole through three feet of concrete, bounced off the floor of an antechamber while killing a dozen men, and exited out the back. It's in the small church at Angoville-au-Plain, where dark stains still identify the pews on which American paratroopers bled as they were treated by medics.
Like them, William Tritt first came to Normandy by parachute. That night, the sky was black and his plane was lost, the formation scattered by antiaircraft fire.
"We jumped at 2:15 in the morning at 450 feet. It took about five seconds to hit the ground." The blue-and-red shingle of the "All American" 82nd Airborne division still on his left shoulder, Tritt, 86, unreels his story in a farmhouse in Le Cambe, a few miles from Omaha.
"I landed about four miles outside of Sainte-Mère-Église, between a railroad track and a cow pasture. We were supposed to land on Hill 30, but we didn't know where it was. We didn't even know we were in Normandy. Only the noncommissioned officers carried compasses. There were 10 of us there in the dark, and none of us had a compass, so we just started walking."
Tritt spent much of his first night at war at the edge of a field, watching German soldiers pick over the remains of crashed gliders. "We were more hardened physically than mentally by our training. To tell you the truth, I was scared to death." Tritt is from Pennsylvania and now lives in Gainesville, Florida. With the 65th anniversary of D-Day approaching, he bought a plane ticket with some help from friends.
Tritt also had to get a passport and a suitcase, this being his first trip overseas since 1945. Over the past two days, he's been swarmed by adoring French citizens, has met the president of the United States, and has returned to the exact spot of his landing. Of the reenactors, Tritt says with a grimace, "Most of them were never in the service. But I guess everybody has their thing."
The darkness is just thinning at 6 a.m. on June 6, H-Hour on Omaha, the bloodiest of the D-Day meat grinders. Churning nonchalantly through deep sand, Rum Buggy has reached the water's edge of Dog Green, the beach depicted in Saving Private Ryan. Suddenly, our jeep is commandeered by Dutch reenactors hoping to use it as a prop in a memorial service.
Sybren van der Velden, 40, lays the vestments out on the jeep's hood, just as wartime chaplains at the front often did. His assistant plays hymns on a small organ. An American M2 half-track studded with machine guns rolls by as British reenactors in U.S. 29th Infantry garb stage a charge across the sand for a French TV crew. A few fall down and are set upon by "medics." A gray sky has doused the sunrise.
Private Ryan and the real bands of brothers came and departed this place long ago, but time seems to be permanently locked in low gear here.
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