"Then we saw the coast of France"
Churchill dreaded that D-Day would turn into another First Day on the Somme, but instead of the 20,000 dead that he feared, British casualties — including wounded and missing — on 6 June 1944 totalled 3,000. However, on each day thereafter, the fighting was every bit as terrible as it had been in Picardy, a generation before. Allied losses in Normandy in the summer of 1944 were 425,000 killed, wounded and missing, roughly double the German losses. Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) was with the Allied troops as they crossed the English Channel on D-Day:
"Then we saw the coast of France. As we closed in, there was one LCT [landing craft, tank] near us, with washing hung up on a line, and between the loud explosions of mines being detonated on the beach, one could hear dance music coming from its radio. There were barrage balloons, looking like comic toy elephants, bouncing in the high wind above the massed ships, and you could hear invisible planes flying behind the grey ceiling of cloud. Troops were unloading from big ships to heavy barges or to light craft, and on the shore, moving up brown roads that scarred the hillside, our tanks clanked slowly and steadily forward.
Then we stopped noticing the invasion, the ships, the ominous beach, because the first wounded had arrived. An LCT drew alongside our ship, pitching in the waves. A boy in a steel helmet shouted up to the crew at the aft rail, and a wooden box looking like a lidless coffin was lowered on a pulley, and with the greatest difficulty, bracing themselves against the movement of their boat, the men on the LCT laid a stretcher inside the box. The box was raised to our deck, and out of it was lifted someone who was closer to being a child than a man, dead-white and seemingly dying. The first wounded man to be brought to that ship for safety and care was a German prisoner.
Everything happened at once. We had six water ambulances — light motor launches that swung down from the ship's side and could be raised the same way when full of wounded. They carried six litter cases apiece, or as many walking wounded as could be crowded into them. Now they were being lowered, with shouted orders: 'That beach over there where they've got streamers up.'
The stretcher-bearers, who were part of the American medical personnel, now started on their long, back-breaking job. By the end of that trip, their hands were padded with blisters and they were practically hospital cases themselves. For the wounded had to be got from the shore into our own water ambulances or into other craft, raised over the side, and then transported down the winding stairs of this converted pleasure ship to the wards. The ship's crew became volunteer stretcher-bearers instantly."
Martha Gellhorn, who reported on the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6 June 1944 for Collier's Weekly, was a war correspondent during some of the key conflicts of the 20th century, from the Spanish Civil War and World War II to Vietnam and the Six-Day War in the Middle East. Tomorrow: "On a deck, in a bunk by the wall, lay a very young lieutenant. He had a bad chest wound, his face was white, and he lay too still."
