Montgomery in the Good War: Portrait of a Southern City, 1939-1946

8. OVERLORD and Aftermath

8 OVERLORD and Aftermath Private James Donald Godwin (far right) and other U.S. Army infantry replacements in a New York City night club in December 1943 before they shipped to England. Courtesy ofCatherine Cobb. Since the early part of the war, the Western Allies had given Europe first priority in their military planning, but British resistance to a direct thrust across the English Channel into France delayed a "second front" for two years. Meanwhile an invasion ofItaly via North Africa and Sicily in 1943 proved no substitute.l Captain Peyton Ward Williams wrote his parents in Ramer ofseeing the bombing of a German bastion impeding the Allied drive on Rome-Monte Cassino. As German paratroops held the famous ab- OVERLORD andAftermath 169 bey in February 1944, "Big and little, our bombers came in steady, slow-seeming waves overhead, swinging over the mountains and hurriedly dumping their loads on the great white building. Suddenly there was no building but a great and growing cloud ofdust through which you could see the individual bomb flashes."2 When Allied troops attacked up the slopes, the paratroopers came out of cellars and sent a torrent of fire from the ruins down on the advancing troops, like medieval defenders of a monastery on a hill pouring molten lead on besiegers climbing the walls on ladders. It was May before the citadel fel1.3 In September 1943 the Americans and the British, pressured by Russian dictator Joseph Stalin, made a final agreement on a cross-channel invasion. Operation OVERLORD was scheduled for the late spring 1944. A massive buildup ofpersonnel and material in England began. Men from the Montgomery area, who included parachute artillery (paratrooper) intelligence officer Captain Howard Upchurch, parachute infantry (paratrooper) private Henry Cotten, infantry private James Donald Godwin, and Private First Class Francis David Powell, army ranger, were part of the buildup.4 Godwin, eighteen, who preferred to be called Donald, arrived from the states as an infantry replacement in January 1944, eight months after his graduation from Lanier. He wrote home, ''I'm stationed somewhere in southwest England. There's a town nearby but I haven't visited it yet.... The chow here is good, a lot better than some I had in the states." In February he became a part of a "band of brothers"Headquarters Company, First Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment, Twenty-ninth "Blue-Gray" Division, stationed at Salisbury; the Twenty-ninth had been the first large American ground forces combat unit to come to England in 1942. On March 1, Godwin wrote home, "I'll celebrate my 19th birthday in ten days, but it won't be much ofa celebration.... I saw my first football game"-American style between two service teams-"in over a year last Sunday and I really enjoyed it." Baseball, however, was his favorite sport, as a spectator and as a participant.s The last major military barrier to launching an invasion was Ger- 170 OVERLORDandAftermath man control of the air over Western and Central Europe. In the first three months of 1944, American fighter planes with enough range to fly deep into the Reich-the essential ingredient for victory in the airarrived in increasing numbers at AAF bases in England. Fighter pilots such as Captain Paul Saffold of Montgomery accompanied the bombers on deep penetration missions. In February and March, two mighty air campaigns took place over Germany itself. When these had concluded, the Americans had wrested daytime air superiority from the Germans-a necessary precondition for a successful landing .6 The crucial air campaigns were costly to all participants, including the AAF. The names ofMontgomerians appeared on the casualty rolls, and the telegram deliveries increased. An Eighth Air Force B-24 navigator , Second Lieutenant Homer Gentry, Jr., survived the first Ploesti mission only to die in 1944. The strain on affected Montgomery families was heavy. An Eighth Air Force pilot ofa B-17, First Lieutenant Leonard Travis ("Tobie") Tobias, who had gone through preflight at Maxwell, ,flew on two missions to Berlin, on March 6 and 8. The mission of the sixth resulted in the loss of sixty-nine heavy bombers, the greatest number of American heavies shot down on any mission of the war. Tobias survived it. On the eighth, German air defenses brought down thirty-nine AAF bombers, almost halfthe number felled on the sixth, but Tobias's plane was among these losses. It went down over Magdeburg...