Landing on Utah Beach
The 4th Division’s entire first wave, consisting of more than 600 infantrymen in 20 landing craft, had come ashore considerably south of its intended landing point. Brigadier-General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was one of the first soldiers to discern this disturbing mistake. His command—“We’re going to start the war from right here!”—would become the defining moment of the Utah Beach invasion.
The landmarks that Salinger had trained to spot, to orient himself once ashore, weren’t there. The only fortunate thing was that the German defenses were a bit weaker there than they might’ve been had Salinger and his unit landed farther to the north on the Cherbourg Peninsula, but nonetheless the bullets were the same. The explosions, the artillery, the churning sand, the surf, the confusion, the rain, the smoke, the seasickness.
Day One ashore for Salinger would’ve been sheer terror. The urgency of getting himself ashore, getting set up ashore, protecting himself, the soldiers around him. Fire. Smoke. Yelling. No amount of training could’ve prepared him for that. The experience was brutal and sudden and shocking. It was simply burned into his soul.
Salinger’s only story that directly evokes war, “The Magic Foxhole,” was written shortly after D-Day and is clearly based on that experience. It was never published. Cynical toward even the idea of war, the story relates the battle fatigue suffered by two soldiers, one of whom, Garrity, tells the story in rapid-fire monologue. In the opening scene, a chaplain who is trying to find his glasses beneath dead bodies on Normandy beach gets killed. God is now not only sightless but dead. Salinger will spend the rest of his life trying to find a replacement vision, a replacement for God.
(“The Magic Foxhole,” unpublished):
We come in twenty minutes before H-Hour on D-Day. There wasn’t nothing on the beach but the dead boys of “A” and “B” Company, and some dead sailor boys, and a Chaplain that was crawling around looking for his glasses in the sand. He was the only thing that was moving, and eighty-eight shells were breaking all around him, and there he was crawling around on his hands and knees, looking for his glasses. He got knocked off… That’s what the Beach was like when I come in.
Many of the passages in “The Magic Foxhole” are autobiographical and exactly what Salinger witnessed. A similar account comes from Private Ray A. Mann, who landed on Utah Beach with the 8th Regiment.
Once ashore, the first object for Salinger and the rest of his regiment was to organize and secure the beachhead. Some of the worst of the fighting wasn’t at the beaches. That was over
and done with in the first few hours, but the utter grind, the sheer hell of grueling infantry combat, came once they cleared the beach.
Utah Beach was not the bloodiest beach on D-Day. There were two-hundred-odd casualties suffered by the 4th Infantry Division on Utah, and these were men Salinger knew and had trained with. The issue about Utah and D-Day is not one of casualties sustained on D-Day but the casualties sustained in the days immediately after. Because Utah was not the bloodiest beach on D-Day, there was a false sense of security among the 4th Division, certainly among Salinger and his comrades, as to what was to come next.
--Adapted from Salinger. Simon & Schuster. 2013. 720 pages.
By David Shields and Shane Salerno
Salinger’s work in the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC)
Salinger’s job was support for assault troops, working in German command posts and communication posts and communications terminals, telephone exchanges, also telegraph. We also had lists of people identified as German collaborators. We were to seize records, interrogate. A lot of it was aborted because a lot of the targets had been blown apart. For instance, the telephone exchange in Ste.-Marie-Eglise [had been destroyed]. We did get some prisoners, but we didn’t have time to interrogate them; we had to send them back to England.
As a member of counterintelligence, Salinger had a lot of freedom, a lot of latitude. In some ways, it was a more intellectual, probing war for him than the average grunt. He, for example, would not have to reply to an officer with his rank because he was in counterintelligence. He could actually order a major or a colonel to do something, and yet he was a sergeant. He had a lot of latitude to move behind and near the enemy lines, to understand the culture, to understand the people, to understand what war did to the local people, how it strained the relationships between soldiers and locals, how it had corrupted and infected and damaged these great European cultures and traditions and peoples.
He would have understood what it was like to be a civilian and be bombed, what it was like to be a collaborator, to be a young, attractive female whose only opportunity for bread and to feed her family was to have a relationship with a German soldier.
He would have understood that level of complexity, not only of combat, but more importantly of the relationships that are strained and come into connection with combat and how war poisons everything. It spreads from the battlefield and poisons everything. He would have had a very complete picture of what war did to ordinary people in the Second World War.
--Adapted from Salinger. Simon & Schuster. 2013. 720 pages.
By David Shields and Shane Salerno
The Hürtgen Forest
Salinger’s regiment was like most of the other American outfits in the Hürtgen: it got destroyed. The thick woods and lousy weather made it hard for commanders to coordinate regimental movements. The intensity of German artillery fire also negated movement. It was not at all unusual for company-size units to get swallowed up, surrounded, cut off, or destroyed amid the brooding fir trees. The firebreaks were the only places where soldiers could advance in any numbers. Naturally, those firebreaks were zeroed in on with a prodigious volume of machine-gun and artillery fire. Any opening in the trees was swept with grazing fire—waist high or even lower. A man could hug the mud for dear life, only to take a bullet in his shoulder, through his head, or in the back of his thighs since these were generally the highest silhouette parts of his body.
The enemy artillery shells—generically called .88s but also including quite a bit of higher-caliber stuff—usually exploded in the treetops. The resulting bursts sent metal and wood fragments downward, ripping through a man’s back, his abdomen, or, most frequently, his arms. Shrapnel wounds were so common that medics were simply overwhelmed. Most ran out of bandages, sulfa powder, and morphine. The mud, rain, and cold only added to their problems because soldiers often had pneumonia, trench foot, or just common head colds. If a man didn’t have overhead cover, his foxhole was practically useless because tree bursts would shred him. If he was caught in the open in the middle of a barrage, the safest thing to do was to huddle against a tree. Of course, the problem with that was that trees often took direct hits and exploded or toppled over. The sheer volume of shells exploding in such a confined forest created an avalanche of noise and the sense that the explosions would never stop. Men spent so much time huddling desperately for cover that they felt isolated, cut off from the outside world. The darkness of the forest added to that sense.
This isolation led to a greater rate of combat fatigue cases—and certainly this was the case for Salinger. As for the effect of all this, most participants in the Hürtgen were shattered forever by the abject misery, the shelling, the hopelessness of the entire mess. Some could never set foot in woods again. Quite a few were, from that point on, angry and skeptical about the quality of their leadership. The trauma of Hürtgen never left those who were there.
--Adapted from Salinger. Simon & Schuster. 2013. 720 pages.
By David Shields and Shane Salerno
Liberating the Nazi Death Camps
J. D. Salinger was one of the first Americans to witness the full evil of the Nazi regime when he went into a concentration camp in Germany in the spring of 1945. He would have seen unimaginable horrors: burning bodies, piles of burning bodies. It’s a truism because it’s true: words aren’t enough to describe it.
Soldiers walked through a beautiful, manicured German village, and at the end of the road was this camp that looked like hell piled with corpses. For a soldier like Salinger walking into a camp, there was a stillness to it and a craziness to it. You were caught off guard. You weren’t psyched for battle. These weren’t liberations in the sense of busting down the gates or anything like that. The war was over; you could let down your guard a little. These soldiers basically walked into these horrific situations. Unguarded and unsuspecting, they were walking into an open place. This was like opening up, and falling into, a graveyard.
When American GIs walked into a camp, the shock was so horrendous that they’d just break down in tears. They’d fall on the ground. Some of them had to be immediately treated by doctors. These are the liberators I’m talking about now, not the inmates.
For a soldier like Salinger, who’d been through so much violence, one would have to wonder, what was the final psychic straw in this illogical world turned upside down? At least in battle you had an enemy.
There was something different about the liberations that pushed soldiers like Salinger over the edge. When you’re in the military and fighting battles, there is logic to it. When the soldiers came upon these camps, there was no battle to win. They were at an extremely vulnerable moment, because for most of them this was the very last thing that was going to happen to them during the war.
--Adapted from Salinger. Simon & Schuster. 2013. 720 pages.
By David Shields and Shane Salerno