Army & Navy – Letter from a Cousin

In a roundabout way last week a Briton showed what Britons have long thought of U.S. soldiers but have never said out loud. From the Normandy front the London Daily Mail’s Correspondent John Hall reported on the G.I. Joes who had been quartered in England. Hall wrote:

“No doubt you are wondering how they are faring. . . . Back there in Britain life seemed so generous to them—clothes, food, equipment and money, particularly money. . . . [You] wondered how these American cousins of ours with their neatly creased clothes and their fondness for what seemed to us to be luxuries would face the stubborn Hun. . . .

They Die Quietly. “First thing that happens to the Americans when they get into the line is that they stop talking. You notice how the conversational silence deepens as you pass the thump of artillery and approach the chatter of machine guns.

“That apparent casualness and man-to-man friendliness which rather appalled our disciplinarians at home disappears. Commands are tersely given and tersely acknowledged with an immediate ‘Yes, sir,’ and a smart salute. All trace of casualness evaporates. These men go to it with the snap of Guardsmen. . . .

“Often I wonder if the people back home in America, thirsting for headlines of captured towns, realize how many Americans lie newly dead in these Normandy fields: men who have died to win a few yards of hedgerow. . . .

“They die quietly, these American boys—without fuss or complaint, perhaps muttering about ‘Mom’ just before the end.

“Grousing—’bitching,’ as they call it—is left behind in the rear areas.

“No soldiers could be more resolute. I have seen them ordered to attack a strong point almost impregnable to infantry. They filed off without a word. Many died in that sortie. The survivors did not utter one word of private criticism of the task they had been set.

They Remember Britain. “Their deep American confidence in themselves—sometimes back home you thought they had too much of it—disappears from the surface and conversation goes inside, where it stays. . . .

“You expect to see officers in the front line, but no army in the world sees the profusion of colonels and higher officers in the battle line more continuously than the American.

“When things hot up and you dive into a foxhole you are just as likely as not to find that the man who followed you was a brigadier or major general.

“American toughness is not just talk. . . .

.”Britain and its memories are still very ‘much in the minds of these American boys. . . . Scores tell me they want to return home after the war via Britain to revisit their friends to thank people who were kind to them—and to apologize for all the cracks they made about our weather. We have Normandy weather to thank for that.”