roanoke.com

"CLICK THAT CLICKER"

By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994

On his jump above Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Joe Comer was supposed to land 400 yards outside town. Instead, he landed only 100 yards away, close enough to hear the gunfire that killed some of his fellow paratroopers.

It was 1:30 a.m.

Comer dropped in a field, and felt lucky. He took a moment to cut a small swatch of silk from his parachute for a souvenir. Like many of the men, Comer realized that the invasion was something extraordinary, possibly historic. He figured on getting a piece of it.

He clutched his clicker and remembered what his lieutenant aid before they jumped. "When we get down, click that damn clicker. We've got to get together."

In the dark countryside, isolated from each other by the jump and dressed in camouflage, they wouldn't be able to see each other. They wouldn't be able to holler for each other, either, for fear of giving away their position to Germans who might be nearby.

The paratroopers were issued clickers to signal each other. One click was answered by two clicks. If there was a noise in the bushes, it got a click. If the bushes didn't click back, it was probably the enemy.

Comer, in the dark and alone, clicked.

He clicked once and waited.

Comer was 26, 5-feet-5 and 130 pounds. His unit had nicknamed him Doc after helped a wounded paratrooper during a jump into Italy. But Comer was no doctor. Before he was drafted, he worked as a locomotive fireman for the Norfolk & Western Railway in Buena Vista.

Three of his brothers also were in the war. By D-Day, one had been killed in the Pacific, although Comer did not know it at the time. In England, where Comer was stationed with the 82nd Airborne Division, he had been insulated from such news.

In fact, in the months before D-Day Comer was told little of anything, even about the impending invasion. He knew he would play a role, but like most of the troops amassed in England, he didn't know any details, such as when the invasion would come, or where, or what his mission would be.

It was only in the days before June 6 that Comer and other paratroopers were briefed on the plan, after they had been bused to the landing strip where they would take off for the invasion. They spent those final days in seclusion, waiting, taking spit baths out of their helmets and sleeping under the wings of the airplanes they would jump from.

On the night of the invasion, a church service was held in the hangar. The unit chaplain read from Psalm 91. "Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust, His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.

"Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day."

Joe Comer prayed for himself and his country. In the invasion, he would carry a miniature copy of the New Testament in the shirt pocket over his heart.

.....

For Murphy Scott and the rest of the men of the 29th Division, the invasion of France was what they had been training for for the past 18 months -- although they hadn't always known that. The invasion had been their reason to be and now, maybe, to die.

The 29th was one of the first infantry divisions to reach Great Britain, arriving in October 1942 aboard the Queen Mary. The division trained in England so long that it gained the uncomplimentary nickname of "England's Own." It would meet the demons of war for the first time on D-Day.

By the spring of 1944, the 29th had company on its 25-mile marches along the English countryside or in its mock landings on English beaches. By June, more than 1.5 million U.S. troops were in Britain. There were a million more from Britain and Canada. Thirty-nine divisions were to take part in the invasion, including 20 American.

As early as September 1941, the British had begun planning an amphibious landing in Europe. The Americans joined the effort after the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

American and British leaders differed over the strategy for the European war. The Americans, confident in their industrial strength, wanted an early assault, and there was talk of making it in 1942. British strategists thought it best to wear down the Germans with a series of campaigns at the edges of central Europe, in the Mediterranean, Balkans, Scandinavia and the Soviet Union.

The British later agreed to an American plan for an operation that would mass 1 million men in Britain for a European invasion in 1943 either in the Balkans or Western Europe. Planning began under British Lt. Gen. Frederick Morgan, who was given the title of chief of staff for a supreme allied commander, who had not yet been named.

A disastrous raid by Canadian troops at the French coastal town of Dieppe in August 1942 illustrated how difficult it would be to attack a fortified port as well as the enormous force that would be needed to mount an invasion. At a conference in Casablanca in January 1943, British Prime Minister.Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed to delay the invasion until 1944. At a conference in Washington in May 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt settled on a May 1, 1944 date.

Although the British and Americans had been helping supply the Soviet Union in its fight against Germany in the East, Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin, angered at delays, had been pushing his allies to open a front in the West. At a meeting between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin in Teheran in November 1943, the commitment to the invasion, code-named "Overlord" was solidified.

The British and Americans were worried that the Soviets, who had conspired with Hitler 1939 to split Poland before the Nazi dictator had turned on them, might make a separate peace with Germany, leaving them to go it alone in the West.

The sooner Hitler could be defeated, the quicker the Allies could turn full attention to the defeat of Japan. At America's entrance into the war after Pearl Harbor, Britain and the United States had agreed to focus first on the war against Germany while pursuing their island-hopping strategy and Indo-Chinese and Chinese campaigns against the Japanese. more...