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Text originally published in 1944 under the same title.
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Publishers Note
Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.
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MANY A WATCHFUL NIGHT
LT. JOHN MASON BROWN, USNR
Golden care!
That keepst the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night!
KING HENRY IV, PART II
Off Normandy
Rear-Admiral ( now Vice-Admiral ) Alan G. Kirk, USN Watches the Invasions Progress
Chapter I The Shadows Before
We were watching the skies with an interest unknown to men reared in peaceful cities, where weather is a weekend worry. We were watching the gray skies, and the gray, choppy, rain-speckled waves around us.
No. This is wrong. This past tense is a lie. It is historys prerogative when the fears and hopes of men, materialized as deeds, have cooled into those facts which other people read with interest or with boredom.
Participants have their own whittled sense of time. They do not know, they cannot guess, the storys outcome. They are uncertain about the minutes end. Battles are not faced or fought in the past tense. Men going into battle admit only one tensethe present. A suspensive present it is, cut off, except in sudden flashes of memory, from what has been and with the future quiveringly unrevealed. So, for truths sake, lets start out all over again.
We are glancing intently at those choppy waves, each one of which is grayer than the battleship gray of the Augusta on which we stand or of the ships huddled near us within the harbor. We are scanning the heavy English clouds above us, not thinking for the moment of enemy planes or of what soft pillows they would find here.
It is Monday, June 5; the afternoon of the second day we have waited. We have waited? The whole world has been waiting. For slow months and slowly quickening weeks, all the nations and all the separated families belonging to those nations have been waiting. They have been waiting with rumors rising tidally; with the faraway wiseacres speaking knowledgeably about what they cannot know, about what only the anxious few do know.
This waiting is not easy for anyone. If anything it must be harder for those hung upon their radios at home with nothing to do except to listen from a fearful distance; to listen and read, remember and dread. It is not easy even for us lucky ones who are present, who have been trained in time-filling duties, and hence can find that blessed release from apprehension which is action.
On the Sunday that was yesterday we had thought the Invasion would start. We trust it will today. We are only the men crowded on one cruiser in one crowded harbors worth of the armada scheduled to sail. In port after port along Englands southern coast, in ports in Wales, in ports to the north in Scotland and in Ireland, other vessels, large and small, freighted with arms and men, with history and with hopes, are waiting, more tightly clustered than the grapes of wrath.
Yesterday we waited through the long Sabbath stretches. Yesterday we waited through the nervous watches of that Sunday night when they might have comewhen in fact they should have comeover. Today we have waited restlessly through the routines of this fateful Monday.
Each waiting ship is a sealed ship, carrying men too much in the know to touch any shore now but the far shore. We have heard it whispered that there is only a three-day interval so blessed by the moon and the tides that the Invasion could at present start. In other words, we have heard it said that if it does not take place now, it could notwould nothappen until another two weeks of spiritual quarantine have snailed past, and the tides and the moon are our allies once again.
Yesterday most of us had gone to church. Men begin going to church as battles draw near. D-day is a more potent revivalist than Moody, Billy Sunday, or the McPherson who was Aimee Semple. Men begin going to church in droves. The toughest sailors; the guys whose speech is as a rule proudly, patently uninfluenced by the liturgy, they all begin going to church, even if they havent bent an elbow to lift a hymnal in months.
Church services yesterday had not been held in the open air of the Augustas well deck. It was on the well deck some weeks previously, with the men trimly lined up, that the Augusta had paid its official respects as flagship of the American Task Forces to Secretary Knox.
Admiral Kirk had spoken at those simple services, pointing out how in democratic America the Navy had always been in civilian hands since the Republics founding, and how capable were Mr. Knoxs hands. Admiral Deyo, a close friend of the Secretary, had spoken of him affectionately in those sparse, precise, doubly moving words of the sea-trained. And taps, for a man and a symbol, dead thousands of miles away back home in the nations capital, had been sounded by two bugles, so placed on that clean spread of steel which is a cruiser that the echoes came back from the foremast as gently as if they were floating down the hills of Arlington.
O God, Our Help in Ages Past
Yesterday, though the sun had crept out to reconnoiter for a few deceptive minutes, the church services were held in the hot confines of the forward Mess Hall. Captains, messboys, petty officers, yeomen, gunners, marines, cooks, junior officers, and soldierswe had all come unordered to this service which we suspected of being the last onewell, the last one before the Invasion. We had all come, or almost all, including the fellows who seem incapable of avoiding in every sentence a certain blunt, four-letter word which serves as a whole dictionary, since they are given to using it as noun, adjective, or verb, and using it abusively as if it had no association with pleasure.
They were all there yesterday, facing on the improvised altar a red triptych in which two angels, serene in spite of having been drafted, went calmly about their war jobs, the one employing his, her, or its Botticelli fingers to support a bomber, the other a destroyer. The hymns were properly amphibiousFor Those in Peril on the Sea, Onward, Christian Soldiers, and O God, Our Help in Ages Past. They were those sturdy standbys in which, comfortably familiar as they are, men keep rediscovering new meanings when danger rewrites them.
