CHAPTER 1
To Selsey Bill
So said the orders.
Selsey Bill? To an American, an odd name for any spot. Till Id been given those orders, Id never heard of the place.
Now I was looking at Selsey Bill. In English parlance, it was a bill. To me, in everyday American, it was just a promontory, protruding not too importantly into the English Channel just east of the Isle of Wight. Selsey Bill turned out to be both a sandy cape and a most unpretentious seashore village straddling a long, wide beach. Its thin line of frowzy summer cottages, stretched out along the Channel sand, was reminiscent of the flimsy shelters of a generation ago fringing our own New Jersey coast. This collection of shacks was evidently the summertime haven of some hundreds of middle class English families fleeing to sand and sea from sweltering London streets.
Selsey Bill was most unimpressive. Unlike not so distant Brighton, no shore hotels caught the eye. Nor did it give any indication of being a seaport, large or small. Selsey had no harbor, it had no piers, it had no warehouses. It had absolutely nothing of importance to friend or enemy in a warexcept that wide stretch of endless beach fronting the English Channel. For, only a hundred miles from that beach, due south across the water, lay Normandyand less than a hundred miles north of it over defenseless open country lay London.
That wide, flat beachSelsey Bill had something there. But what? Asset or danger spot to the British whose beach it was, now that there was a war?
Four years before, when France fell, it had been spotted instantly as a glaring danger point by the British, stripped of their arms at Dunkirk, naked now before their enemies. Across that inviting beach, every Englishman at no great strain to his imagination envisioned hordes of steel-helmeted Nazis leaping ashore from landing barges to trample beneath their hobnailed boots what few defenders Britain might muster on the sands. And then without pause moving north to overwhelm both him and nearby London.
Faced with that prospect, the English had hastily evacuated all cottagers from Selsey Bill, in desperation had sowed the broad sands with buried land mines, festooned the beach before the front doors of the emptied cottages with endless snarls of concertina barbed wire.
So in 1940, except for a few sentries peering anxiously out to sea each morning as the dawn broke, Selsey Bill became a deserted village. Before me there, in 1944, still remained much of the tangled wire. Even some of the warning signs, faced to be read only from the land side, screaming to any unwary Englishman approaching the beach:
KEEP OFF THE SANDS! MINES!
But that was all over. Four heartrending years of war had wrought some changes. Now it was the spring of 1944. The wide flat beach at Selsey Bill, by an ironic reversal in the whims of Mars, had in British eyes been metamorphosed from a danger spot to an invaluable asset. From Britains vulnerable Achilles heel to Britannias strong right arm.
For from that selfsame beach at Selsey Bill, seemingly made to order for just such a purpose, reprisal was about to start. From its sands, an irresistible lance to strike down the enemy on the Far Shore was at last about to be launched!
Or, was it about to be?
There was little doubt in the minds of the planners (both British and American) round about Grosvenor Square in London that the allied lance was actually irresistible, as planned. But there seemed to be (in one American mind, at least) some gnawing doubt as to whether the launching of it was likely to come off. So in the face of fervid British pooh-poohing of any basis at all for the existence even of such a silly question, I had been ordered by the American high command to Selsey Bill to see what actually was the situation.
As a result, there was I, gazing for the first time out over the Channel towards Hitlers boasted impregnable Atlantic Wall, invisible to me below the distant southern horizon. Immediately before me lay Selsey Bill and its simple village, easily encompassed at a glancethe string of unpretentious cottages, the rusted remnants of the barbed wire, the faded warning signs, the wide sands beneath which here and there still lurked, like deadly cobras set to strike should one step on them, such of their own mines as had escaped even the most intensive efforts of the British to find and remove.
Altogether, it was no very striking seashore scene.
But, just offshore?
I stared offshore in open-mouthed astonishment. Nothing I had heard from anyone round about Grosvenor Square or read there concerning invasion planning had prepared me for what now hit me in the eyes, just offshore.
What was this fantasy, sprawled over five square miles at least of what should be the rippling open sea? That conglomeration of tall black towers reaching skyward from beneath the Channel waters? That massive jumble of half submerged block-long windowless concrete warehousesa hundred of them, perhaps even morefar and near protruding in no recognizable pattern, helter-skelter, from the waves? Those ponderous steel arches, evidently disjointed sections of highway bridges, beginning nowhere, ending nowhere, mysteriously swimming on the surface of the sea, somehow afloat in spite of gravity, interspersed crazily amongst the even crazier disarray of those semi-submerged concrete buildings? A city, perhaps, insanely shuffled about and then sunk by some overwhelming catastrophe?
To my dazed eyes, I might be looking on a grander scale at nothing more or less than lower Pittsburgh, half buried from sight beneath the waters in full flood of the overflowing Monongahela and Alleghany, joining to form the still more overflooded Ohio. There before me could be Pittsburghs tall blast furnaces, dead now, their fires drowned out; her warehouses, with the waters rising nearly to their roofs; her deserted bridges flooded to their floorseverything half hidden in the rising waters, half still showing above the riversmile on square mile of flooded city. Some such vast industrial metropolis as that, overwhelmed by the sea, lay there off Selsey Bill, so any casual observer would swear.
What it really was, of course, I knew.
In Admiral Starks American naval headquarters in Grosvenor Square, studying the thick volume embodying every facet of the Overlord Plan, I had been thoroughly saturated in its purpose. Still, even so, the first sight of the reality in all its immensity stunned the mindmine, anyway. There it rested like a titanic unsolved jigsaw puzzle, scrambled beyond any recognition of its true design. Half-engulfed in the Channel waters, it lay in a multitude of pieces, the instrument unenvisioned by the enemy (so we hoped), which was to sustain to success an invasion which the enemy High Command
