THESE FINAL DAYS
“We have been paid in francs today, which removes any lingering doubts about our destination,” Lieutenant Jack Swaab, a field gunner with the British 51st (Highland) Infantry Division, jotted in his diary for May 26, 1944. “My own guess is that we shall try and bite off the Cherbourg peninsula.” Swaab was then stationed at a temporary tented site known as an embarkation camp, set up at Leytonstone Park in East London—one of tens of thousands of troops waiting at dozens of such camps in the south of England, near its ports on the English Channel.
Once the final amphibious training exercise had been conducted on May 3, the assault troops and those who would follow them shifted first into assembly areas. There they waterproofed their vehicles, were issued full sets of specialist equipment, and shed any unwanted kit and administrative staff. From those assembly areas, the troops would move to the embarkation camps—also called “sausages” because of their peculiar ovalshaped appearance on military maps—nearer where troops would board their craft. “It was here that many of the troops were to be briefed on their missions,” explained Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, who would command the U.S. First Army for the invasion. “Once briefed, they were to be cut off from the rest of England.”
It was a strange time. All military and civilian mail was impounded beginning on May 27. For security purposes, there was no leave or contact with the outside world. Y-Day—June 1, 1944—by which all troops and materiel for the Normandy invasion were to be in place, was now only days away.
“The atmosphere was unusual, to say the least. We watched the
