"Bong-bong-bong." It's one of the most famous incidents of the D-Day invasion, and one of the most memorable scenes in "The Longest Day," Daryl Zanuck's all-star festival movie about D-Day: Red Buttons, playing Private John Steele of the 82nd Airborne Division, utters that line to describe what his night was like after getting his parachute tangled in the steeple of the church in Sainte Mère Église, playing dead to avoid getting shot while being forced to listen to the church bells ring the night away.
This dummy version of his ordeal sums up much of what you see when you tour the invasion sites, which I was only able to do in a limited way a couple weeks ago thanks to the horrid food-poisoning incident. There are lots of dummies, not only hanging from steeples but filling mediocre museum exhibits, and an overwhelming sense that D-Day, like most battles, was won by the Allies despite an endless series of screwups on their part and with the help of an equally endless series of screwups by the Germans. (Robert Rodat's script for "Saving Private Ryan" captures this sentiment with its joking subplot about FUBAR.)
Take Private Steele, since he was one of hundreds of paratroopers wounded or killed thanks to the panic and outright incompetence of many of the pilots flying them in on planes and gliders that night. Freaked out by anti-aircraft fire, they flew too low, or too high, or too fast, or missed landing markers, or took too steep an angle of descent, with the result that most of the 13,000 men in the two U.S. airborne divisions landed nowhere near their intended destinations.
The other two sites we visited on the same day only reinforce this. Utah Beach, where the American forces faced little opposition coming ashore compared to the units landed at Omaha Beach, is not actually where Utah Beach was supposed to be in the original invasion plans, but two miles away. If they had landed where intended, things might have been much worse for them. And then there's Pointe-du-Hoc, where Ronald Reagan made his famous speech above the cliffs during the 40th anniversary memorial in 1984 - it too was monumentally FUBAR, with U.S. Army Rangers assaulting clifftop artillery emplacements that didn't actually contain any artillery.
Military histories are filled with chapter and verse on the fog of war, but it's hard to believe there was ever worse than it was in June, 1944.
