June 6, 2002

Drafting an Invasion: Winston-Salem Man Helped Draw the Maps of Normandy for D-Day

- from the Winston-Salem Journal

[Note from the editor, Engineering Communications, NC State University: this article features NC State alumnus Jim Haney, who received his degree in civil engineering.]

By Michael Biesecker, staff reporter
© Copyright 2002, Winston-Salem Journal

Jim Haney fought the Nazis with a No. 3 pencil. As a 36-year-old staff sergeant in the U.S. Army, it was Haney's job in 1944 to draw some of the detailed maps used in the June 6 D-Day attack on Normandy.

In the long months before the inevitable invasion, that assignment made him privy to one of the biggest secrets of World War II - the planned location of the assault.

"I knew that coastline like the back of my hand," said Haney, now 94. "I knew where the men would land - and I knew that a lot of those boys wouldn't make it back."

When people think of the attack that occurred 58 years ago today, harrowing images of bloody amphibious and airborne assaults are likely to come to mind.

But for each of the combat soldiers who stormed the beaches or jumped from an airplane, there were others who worked behind the lines to help make sure that the defining moment in the war against Hitler's Third Reich ended in Allied victory.

A bookish preacher's son, Haney was something of an unlikely soldier when he was drafted less than a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor. A 1926 graduate of Reynolds High School, he went to Davidson College and earned a bachelor's degree in pre-engineering in 1930.

"A lot of people assumed I'd be a minister like my father, but it wasn't for me," said Haney, whose father was the pastor of Southminster Presbyterian on Waughtown Street. "My mother always said I started drawing as soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil."

He weathered the Depression working as a draftsman for a Winston-Salem architectural and engineering firm. After he was drafted in 1942, it was his experience in technical drawing that led to his assignment with a small unit of educated men with specialized skills.

His first assignments were to update old maps of Portugal and Spain, but soon he was working on maps of France.

After only a few months in the service, he received word that he would be going to England. He wrote home to his sweetheart, Nell Reynolds. She took a train north to Pennsylvania, where he was stationed. They were married in November 1942.

Haney didn't have much time to honeymoon, however. On New Year's Eve he sailed from New York to England.

Haney's unit was sent to the coastal city of Bristol and attached to the 17th Port Headquarters, an outfit involved with the planning for Operation Overlord, the invasion of occupied Europe.

To work on the sensitive plans, the men had to receive a security classification above that of Top Secret. Unknown to Haney, FBI agents conducted background interviews with his friends, neighbors and parents in North Carolina.

"They had to make sure I was OK, I guess," Haney said. "Security was as tight as a drum. We weren't supposed to talk about what we were doing. No one other than my superior officer was allowed to come near my desk, and I wasn't allowed to see what the other fellas were working on."

None of his supervisors ever told Haney directly where the invasion was to take place. Soon, however, his assignments involved drafting ever more detailed maps of the French coast.

"I just sized it up and knew it had to be Normandy," said Haney, who liked to use a pencil with a hard No. 3 lead because it didn't smear. "They wanted every road, canal and house on the maps."

Haney's job also involved looking at aerial reconnaissance photos taken by B-25s and B-26s over France and making sketches of what the beaches would look like from sea level. On them were portrayed details of Hitler's Atlantic Wall, a network of coastal defenses designed to stop a sea-borne invasion.

The French underground also passed on maps of German positions to the Allies, and Haney would attempt to confirm the information with the reconnaissance photos.

In preparation for the attack, British counterintelligence agents used captured Nazi spies to feed the German high command false information that the invasion would come at Calais, a French port north of Normandy that was closer to England.

Another ruse involved the creation of a fake army supposedly stationed at Dover under the command of Gen. George S. Patton.

The press was encouraged to write stories about Patton's travels in England to give the impression that he was preparing his phantom army to invade at Calais.

The trickery worked. Days after the invasion, Hitler still held back several of his best Panzer divisions from the fight in Normandy and waited for an attack at Calais that never came.

Contrary to the story that Patton served as little more than a diversion in the months before D-Day, Haney says that the colorful general visited Bristol in the winter of 1944 to look at the maps and photos to help Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower choose the site of the invasion.

"He had been to Normandy before the war and he was familiar with a lot of the places we had pictures of," Haney said of Patton.

That spring, Eisenhower himself traveled down from his headquarters in London to visit Haney's outfit. "He had more security people than I had ever seen in my life. They weren't taking any chances," said Haney.

"He was a smart bugger, a very capable man. When he asked a question, he would repeat back the answer to make sure he had understood 100 percent right. He really impressed me," Haney said.

When D-Day finally arrived, Haney said he and some others from his unit drove down to the channel shore to watch the massive invasion armada sail for France.

Though at his age, Haney said, it is sometimes difficult to remember recent events, his memory of that morning is as clear as if it were yesterday.

"My squad leader woke me up at 3 a.m. The mess was already open and I had a biscuit with a fried egg on it for breakfast," Haney said. "About dawn the Navy opened fire."

From his position, Haney said, he could hear the battleships' 16-inch guns thundering from the gray horizon as they fired from the channel onto German positions.

"I've never heard such a racket. Pow! I can still hear those guns firing," Haney said, smacking his hands together for emphasis. "I was concerned for the boys going in. We knew the first men off the boats; half of them would die. I said a little prayer several times."

A few months after D-Day, Haney was sent to the United States and discharged. After the war, he used money from the GI Bill to get a civil engineering degree from N.C. State University, and he built the house on Hawthorne Road where he still lives with his wife, Nell, now 92.

He returned to the same engineering firm and retired around 1970. The couple had a daughter in 1946, and they have two grandsons.

Haney still drives his wife to church on Sunday.

"I have been blessed, thank the Lord," he said. "I had strep throat in 1931, but besides that I've never been sick or broke a bone. I feel as good now as when I was 40 years old."

He said that among his few regrets, however, is that he never visited the beaches and villages in Normandy that he once studied on maps and aerial photos. He still likes to draw landscapes.

Historians now say that the maps and sketches produced by Haney and others during the war were key to the ultimate success of D-Day. He is modest about any role he might have played.

"I just did what they told me to," Haney said.

Michael Biesecker can be reached at 727-7338 or at mbiesecker@wsjournal.com

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