The Victors Part 3

Gray was standing at the end of the bridge, at the northwest corner. Brotheridge was lying in the middle of the bridge, at the west end. Other men in the section were running onto the bridge. Wally Parr was with them, Pvt. Charlie Gardner beside him. In the middle of the bridge, Parr suddenly stopped. He was trying to yell "Able, Able," as the men around him had started doing as soon as the shooting broke out.

But to his horror, "my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and I couldn't spit sixpence. My mouth had dried up of all saliva and my tongue was stuck."

His attempts to yell only made the sticking worse. Parr's frustration was a terrible thing to behold-Parr without his voice was an impossible thing to imagine. His face was a fiery red, even through the burned cork, from the choking and from his anger. With a great effort of will Parr broke his tongue loose and shouted in his great c.o.c.kney voice, "COME OUT AND FIGHT, YOU SQUARE-HEADED b.a.s.t.a.r.dS," with a very long drawn-outA and the last syllable p.r.o.nounced "t.u.r.ds." Pleased with himself, Parr started yelling "Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam," as he ran the rest of the way over, then turned left to go after the bunkers that were his task.

By 0021, the three platoons at the ca.n.a.l bridge had subdued most resistance from the machine-gun pits and the slit trenches-the enemy had either been killed or run off. Men previously detailed for the job began moving into the bunkers. Sandy Smith remembered that "the poor b.u.g.g.e.rs in the bunkers didn't have much of a chance and we were not taking any prisoners or messing around, we just threw phosphorous grenades down and high-explosive grenades into the dugouts there and anything that moved we shot."

Wally Parr and Charlie Gardner led the way into the bunkers on the left. When they were underground, Parr pulled open the door to the first bunker and threw in a grenade. Immediately after the explosion, Gardner stepped into the open door and sprayed the room with his Sten gun. Parr and Gardner repeated the process twice; then, having cleaned out that bunker, and with their eardrums apparently shattered forever by the concussion and the sound, they went back up to the ground.

Their next task was to meet with Brotheridge, whose command post was scheduled to be the cafe, and take up firing positions. As they rounded the corner of the cafe, Gardner threw a phosphorous grenade toward the sound of sporadic German small-arms fire. Parr shouted at him, "Don't throw another one of those b.l.o.o.d.y things, we'll never see what's happening."

Parr asked another member of D Company, "Where's Danny?" (To his face, the men all called him Mr.

Brotheridge. The officers called him Den. But the men thought of him and referred to him as Danny.) "Where's Danny?" Parr repeated. The soldier did not know, had not seen Lieutenant Brotheridge. Well, Parr thought, he's here, Danny must be here somewhere. Parr started to run around the cafe. "I ran past a bloke lying on the ground in the road opposite the side of the cafe." Parr glanced at him as he ran on.

Hang on, he said to himself, and went back and knelt down. "I looked at him, and it was Danny 40 Brotheridge. His eyes were open and his lips moving. I put my hand under his head to lift him up. He just looked. His eyes sort of rolled back. He just choked and he laid back. My hand was covered with blood.

"I just looked at him and thought, My G.o.d. Right in the middle of that thing I just knelt there and I looked at him and I thought, What a waste! All the years of training we put in to do this job-it lasted only seconds and he lay there and I thought, My G.o.d, what a waste."

Jack Bailey came running up. "What the h.e.l.l's going on?" he asked Parr.

"It's Danny," Parr replied. "He's had it."

"Christ Almighty," Bailey muttered.

Sandy Smith, who had thought that everyone was going to be incredibly brave, was learning about war.

He was astonished to see one of his best men, a chap he had come to depend on heavily during exercises and who he thought would prove to be a real leader on the other side, cowering in a slit trench, praying.

Another of his lads reported a sprained ankle from the crash and limped off to seek protection. He had not been limping earlier. Lieutenant Smith lost a lot of illusions in a hurry.

On the other (east) side of the bridge, David Wood's platoon was clearing out the slit trenches and the bunkers. The task went quickly enough, most of the enemy having run away. Wood's lads were shouting "Baker, Baker, Baker" as they moved along, shooting at any sign of movement in the trenches. Soon they were p.r.o.nounced clear of enemy. Wood discovered an intact MG 34 with a complete belt of ammunition on it that had not been fired. He detailed two of his men to take over the gun. The remainder of his men filled in the trenches, and Wood went back to report to Howard that he had accomplished his mission. As he moved back, he was telling his platoon, "Good work, lads," and "Well done," when there was a burst from a Schmeisser. Three bullets. .h.i.t virtually simultaneously in his left leg, and Wood went down, frightened, unable to move, bleeding profusely.

All three platoon leaders gone, and in less than ten minutes! But the well-trained sergeants were thoroughly familiar with the various tasks and could take over; in Wood's platoon, a corporal took charge. In addition, Smith was still on his feet, although hardly mobile and in great pain. Howard had no effective officers at the ca.n.a.l bridge, and did not know what was happening at the river bridge. Gloom might have given way to despair had he known that his second-in-in-command, Captain Priday, and one-sixth of his fighting strength had landed twenty kilometers away, on the River Dives. Howard kept asking Corporal Tappenden, "Have you heard anything from the river, from numbers four, five, and six?"

"No," Tappenden kept replying, "no, no." Over the next two minutes there was a dramatic change in the nature of the reports coming in, and consequently in Howard's mood. First, Lt. Jock Neilson of the sappers (combat engineers) came up to him: "There were no explosives under the bridge, John." Neilson explained that the bridge had been prepared for demolition, but the explosives themselves had not been put into their chambers. The sappers removed all the firing mechanisms, then went into the line as infantry.

The next day they found the explosives in a nearby shed. Knowing that the bridge would not be blown was a great relief to Howard. Just as good, the firing was dying down, and from what Howard could see through all the smoke and in the on-again, off-again moonlight, his people had control of both ends of the ca.n.a.l bridge. Just as he realized that he had pulled off Ham, Tappenden tugged at his battle smock. A message was coming in from Sweeney's platoon: "We captured the bridge without firing a shot."

Hamand Jam! D Company had done it. Howard felt a tremendous exultation and a surge of pride in his company. "Send it out," he told Tappenden. "Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam, keep it up until you get acknowledgment." Tappenden began incessantly calling out, "Ham and Jam, Ham and Jam." In Ste.-Mere-Eglise, a fire in a barn was raging out of control. It was around 0200. The men of the U.S.

41 506th who had landed in and near the town had scattered. At 0145, the second platoon of F Company, 505th, had the bad luck to jump right over the town, where the German garrison was fully alerted. Pvt.

Ken Russell was in that platoon. "Coming down," he recalled, "I looked to my right and I saw this guy, and instantaneously he was blown away. There was just an empty parachute coming down." Evidently a sh.e.l.l had hit his Gammon grenades.

Horrified, Russell looked to his left. He saw another member of his stick, Pvt. Charles Blankenship, being drawn into the fire (the fire was sucking in oxygen and drawing the parachutists toward it). "I heard him scream once, then again, before he hit the fire, and he didn't scream anymore." The Germans filled the sky with tracers. Russell was trying "to hide behind my reserve chute because we were all sitting ducks." He got hit in the hand. He saw Lt. Harold Cadish and Pvts. H. T. Bryant and Ladislaw Tlapa land on telephone poles around the church square. The Germans shot them before they could cut themselves loose. "It was like they were crucified there." Pvt. Penrose Shearer landed in a tree opposite the church and was killed while hanging there. Pvt. John Blanchard, also hung up in a tree, managed to get his trench knife out and cut his risers. In the process he cut one of his fingers off "and didn't even know it until later."

Russell jerked on his risers to avoid the fire and came down on the slate roof of the church. "I hit and a couple of my suspension lines went around the church steeple and I slid off the roof." He was hanging off the edge. "And Steele, [Pvt.] John Steele, whom you've heard a lot about [in the book and movieThe Longest Day ], he came down and his chute covered the steeple." Steele was. .h.i.t in the foot.

Sgt. John Ray landed in the church square, just past Russell and Steele. A German soldier came around the corner. "I'll never forget him," Russell related. "He was red-haired, and as he came around he shot Sergeant Ray in the stomach." Then he turned toward Russell and Steele and brought his machine pistol up to shoot them. "And Sergeant Ray, while he was dying in agony, he got his .45 out and he shot the German soldier in the back of the head and killed him." Through all this the church bell was constantly ringing. Russell could not remember hearing the bell. Steele, who was hanging right outside the belfry, was deaf for some weeks thereafter because of it. (He was hauled in by a German observer in the belfry, made prisoner, but escaped a few days later.) Russell, "scared to death," managed to reach his trench knife and cut himself loose. He fell to the ground and "dashed across the street and the machine-gun fire was knocking up pieces of earth all around me, and I ran over into a grove of trees on the edge of town and I was the loneliest man in the world. Strange country, and just a boy, I should have been graduating from high school rather than in a strange country."

There was a flak wagon in the grove, shooting at pa.s.sing Dakotas. "I got my Gammon grenade out and I threw it on the gun and the gun stopped." He moved away from town. A German soldier on a bicycle came down the road. Russell shot him. Then he found an American, from the 101st (probably a trooper from the 506th who had landed in Ste.-Mere-Eglise a half hour earlier). Russell asked, "Do you know where you are?"

"No," the trooper replied. They set out to find someone who did know. Howard's success at the Orne Ca.n.a.l bridge came about because his three gliders landed together and thus a platoon-size force of more than thirty men was able to go into combat as a unit within seconds of landing. For the paratroopers it was altogether different. The parachutists of the British 6th Division and the American 82nd and 101st were badly scattered, due to the evasive action their C-47 pilots took when they encountered flak. There was almost no unit cohesion. Still, the men had been well trained and well briefed; they knew what to do and set out to accomplish their objectives as best they could. All over Normandy individuals, a pair of men, or small groups acted aggressively and effectively. Easy Company of the 506th PIR was especially effective. Its CO had been killed when his plane crashed; Lt. Richard Winters took command. He had landed on the edge of Ste.-Mere-Eglise and managed to gather a dozen of the men. The company's 42 objective was Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, some ten kilometers away. Winters set out for the village. When he arrived he was given orders to attack a German battery. Winters went to work instinctively and immediately. He told the men of E Company to drop all the equipment they were carrying except weapons, ammunition, and grenades. He explained that the attack would be a quick frontal a.s.sault supported by a base of fire from different positions as close to the guns as possible. He set up the two machine guns to give covering fire as he moved the men forward to their jump-off positions.

The field in which the cannon were located was irregular in shape, with seven acute angles in the hedgerow surrounding it. This gave Winters an opportunity to hit the Germans from different directions.

Winters placed his machine guns (manned by Pvts. John Plesha and Walter Hendrix on one gun, Cleveland Petty and Joe Liebgott on the other) along the hedge leading up to the objective, with instructions to lay down covering fire. As Winters crawled forward to the jump-off position, he spotted a German helmet-the man was moving down the trench, crouched over, with only his head above ground.

Winters took aim with his M-1 and squeezed off two shots, killing the Jerry. Winters told Lt. Lynn Compton to take Sgts. Bill Guarnere and Don Malarkey, get over to the left, crawl through the open field, get as close to the first gun in the battery as possible, and throw grenades into the trench. He sent Sgts. Carwood Lipton and Mike Ranney out along the hedge to the right, alongside a copse, with orders to put a flanking fire into the enemy position. Winters would lead the charge straight down the hedge.

With him were Pvts. Gerald Lorraine (of regimental HQ; he was Col. Robert Sink's jeep driver) and Popeye Wynn, and Cpl. Joe Toye.

Here the training paid off. "We fought as a team without standout stars," Lipton said. "We were like a machine. We didn't have anyone who leaped up and charged a machine gun. We knocked it out or made it withdraw by maneuver and teamwork or mortar fire. We were smart; there weren't many flashy heroics. We had learned that heroics was the way to get killed without getting the job done, and getting the job done was more important."

When Lipton and Ranney moved out along the hedge, they discovered they could not see the German positions because of low brush and ground cover. Lipton decided to climb a tree, but there were none of sufficient size to allow him to fire from behind a trunk. The one he picked had many small branches; he had to sit precariously on the front side, facing the Germans, exposed if they looked his way, balancing on several branches. About seventy-five meters away he could see about fifteen of the enemy, some in the trenches, others p.r.o.ne in the open, firing toward E Company, too intent on the activity to their front to notice Lipton.

Lipton was armed with a carbine he had picked up during the night. He fired at a German in the field.

The enemy soldier seemed to duck. Lipton fired again. His target did not move. Not certain that the carbine had been zeroed in, Lipton aimed into the dirt just under the man's head and squeezed off another round. The dirt flew up right where he aimed; Lipton now knew that the carbine's sights were right and his first shot had killed the man. He began aiming and firing as fast as he cold from his shaky position.

Lieutenant Compton was armed with a Thompson submachine gun that he had picked up during the night (he got it from a lieutenant from D Company who had broken his leg in the jump). Using all his athletic skill, he successfully crawled through the open field to the hedge, Guarnere and Malarkey alongside him. The Germans were receiving fire from the machine gun to their left, from Lipton and Ranney to their rear, and from Winters's group in their front. They did not notice Compton's approach.

When he reached the hedge, Compton leaped over and through it. He had achieved complete surprise and had the German gun crew and infantry dead in his sights. But when he pulled the trigger on the 43 borrowed tommy gun, nothing happened. It was jammed.

At that instant Winters called, "Follow me," and the a.s.sault team went tearing down the hedge toward Compton. Simultaneously, Guarnere leaped into the trench beside Compton. The German crew at the first gun, under attack from three directions, fled. The infantry retreated with them, tearing down the trench, away from Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey. The Easy Company men began throwing grenades at the retreating enemy.

Compton had been an All-American catcher on the UCLA baseball team. The distance to the fleeing enemy was about the same as from home plate to second base. Compton threw his grenade on a straight line-no arch-and it hit a German in the head as it exploded. He, Malarkey, and Guarnere then began lobbing grenades down the trench.

Winters and his group were with them by now, firing their rifles, throwing grenades, shouting, their blood pumping, adrenaline giving them Superman strength.

Wynn was. .h.i.t in the b.u.t.t and fell down in the trench, hollering over and over, "I'm sorry, Lieutenant, I goofed off, I goofed off, I'm sorry." A German potato-masher grenade sailed into the trench; everyone dived to the ground. "Joe, look out!" Winters called to Toye. The grenade had landed between his legs as he lay facedown. Toye flipped over. The potato masher hit his rifle and tore up the stock as it exploded, but he was uninjured. "If it wasn't for Winters," Toye said in 1990, "I'd be singing high soprano today." Winters tossed some grenades down the trench, then went tearing after the retreating gun crew. Private Lorraine and Sergeant Guarnere were with him. Three of the enemy infantry started running cross-country, away toward Brecourt Manor. "Get 'em!" Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy gun; Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed, and shot his man through the back of his head.

Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy gun. The German kept yelling, "Help! Help!"

Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head. A fourth German jumped out of the trench, about a hundred yards up the hedge. Winters saw him, lay down, took careful aim, and killed him. Fifteen or twenty seconds had pa.s.sed since he had led the charge. Easy had taken the first gun. Winters's immediate thought was that there were plenty of Germans farther up the trench, and they would be counterattacking soon. He flopped down, crawled forward in the trench, came to a connecting trench, looked down, "and sure enough there were two of them setting up a machine gun, getting set to fire. I got in the first shot and hit the gunner in the hip; the second caught the other boy in the shoulder."

Winters put Toye and Compton to firing toward the next gun, sent three other men to look over the captured cannon, and three to cover to the front. By this time Lipton had scrambled out of his tree and was working his way to Winters. Along the way he stopped to sprinkle some sulfa powder on Wynn's b.u.t.t and slap on a bandage. Wynn continued to apologize for goofing off. Warrant Officer (WO) Andrew Hil, from regimental HQ, came up behind Lipton.

"Where's regimental HQ?" he shouted.

"Back that way," Lipton said, pointing to the rear. Hill raised his head to look. A bullet hit him in the forehead and came out behind his ear, killing him instantly.

After that, all movement was confined to the trench system, and in a crouch, as German machine-gun fire was nearly continuous, cutting right across the top of the trench. But Malarkey saw one of the Germans killed by Winters, about thirty yards out in the field, with a black case attached to his belt. Malarkey thought it must be a Luger. He wanted it badly, so he ran out into the field, only to discover that it was a leather case for the 105mm sight. Winters was yelling at him, "Idiot, this place is crawling with Krauts, 44 get back here!" Evidently the Germans thought Malarkey was a medic; in any case the machine gunners did not turn on him until he started running back to the trench. With bullets kicking up all around him, he dived under the 105.

Winters was at the gun, wanting to disable it but without a demolition kit. Lipton came up and said he had one in his musette bag, which was back where the attack began. Winters told him to go get it.

Time for the second gun, Winters thought to himself. He left three men behind to hold the first gun, then led the other five on a charge down the trench, throwing grenades ahead of them, firing their rifles. They pa.s.sed the two Jerries at the machine gun who had been wounded by Winters and made them prisoners.

The gun crew at the second gun fell back; Easy took it with only one casualty.

With the second gun in his possession, and running low on ammunition, Winters sent back word for the four machine gunners to come forward. Meanwhile six German soldiers decided they had had enough; they came marching down the connecting trench to the second gun, hands over their heads, calling out "No make dead! No make dead!"

Pvt. John D. Hall of A Company joined the group. Winters ordered a charge on the third gun. Hall led the way and got killed, but the gun was taken. Winters had three of his men secure it. With eleven men, he now controlled three 105s. At the second gun site Winters found a case with doc.u.ments and maps showing the positions of all the guns and machine-gun positions throughout the Cotentin Peninsula. He sent the doc.u.ments and maps back to the battalion, along with the prisoners and a request for more ammunition and some reinforcements, because "we were stretched out too much for our own good."

Using grenades, he set about destroying the gun crew's radio, telephone, and range finders. Capt.

Clarence Hester came up, bringing three blocks of TNT and some phosphorous incendiary grenades.

Winters had a block dropped down the barrel of each of the three guns, followed by a German potato masher. This combination blew out the breeches of the guns like half-peeled bananas. Lipton was disappointed when he returned with his demolition kit to discover that it was not needed. Reinforcements arrived, five men led by Lt. Ronald Speirs of D Company. One of them, Pvt. "Rusty" Houch of F Company, rose up to throw a grenade into the gun positions and was. .h.i.t several times across the back and shoulders by a burst from a machine gun. He died instantly.

Speirs led an attack on the final gun, which he took and destroyed, losing two men killed.

Winters then ordered a withdrawal because the company was drawing heavy machine-gun fire from the hedges near Brecourt Manor, and with the guns destroyed there was no point to holding the position.

The machine gunners pulled back first, followed by the riflemen. Winters was last. As he was leaving he took a final look down the trench. "Here was this one wounded Jerry we were leaving behind trying to put a MG on us again, so I drilled him clean through the head." It was 1130. About three hours had pa.s.sed since Winters had received the order to take care of those guns.

With twelve men, what amounted to a squad (later reinforced by Speirs and the others), E Company had destroyed a German battery that was looking straight down causeway No. 2 and onto Utah Beach.

That battery had a telephone line running to a forward observer who was in a pillbox located at the head of causeway No. 2. He had been calling shots down on the 4th Infantry as it unloaded. The significance of what Easy Company had accomplished cannot be judged with any degree of precision, but it surely saved a lot of lives, and made it much easier-perhaps even made it possible in the first instance-for tanks to come inland from the beach. It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Easy Company saved the day at Utah Beach, but reasonable to say that it made an important contribution to the success of the invasion.

45 Winters's casualties were four dead, two wounded. He and his men had killed fifteen Germans, wounded many more, and taken twelve prisoners; in short, they had wiped out the fifty-man platoon of elite German paratroops defending the guns, and scattered the gun crews. In an a.n.a.lysis written in 1985, Lipton said, "The attack was a unique example of a small, well-led a.s.sault force overcoming and routing a much larger defending force in prepared positions. It was the high morale of the E Company men, the quickness and audacity of the frontal attack, and the fire into their positions from several different directions that demoralized the German forces and convinced them that they were being hit by a much larger force."

There were other factors, including the excellent training the company had received and their combat inexperience. The men had taken chances they would not take in the future. Lipton said he never would have climbed that tree and so exposed himself had he been a veteran. "But we were so full of fire that day." "You don't realize, your first time," Guarnere said. "I'd never, never do again what I did that morning." Compton would not have burst through that hedge had he been experienced. "I was sure I would not be killed," Lipton said. "I felt that if a bullet was headed for me it would be deflected or I would move." (Paul Fussell, inWartime, writes that the soldier going into combat the first time thinks to himself, "Itcan't happen to me. I am too clever / agile / well-trained / good-looking / beloved / tightly laced, etc." That feeling soon gives way to "Itcan happen to me, and I'd better be more careful. I can avoid the danger by watching more prudently the way I take cover / dig in / expose my position by firing my weapon / keep extra alert at all times, etc.") In his a.n.a.lysis Winters gave credit to the army for having prepared him so well for this moment ("my apogee," he called it). He had done everything right, from scouting the position to laying down a base of covering fire, to putting his best men (Compton, Guarnere, and Malarkey in one group, Lipton and Ranney in the other) on the most challenging missions, to leading the charge personally at exactly the right moment.

Winters felt that if Captain Sobel had still been in command, he would have led all thirteen men on a frontal a.s.sault and lost his life, along with the lives of most of the men. Who can say he was wrong about that? But then, who can say that the men of Easy would have had the discipline, the endurance (they had been marching since 0130, after a night of little or no real sleep; they were battered and bruised from the opening shock and the hard landing), or the weapons skills to carry off this fine feat of arms, had it not been for Sobel? Sink put Winters in for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Only one man per division was to be given that ultimate medal for the Normandy campaign; in the 101st it went to Lt. Col. Robert Cole for leading a bayonet charge; Winters received the Distinguished Service Cross. Compton, Guarnere, Lorraine, and Toye got the Silver Star; Lipton, Malarkey, Ranney, Liebgott, Hendrix, Plesha, Petty, and Wynn got Bronze Stars.

With the first light the Allied bombers approached the Norman coast, wave after wave of the four-engine B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators and the two-engine B-26 Marauders filling the sky. Their task was to drop their 500-pound bombs right at the water's edge, to stun or kill the German defenders in their pillboxes, fortifications, and trenches. As the low-flying Marauders approached Utah Beach, the sky brightened and the crews saw a sight unique in world history. None of them ever forgot it; all of them found it difficult to describe. Below them, hundreds of landing craft were running into sh.o.r.e, leaving white wakes. Behind the landing craft were the LSTs and other transports, and the destroyers, cruisers, and battleships. "As I looked down at this magnificent operation," Lt. Allen Stephens, a copilot in a B-26 of the 397th Bomb Group, said, "I had the surging feeling that I was sitting in on the greatest show ever staged."

Lt. William Moriarity, a B-26 pilot, said, "As we approached the coast, we could see ships sh.e.l.ling the beach. One destroyer, half sunk, was still firing from the floating end. The beach was a bedlam of exploding bombs and sh.e.l.ls." Lt. A. H. Corry remembered that "the water was just full of boats, like bunches of ants crawling around down there. I imagined all those young men huddled in the landing craft, 46 doubtless scared to death. I could see what they were heading into and I prayed for all those brave young men. I thought, man, I'm up here looking down at this stuff and they're out there waiting to get on that beach." For the B-17 crews, flying mainly at 20,000 feet, up above the clouds, there was no such sight. They could see nothing but other B-17s. Those that could tucked in behind a pathfinder plane carrying radar. With radar, the lead bombardier would be able to mark a general target area. When the lead plane dropped its bombs, so would the ones following. That was not a textbook method of providing close-in ground support; such bombing was clearly inappropriate to its purpose. Eisenhower had said when he postponed the invasion that he was counting heavily on the air bombardment to get ash.o.r.e; he added that the Allies would not have undertaken the operation without that a.s.set.

Eventually Eisenhower learned the lesson that the B-17 was not a suitable weapon for tactical ground support. The testimony from the B-17 pilots and crews describing their experiences on D-Day suggests that the a.s.set was wasted on D-Day, and that the proper use would have been to do what the B-17 was built to do, pound away at big targets inside Germany (oil refineries, train depots, factory complexes, airfields) and leave the beach bombardment to the Marauders and A-20s (Havocs).

But not even the commanders most dedicated to the idea that strategic airpower would win the war, the ones who had opposed the Transportation Plan so strongly, ever considered for an instant not partic.i.p.ating in D-Day. They wanted to be there, and Eisenhower wanted them there.

At 20,000 feet, with heavy clouds below and the sky just beginning to lighten, where "there" was could be a mystery. Many pilots never got themselves located. The orders were, If you can't see the target, or get behind a radar plane, bring the bombs home. In the 466th Bomb Group, sixty-eight B-17s took off, carrying 400,000 pounds of bombs. Only thirty-two were able to drop their bombs. Those that did dropped them blind through the clouds over the British beaches. Lt. Carl Carden had a brother down below. "I did not know where he was, but I wanted to be accurate. We were a little bit late because of the weather, which affected the bombing accuracy of almost every group up there with us." They delayed on the split-second timing so as to avoid hitting men coming ash.o.r.e; as a consequence, all the bombs from the B-17s fell harmlessly two or even three miles inland.

"It was a day of frustration," said Lt. Werner Meyer. "We certainly didn't do as we had planned." The good part for the B-17s was that the flak was light and there was no Luftwaffe. "It was a milk run,"

Meyer concluded. At Utah Beach, it was no milk run for the Marauders. They went in low enough for the Germans "to throw rocks at us." Sgt. Roger Lovelace recalled seeing "the first wave just a couple of hundred yards offsh.o.r.e, zigzagging toward the beach. We were running right down the sh.o.r.eline looking for a target. We were drawing a lot of fire, not the usual 88mm but smaller rapid-fire stuff. I have this frozen image of a machine gunner set up by a barn, firing at us. For a short second I could look right down the barrel of that gun. A waist gunner or a tail gunner could return fire, but up in the top turret I felt helpless. I couldn't bring my guns below horizontal, therefore I couldn't fire on anything." Lt. J. K.

Havener saw a plane in his box take a flak hit, do a complete snap roll, recover, and carry on.

"Unbelievable!" he remarked. "Now we're on our bomb run and another of our ships takes a direct hit, blows up, and goes down. d.a.m.n that briefer and his milk run. What's with all this flak!" Sgt. Ray Sanders was in Havener's plane. "We were accustomed to heavy flak," he said, "but this was the most withering, heavy, and accurate we ever experienced."

On his bomb run, bombardier Lieutenant Corry was well below 1,000 feet, too low to use his bombsight. He could see men jumping out of the landing craft, guys who fell and were floating in the surf, tracers coming from the bunkers, spraying that beach. He used his manual trip switch, with his foot providing the aiming point. He made no attempt to be accurate; he figured, "I was making good foxholes for some of those guys coming ash.o.r.e." In Havener's B-26, Sergeant Sanders "heard our ship sound like it was being blown or ripped to bits. The sound was much louder than anything I had ever heard and 47 seemed to come from every surface of our ship. Before the terrible noise and jolting had quit, I grabbed the intercom and yelled, 'We've been hit!' And our copilot, Lieutenant Havener, came back on the intercom and said, 'No, we haven't been hit. That was our bombs going off.' We were flying that low."

Lt. John Robinson recalled, "The explosions really b.u.mped my wings at that alt.i.tude. It was like driving a car down the ties of a railroad track." Many others had similar experiences, a good indication of how much of the explosive power of those bombs went up in the air.

In contrast to the near-total success of the B-26s at Utah, the great bombing raids by B-17s and B-24s of June 6 against Omaha and the British beaches turned out to be a bust. The Allies managed to drop more bombs on Normandy in two hours than they had on Hamburg, the most heavily bombed city of 1943, but because of the weather and the airmen's not wanting to hit their own troops most of the blockbusters came down in Norman meadows (or were carried back to England), not on the Atlantic Wall. Yet the B-17 pilots and crews did their best and in some cases made important contributions, certainly far more than the Luftwaffe bomber force.

At the top of the elite world of the Allied air forces stood the fighter pilots. Young, c.o.c.ky, skilled, veteran warriors-in a ma.s.s war fought by millions, the fighter pilots were the only glamorous individuals left. Up there all alone in a one-on-one with a Luftwaffe fighter, one man's skill and training and machine against another's, they were the knights in shining armor of World War II. They lived on the edge, completely in the present, but young though they were, they were intelligent enough to realize that what they were experiencing-wartime London, the Blitz, the risks-was unique and historic. It would demean them to call them star athletes because they were much more than that, but they had some of the traits of the athlete. The most important was the l.u.s.t to compete. They wanted to fly on D-Day, to engage in dogfights, to help make history. The P-47 pilots were especially eager. In 1943 they had been on escort duty for strategic bombing raids, which gave them plenty of opportunity to get into dogfights. By the spring of 1944, however, the P-47 had given up that role to the longer-ranged P-51 (the weapon that won the war, many experts say; the P-51 made possible the deep penetrations of the B-17s and thus drove the Luftwaffe out of France).

The P-47 Thunderbolt was a single-engine fighter with cla.s.sic lines. It was a joy to fly and a gem in combat. But for the past weeks the P-47s had been limited to strafing runs inside France. The pilots were getting bored. Lt. Jack Barensfeld flew a P-47. At 1830 June 5, he and every other fighter pilot in the base got a general briefing. First came an announcement that this was "The Big One." That brought cheers and "electric excitement I'll never forget," Lt. James Taylor said. "We went absolutely crazy. All the emotions that had been pent-up for so long, we really let it all hang out. We knew we were good pilots, we were really ready for it."

The pilots, talking and laughing, filed out to go to their squadron areas, where they would learn their specific missions.

Barensfeld had a three-quarter-mile walk. He turned to Lt. Bobby Berggren and said, "Well, Bob, this is what we've been waiting for-we haven't seen any enemy aircraft for two weeks and we are going out tomorrow to be on the front row and really get a chance to make a name for ourselves." Berggren bet him $50 that they would not see any enemy aircraft. Lieutenant Taylor learned that his squadron would be on patrol duty, 120 miles south of the invasion site, spotting for submarines and the Luftwaffe. They would fly back and forth on a grid pattern.

"We were really devastated," Taylor remembered. "I looked at Smitty and Auyer and they were both looking at the ground, all of us felt nothing but despair. It was a horrible feeling, and lots of the fellows were groaning and moaning and whatnot." Taylor was so downcast he could not eat breakfast. Instead of a knight in shining armor, he was going to be a scout.

48 The first P-47s began taking off at about 0430. They had not previously taken off at night, but it went well. Once aloft, they became part of the air armada heading for France. Above them were B-17s.

Below them were Marauders (B-26s) and Dakotas (C-47s). The Dakotas were tugging gliders. Around them were other fighters.

Lt. (later Maj. Gen.) Edward Giller was leader for a flight of three P-47s. "I remember a rather harrowing experience in the climb out because of some low clouds. There was a group of B-26s flying through the clouds as we climbed through, and each formation pa.s.sed through the other one. That produced one minute of sheer stark terror."

It was bittersweet for the P-47 pilots to pa.s.s over the Channel. Lt. Charles Mohrle recalled: "Ships and boats of every nature and size churned the rough Channel surface, seemingly in a ma.s.s so solid one could have walked from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. I specifically remember thinking that Hitler must have been mad to think that Germany could defeat a nation capable of filling the sea and sky with so much ordnance."

Lieutenant Giller's a.s.signment was to patrol over the beaches, to make certain no German aircraft tried to strafe the landing craft. "We were so high," he remembered, "that we were disconnected, essentially, from the activity on the ground. You could see ships smoking, you could see activities, but of a dim, remote nature, and no sense of personal involvement." Radar operators in England radioed a report of German fighters; Giller and every other fighter pilot in the area rushed to the sector, only to discover it was a false alarm. Lieutenant Mohrle also flew a P-47 on patrol that day. "Flying back and forth over the same stretch of water for four hours, watching for an enemy that never appeared, was tedious and boring."

In the afternoon, Barensfeld flew support for a group of Dakotas tugging gliders to Normandy. The P-47s, flying at 250 miles per hour, had to make long, lazy S-turns to keep the C-47s in visual contact; otherwise they would overrun the glider formation. "Battle formation, 200-300 yards apart, then a turn, crossover, then we'd line up again. We were so busy we had no sense of time. Of course, we were looking for enemy aircraft, there weren't any. Mouth dry. Edge of seat. Silence. Very exciting time."

6 - Utah Beach

CODE NAMES for the landing beaches, running from right to left as seen from the Channel, or west to east, were Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions landed inland from Utah; the British 6th Airborne inland from Sword. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division was scheduled to land at Utah; the U.S. 1st and 29th Infantry Divisions at Omaha; the British 50th Infantry Division at Gold; the Canadian 3rd Division at Juno; the British 3rd at Sword. The landings began an hour or so after dawn, following the air bombardment and an hour-long naval bombardment. As noted, the air strike did little good, except at Utah; the naval bombardment was too short in duration and too long in its targeting to do significant harm to the Germans in their fortifications at the water's edge. The swimming 49 tanks were supposed to provide fire support at the beach itself, but nearly all of them swamped on their way in. So, as so often in war, it all came down to the poor b.l.o.o.d.y infantry. If the Allies were going to establish a beachhead in Normandy, it was up to the rifle-carrying privates and their NCOs and junior officers to do it.

The plan was for DD tanks to land first, at 0630, immediately after the naval warships lifted their fire and the LCTs (landing craft, tank [rocket]) launched their thousand rockets. There were thirty-two of the swimming tanks at Utah, carried in eight LCTs (landing craft, tank). In their wake would come the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Division, in twenty Higgins boats, each carrying a thirty-man a.s.sault team. Ten of the craft would touch down on Tare Green Beach opposite the strong point at Les-Dunes- de-Varreville, the others to the south at Uncle Red Beach.

The second wave of thirty-two Higgins boats carrying the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, plus combat engineers and naval demolition teams, was scheduled to land five minutes later. The third wave was timed for H plus fifteen minutes; it included eight LCTs with some bulldozer tanks as well as regular Shermans.

Two minutes later the fourth wave, mainly consisting of detachments of the 237th and 299th Engineer Combat Battalions (ECBs), would hit the beach. None of this worked out. Some craft landed late, others early, all of them a kilometer or so south of the intended target. But thanks to some quick thinking and decision-making by the high command on the beach, and thanks to the initiative and drive of the GIs, what could have been ma.s.s confusion or even utter chaos turned into a successful, low-cost landing.

Tides, wind, waves, and too much smoke were partly responsible for upsetting the schedule and landing in the wrong place, but the main cause was the loss to mines of three of the four control craft. When the LCCs (landing craft, control) went down it threw everything into confusion. The LCT skippers were circling, looking for direction. One of them hit a mine and blew sky-high. In a matter of seconds the LCT and its four tanks sank.

At this point Lts. Howard Vander Beek and Sims Gauthier on LCC 60 took charge. They conferred and decided to make up for the time lost by leading the LCTs to within three kilometers of the beach before launching the tanks (which were supposed to launch at five kilometers), giving them a shorter and quicker run to the sh.o.r.e. Using his bullhorn, Vander Beek circled around the LCTs as he shouted out orders to follow him. He went straight for the beach-the wrong one, about half a kilometer south of where the tanks were supposed to land. When the LCTs dropped their ramps and the tanks swam off, they looked to Vander Beek like "odd-shaped sea monsters with their huge, doughnut-like skirts for flotation wallowing through the heavy waves and struggling to keep in formation." The Higgins boats carrying the first wave of a.s.sault teams were supposed to linger behind the swimming tanks, but the tanks were so slow that the c.o.xswains drove their craft right past them. Thus it was that E Company of the 2nd Battalion was the first Allied company to hit the beach in the invasion. The tidal current, running from north to south, had carried their craft father left so they came in a kilometer south of where they should have been. Gen. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., T.R.'s son, was in the first boat to hit the sh.o.r.e. Maj. Gen.

Ray Barton had initially refused Roosevelt's request to go in with the 8th Infantry, but Roosevelt had argued that having a general land in the first wave would boost morale for the troops. "They'll figure that if a general is going in, it can't be that rough." Roosevelt had also made a personal appeal, saying, "I would love to do this." Barton had reluctantly agreed. Luck was with E Company. The German fixed fortifications at the intended landing site at exit 3 were far more formidable than those where the landing actually happened, at exit 2 opposite La Madeleine, thanks to the Marauder pounding the battery there had taken. The German troops in the area were from the 919th Regiment of the 709th Division. They had been badly battered by the combined air and sea bombardment and were not firing their weapons. There was only some small-arms fire from riflemen in trenches in the sand dune just behind the four-foot concrete seawall.

In those trenches were the Germans driven from their fixed positions by the bombardment. Their leader 50 was Lt. Arthur Jahnke. He looked out to sea and was amazed. "Here was a truly lunatic sight," he recalled. "I wondered if I were hallucinating as a result of the bombardment." What he saw was a DD tank. "Amphibious tanks! This must be the Allies' secret weapon." He decided to bring his own secret weapon into action, only to discover that his Goliaths* would not function-the bombardment had destroyed the radio controls.

Miniature tanks loaded with explosives "It looks as though G.o.d and the world have forsaken us," Jahnke said to the runner by his side. "What's happened to our airmen?" At that instant, Sgt. Malvin Pike of E Company was coming in on a Higgins boat. He had a scare: "My position was in the right rear of the boat and I could hear the bullets splitting the air over our heads and I looked back and all I could see was two hands on the wheel and a hand on each .50-caliber machine gun, which the Navy guys were firing. I said to my platoon leader, Lieutenant Rebarcheck, 'These guys aren't even looking where they are going or shooting.' About that time the c.o.xswain stood up and looked at the beach and then ducked back down. The machine gunners were doing the same and we just prayed they would get us on the beach."