The Victors Part 5

He was as good a company CO as there was in the U.S. Army. The company was coming into a section of the beach that had no one on it; there was no fire; Schilling remarked to Pvt. George Kobe, "See, I told you it was going to be easy." Moments later, before the ramp went down, Schilling was killed by a sh.e.l.l. Lt. William Gardner was the company executive officer, a West Point graduate described by Sgt.

John R. Slaughter as "young, articulate, handsome, tough, and aggressive. He possessed all the qualities to become a high-ranking officer in the Army." The ramp went down on his boat some 150 meters from sh.o.r.e. The men got off without loss. Gardner ordered them to spread out and keep low. He was killed by machine-gun fire before he made the sh.o.r.e. Sergeant Slaughter's boat was bracketed by German artillery fire. At 100 meters from sh.o.r.e, the British c.o.xswain said he had to lower the ramp and everyone should get out quickly. Sgt. Willard Norfleet told him to keep going: "these men have heavy equipment and youwill take them all the way in." The c.o.xswain begged, "But we'llall be killed!"

Norfleet unholstered his .45 Colt pistol, put it to the sailor's head, and ordered, "All the way in!" The c.o.xswain proceeded. Sergeant Slaughter, up at the front of the boat, was thinking, If this boat don't hurry up and get us in, I'm going to die from seasickness. The boat hit a sandbar and stopped.

"I watched the movieThe Longest Day, " Slaughter recalled, "and they came charging off those boats and across the beach like banshees, but that isn't the way it happened. You came off the craft, you hit the water, and if you didn't get down in it you were going to get shot."

The incoming fire was horrendous. "This turned the boys into men," Slaughter commented. "Some would be very brave men, others would soon be dead men, but all of those who survived would be frightened men. Some wet their britches, others cried unashamedly, and many just had to find it within themselves to get the job done." In a fine tribute to Captain Schilling, Slaughter concluded, "This is where the discipline and training took over."

Slaughter made his way toward sh.o.r.e. "There were dead men floating in the water and there were live men acting dead, letting the tide take them in." Most of D Company was in the water a full hour, working forward. Once he reached sh.o.r.e, for Slaughter "getting across the beach to the shingle became an obsession." He made it. "The first thing I did was to take off my a.s.sault jacket and spread my raincoat so 62 I could clean my rifle. It was then I saw bullet holes in my raincoat. I lit my first cigarette [they were wrapped in plastic]. I had to rest and compose myself because I became weak in my knees. "Colonel [Charles] Canham came by with his right arm in a sling and a .45 Colt in his left hand. He was yelling and screaming for the officers to get the men off the beach. 'Get the h.e.l.l off this d.a.m.n beach and go kill some Germans.' There was an officer taking refuge from an enemy mortar barrage in a pillbox. Right in front of me Colonel Canham screamed, 'Get your a.s.s out of there and show some leadership.' " To another lieutenant he roared, "Get these men off their dead a.s.ses and over that wall."

This was the critical moment in the battle. It was an ultimate test: Could a democracy produce young men tough enough to take charge, to lead? As Pvt. Carl Weast put it, "It was simple fear that stopped us at that shingle and we lay there and we got butchered by rocket fire and by mortars for no d.a.m.n reason other than the fact that there was n.o.body there to lead us off that G.o.dd.a.m.n beach. Like I say, hey man, I did my job, but somebody had to lead me." Sgt. William Lewis remembered cowering behind the shingle. Pvt. Larry Rote piled in on top of Lewis. He asked, "Is that you shaking, Sarge?" "Yeah, d.a.m.n right!"

"My G.o.d," Rote said. "I thought it was me!" Lewis commented, "Rote was shaking all right."

They huddled together with some other men, "just trying to stay alive. There was nothing we could do except keep our b.u.t.ts down. Others took cover behind the wall."

All across Omaha the men who had made it to the shingle hid behind it. Then Cota, or Canham, or a captain here, a lieutenant there, a sergeant someplace else, began to lead. They would cry out, "Follow me!" and start moving up the bluff.

In Sergeant Lewis's case, "Lt. Leo Van de Voort said, 'Let's go, G.o.dd.a.m.n, there ain't no use staying here, we're all going to get killed!' The first thing he did was to run up to a gun emplacement and throw a grenade in the embrasure. He returned with five or six prisoners. So then we thought, h.e.l.l, if he can do that, why can't we. That's how we got off the beach." That was how most men got off the beach. Pvt.

Raymond Howell, an engineer attached to D Company, described his thought process. He took some shrapnel in helmet and hand. "That's when I said, bulls.h.i.t, if I'm going to die, to h.e.l.l with it I'm not going to die here. The next bunch of guys that go over that G.o.dd.a.m.n wall, I'm going with them. If I'm gonna be infantry, I'm gonna be infantry. So I don't know who else, I guess all of us decided well, it is time to start."

The 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division (the Big Red One) was the only first-wave a.s.sault unit on D-Day with combat experience. It didn't help much. Nothing the 16th had seen in the North Africa (1942) and Sicily (1943) landings compared to what it encountered at Easy Red, Fox Green, and Fox Red on June 6. Like the 116th, the 16th landed in a state of confusion, off target, badly intermingled (except L Company, the only one of the eight a.s.sault companies that could be considered a unit as it hit the beach), under intense machine-gun, rifle, mortar, and artillery fire from both flanks and the front.

Schedules were screwed up, paths through the obstacles were not cleared, most officers-the first men off the boats-were wounded or killed before they could take even one step on the beach.

The naval gunfire support lifted as the Higgins boats moved in and would not resume until the smoke and haze revealed definite targets or until navy fire-control officers ash.o.r.e radioed back specific coordinates (few of those officers made it and those who did had no working radios). Most of the DD tanks had gone down in the Channel; the few that made it were disabled. As a consequence, the German defenders were able to fire at pre-sited targets from behind their fortifications unimpeded by incoming fire. The American infantry struggled ash.o.r.e with no support whatsoever. Casualties were extremely heavy, especially in the water and in the two hundred meters or so of open beach. As with the 116th to the right, 63 for the 16th Regiment first and second waves D-Day was more reminiscent of an infantry charge across no-man's-land at the Somme in World War I than a typical World War II action. "Our life expectancy was about zero," Pvt. John MacPhee declared. "We were burdened down with too much weight. We were just pack mules. I was very young, in excellent shape. I could walk for miles, endure a great deal of physical hardship, but I was so seasick I thought I would die. In fact, I wished I had. I was totally exhausted."

Jumping off the ramp into chest-deep water, MacPhee barely made it to the beach. There, "I fell and for what seemed an eternity I lay there." He was. .h.i.t three times, once in the lower back, twice in the left leg.

His arm was paralyzed. "That did it. I lost all my fear and knew I was about to die. I made peace with my Maker and was just waiting."

MacPhee was lucky. Two of his buddies dragged him to the shelter of the seawall; eventually he was evacuated. He was told he had a million-dollar wound. For him the war was over.

As the ramp on his Higgins boat went down, Sgt. Clayton Hanks had a flashback. When he was five years old he had seen a World War I photograph in a Boston newspaper. He had said to his mother, "I wish I could be a war soldier someday." "Don't ever say that again," his mother had replied. He didn't, but at age seventeen he joined the Regular Army. He had been in ten years when the ramp went down and he recalled his mother's words. "I volunteered," he said to himself. "I asked for this or whatever was to come." He leaped into the water and struggled forward.

Pvt. Warren Rulien came in with the second wave. Dead soldiers floated around in the water, which had risen past the first obstacles. He ducked behind a steel rail in waist-deep water. His platoon leader, a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, was behind another rail.

The lieutenant yelled, "Hey, Rulien, here I go!" and began attempting to run to the sh.o.r.e. A machine gun cut him down. Rulien grabbed one of the bodies floating in the water and pushed it in front of him as he made his way to the sh.o.r.e. "I had only gone a short distance when three or four soldiers began lining up behind me. I shouted, "Don't bunch up!" and moved out, leaving them with the body. I got as low as I could in the water until I reached a sandbar and crossed it on my belly." On the inland side of the sandbar the water was up to his chest. He moved forward. "On the sh.o.r.e, there were officers sitting there, stunned. n.o.body was taking command." He joined other survivors at the seawall. The c.o.xswain on Pvt. Charles Thomas's boat was killed by machine-gun fire as he was taking his craft in. A crew member took over. The platoon leader had his arm shot off trying to open the ramp. Finally the ramp dropped and the a.s.sault team leaped into the surf. Thomas had a bangalore torpedo to carry so he was last man in the team.

"As I was getting off I stopped to pick up a smoke grenade, as if I didn't have enough to carry. The guy running the boat yelled for me to get off. He was in a hurry, but I turned around and told him that I wasn't in any hurry." Thomas jumped into chest-deep water. "My helmet fell back on my neck and the strap was choking me. My rifle sling was dragging under the water and I couldn't stand." He inflated his Mae West and finally made it to sh.o.r.e. "There I crawled in over wounded and dead but I couldn't tell who was who and we had orders not to stop for anyone on the edge of the beach, to keep going or we would be hit ourselves."

When he reached the seawall, "it was crowded with GIs all being wounded or killed. It was overcrowded with GIs. I laid on my side and opened my fly, I had to urinate. I don't know why I did that because I was soaking wet anyway and I was under fire, and I guess I was just being neat." Thomas worked his way over to the left, where "I ran into a bunch of my buddies from the company. Most of them didn't even have a rifle. Some b.u.mmed cigarettes off of me because I had three cartons wrapped in 64 waxed paper." Thomas was at the base of the bluff (just below the site of the American cemetery today).

In his opinion, "The Germans could have swept us away with brooms if they knew how few we were and what condition we were in."

Capt. Fred Hall was in the LCVP carrying the 2nd Battalion headquarters group (Lt. Col. Herb Hicks, CO). Hall was battalion S-3. His heart sank when he saw yellow life rafts holding men in life jackets and he realized they were the crews from the DD tanks. "That meant that we would not have tank support on the beach." The boat was in the E Company sector of Easy Red. E Company was supposed to be on the far right of the 16th, linking up with the 116th at the boundary between Easy Green and Easy Red, but it came in near the boundary between Easy Red and Fox Green, a full kilometer from the nearest 116th unit on its right (and with sections of the badly mislanded E Company of the 116th on its left). There was nothing to be done about the mistake. The officers and men jumped into the water and "it was every man for himself crossing the open beach where we were under fire." Fourteen of the thirty failed to make it.

Hall got up to the seawall with Hicks and "we opened our map case wrapped in canvas, containing our a.s.sault maps showing unit boundaries, phase lines, and objectives. I remember it seemed a bit incongruous under the circ.u.mstances." The incoming fire was murderous. "And the noise-always the noise, naval gunfire, small arms, artillery, and mortar fire, aircraft overhead, engine noises, the shouting and the cries of the wounded, no wonder some people couldn't handle it." The a.s.sistant regimental commander and the forward artillery observer were killed by rifle fire. Lieutenant Colonel Hicks shouted to Hall to find the company commanders. To Hall, "It was a matter of survival. I was so busy trying to round up the COs to organize their men to move off the beach that there wasn't much time to think except to do what had to be done." Hicks wanted to move his men to the right, where the battalion was supposed to be, opposite the draw that led up the bluff between St.-Laurent and Colleville, but movement was almost impossible. The tide was coming in rapidly, follow-up waves were landing, the beach was narrowing from the incoming tide, "it became very crowded and the confusion increased." So far as Hall could make out, "there was no movement off the beach."

In fact, one platoon from E Company, 16th Regiment, was making its way up to the top of the bluff. It was led by Lt. John Spaulding of E Company. He was one of the first junior officers to make it across the seawall, through the swamp and beach flat, and up the bluff.

G Company, 16th Regiment, 1st Division, came in at 0700. The CO, Capt. Joe Dawson, was first off his boat, followed by his communications sergeant and his company clerk. As they jumped, a sh.e.l.l hit the boat and destroyed it, killing thirty men, including the naval officer who was to control fire support from the warships.

Dawson expected to find a path up the bluff cleared out by F Company, but "as I landed I found nothing but men and bodies lying on the sh.o.r.e." He got to the shingle where survivors from other boats of G Company joined him. Among them was Sgt. Joe Pilck. He recalled, "We couldn't move forward because they had a double ap.r.o.n of barbed wire in front of us, and to our right it was a swampy area we couldn't cross and to the left they had minefields laid out so we couldn't go there."

"Utter chaos reigned," Dawson recalled, "because the Germans controlled the field of fire completely."

He realized that "there was nothing I could do on the beach except die." To get through the barbed wire he had Pvts. Ed Tatara and Henry Peszek put two bangalore torpedoes together, shoved them under the wire, and blew a gap. They started through the minefield and up the bluff, engaging the enemy.

Dawson got to the top. How he got there is a story he tells best himself: "On landing I found total chaos as men and material were literally choking the sandbar just at the water's edge. A minefield lay in and around a path extending to my right and upward to the crest of the bluff. After blowing a gap in the concertina wire I led my men gingerly over the body of a soldier who had stepped on a mine in seeking 65 to clear the path. I collected my company at the base of the bluff and proceeded on. Midway toward the crest I met Lieutenant Spaulding. "I proceeded toward the crest, asking Spaulding to cover me. Near the crest the terrain became almost vertical. This afforded complete defilade from the entrenched enemy above. A machinegun nest was busily firing at the beach, and one could hear rifle and mortar fire coming from the crest. "I tossed two grenades aloft, and when they exploded the machine gun fell silent. I waved my men and Spaulding to proceed as rapidly as possible and I then proceeded to the crest where I saw the enemy moving out toward the E-3 exit and the dead Germans in the trenches.

"To my knowledge no one had penetrated the enemy defenses until that moment. "As soon as my men reached me we debouched from that point, firing on the retreating enemy and moving toward a . . .

wooded area, and this became a battleground extending all the way into town."

In an a.n.a.lysis of how he became the first American to reach the top of the bluff in this area, written in 1993, Dawson pointed out: "The Battle of Omaha Beach was 1st, Deadly enemy fire on an exposed beach where total fire control favored the defender and we were not givenany direct fire support from the Navy or tanks. 2nd, the poor German marksmanship is theonly way I could have made it across the exposed area because I could not engage the enemy nor even see him until I reached the machine gun. 3rd, the fortunate ability to control my command both in landing together and debouching up the bluff together as a fighting unit. 4th, our direct engagement of the enemy caused him to cease concerted small-arms, machine-gun and mortar fire with which he was sweeping the beach below." *

Dawson's route to the top was approximately the same as the paved path that today leads from the beach to the lookout with the bronze panorama of Omaha Beach on the edge of the American cemetery.

At the top, Dawson was experiencing difficulties in moving on Colleville. Dawson led by example and gave orders that were simple, direct, impossible not to understand: "I said, 'Men, there is the enemy.

Let's go get them.' " G Company worked its way to within a kilometer of Colleville. Dawson paused under a large oak tree. "There, a very friendly French woman welcomed us with open arms and said, 'Welcome to France.' " Dawson advanced to the edge of Colleville. The dominant building, as always in the Normandy villages, was a Norman church, built of stone, its steeple stretching into the sky. "Sure enough," Dawson noted, "in the steeple of the church there was an artillery observer." He dashed inside the church with a sergeant and a private.

"Immediately, three Germans inside the church opened fire. Fortunately, we were not hit by this burst.

But as we made our way through the church the private was killed, shot by the observer in the tower. I turned and we secured the tower by eliminating him. My sergeant shot the other two Germans and thus we took care of the opposition at that point."

66 As Dawson ran out of the church, a German rifleman shot at him. Dawson fired back with his carbine, but not before the German got off a second shot. The bullet went through Dawson's carbine and shattered the stock. Fragments from the bullet went through his kneecap and leg, which "caused my knee to swell and caused me to be evacuated the next day."

Beyond the church, G Company ran into heavy fire from a full German company occupying the houses in Colleville. Built of stone, the positions were all but impregnable to small-arms fire. G Company got into what Dawson called "a very severe firefight," but could not advance.

It was shortly after noon. Maj. William Washington, executive officer of the 2nd Battalion, 16th Regiment, came up, arriving at about the same time as Spaulding's platoon. Washington set up a command post (CP) in a drainage ditch just west of Colleville. He sent the E Company platoon to the right (south) of the village. Spaulding moved out and got separated from Dawson. Germans moved into the gap; in forty minutes Spaulding's platoon was surrounded. Just that quickly, Spaulding realized that instead of attacking, he was being counterattacked. He set up a defensive position in the drainage ditches. Several squads of Germans came toward the platoon. Spaulding's men were able to beat them off.

Spaulding saw a runner coming from the battalion CP with a message from Major Washington. "The Germans opened fire on him. After he fell they fired at least a hundred rounds of machinegun ammunition into him. It was terrible but we do the same thing when we want to stop a runner bearing information."

Spaulding's platoon spent the remainder of the day in the ditches, fighting a defensive action. By nightfall, Spaulding was down to six rounds of carbine ammunition; most of his men were down to their last clip.

The platoon was still surrounded.

It had been the first platoon to take prisoners. It had eliminated several machine-gun posts on the bluff and the emplacement looking down the E-1 draw. It had landed with thirty men; by nightfall, two had been killed, seven wounded. Five men in the platoon were awarded DSCs, personally presented by General Eisenhower: they were Lt. John Spaulding, Kentucky; Sgt. Philip Streczyk, New Jersey; Pvt.

Richard Gallagher, New York; Pvt. George Bowen, Kentucky; Sgt. Kenneth Peterson, New Jersey.

Spaulding's and Dawson's and the other small groups were like magnets to the men along the shingle embankment. If they can make it so can I, was the thought. Simultaneously, the men were being urged forward by other junior officers and NCOs, and by the regimental commander, forty-seven-year-old Col. George Taylor. He landed about 0800. Pvt. Warren Rulien watched him come in. "He stepped across the sandbar and bullets began hitting the water around him. He laid down on his stomach and started crawling toward sh.o.r.e, his staff officers doing the same." "He had a couple of tattered-a.s.s second louies following him," according to Pvt. Paul Radzom, who was also watching. "They looked like they were scared to death."

When Taylor made it to the seawall, Rulien heard him say to the officers, "If we're going to die, let's die up there." To other groups of men, Taylor said, "There are only two kinds of people on this beach: the dead and those about to die. So let's get the h.e.l.l out of here!"

Men got to work with the bangalores, blowing gaps in the barbed wire. Engineers with mine detectors moved through, then started laying out tape to show where they had cleared paths through the minefields.

Others. .h.i.t the pillboxes at the base of the bluff. "I went up with my flamethrower to b.u.t.ton up the aperture of a pillbox," Pvt. Buddy Mazzara of C Company remembered, "and [Pvt.] Fred Erben came in with his dynamite charge. Soon some soldiers came out of the pillbox with their hands up saying, 'No shoot. No shoot. Me Pole.' " Pvt. John Shroeder, his machine gun cleaned and ready to fire, watched as a rifleman moved out. "So the first man, he started out across, and running zigzag he made it to the bluff.

67 So we all felt a little better to see that we had a chance, we were going to get off. And the minefield was already full of dead and wounded. And finally it came my turn and I grabbed my heavy .30-cal and started up over the shingle and across the minefield, trying to keep low. Finally I got to the base of the bluff." There he ducked behind the old foundation of a house. Two others joined him. "It was just the three of us there, we couldn't find our platoon leaders or our platoon sergeants or anybody." But they could see two heartening sights. One was Americans on the crest of the bluff. The other was a line of POWs, sent down by Captain Dawson under guard. The enemy prisoners "were really roughed up.

Their hair was all full of cement, dirt, everything. They didn't look so tough. So we started up the bluff carrying our stuff with us, and the others started following us." Lt. William Dillon gathered the survivors from his platoon, joined three bangalores together, shoved them under the barbed wire, blew a gap, dashed through, crossed the swamp, swam across an ant.i.tank ditch filled with water, and made it to the base of the bluff.

"I knew that the Germans had to have a path up the hill that was clear of mines. I looked around. When I was younger I'd been a good hunter and could trail a rabbit easily. I studied the ground and saw a faint path zigzagging to the left up the hill, so I walked the path very carefully. Something blew up behind me. I looked back and a young soldier had stepped on a mine and it had blown off his foot up to his knee. I brought the others up the path. At the top we saw the first and only Russian soldiers I have ever seen." In his column for June 12, 1944, reporter Ernie Pyle wrote, "Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. . . . As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it's the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained. "Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy's side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on." It was not a miracle. It was infantry. The plan had called for the air and naval bombardments, followed by tanks and dozers, to blast a path through the exits so that the infantry could march up the draws and engage the enemy, but the plan had failed, utterly and completely failed. As is almost always the case in war, it was up to the infantry. It became the infantry's job to open the exits so that the vehicles could drive up the draws and engage the enemy. Exhortation and example, backed by two years of training, got the GIs from the 16th Regiment to overcome their exhaustion, confusion, and fear and get out from behind the shingle and start up the bluff. Colonel Taylor and many others pointed out the obvious, that to stay behind the "shelter"

was to die. Retreat was not possible.

Captain Dawson, Lieutenants Spaulding and Dillon, and many others provided the example; their actions proved that it was possible to cross the swamp, the ant.i.tank ditch, the minefields, and find paths to the top of the bluff. As they came onto the beach, the junior officers and NCOs saw at once that the intricate plan, the one they had studied so hard and committed to memory, bore no relationship whatsoever to the tactical problem they faced. They had expected to find ready-made craters on the beach, blasted by the bombs from the B-17s, to provide shelter in the unlikely event that they encountered any small-arms fire when they made the sh.o.r.eline. They had expected to go up the draws, which they antic.i.p.ated would have been cleared by the DD tanks and dozers, to begin fighting up on the high ground. They had expected fire support from tanks, half-tracks, artillery. Nothing they had expected had happened. Yet their training had prepared them for this challenge. They sized up the situation, saw what had to be done, and did it.

This was leadership of the highest order. It came from men who had been civilians three or even two years earlier.

Sgt. John Ellery of the 16th Regiment was one of those leaders. When he reached the shingle, "I had to peer through a haze of sweat, smoke, dust, and mist." There was a dead man beside him, another behind him. Survivors gathered around him; "I told them that we had to get off the beach and that I'd lead the 68 way." He did. When he got to the base of the bluff, he started up, four or five men following. About halfway up, a machine gun opened up on them from the right. "I scurried and scratched along until I got within ten meters of the gun position. Then I unloaded all four of my fragmentation grenades. When the last one went off, I made a dash for the top. The other kids were right behind me and we all made it. I don't know if I knocked out that gun crew but they stopped shooting. Those grenades were all the return fire I provided coming off that beach. I didn't fire a round from either my rifle or my pistol." In giving his account Ellery spoke about leadership. "After the war," he said, "I read about a number of generals and colonels who are said to have wandered about exhorting the troops to advance. That must have been very inspirational! I suspect, however, that the men were more interested and more impressed by junior officers and NCOs who were willing to lead them rather than having some general pointing out the direction in which they should go." Warming to the subject, Ellery went on: "I didn't see any generals in my area of the beach, but I did see a captain and two lieutenants who demonstrated courage beyond belief as they struggled to bring order to the chaos around them." Those officers managed to get some men organized and moving up the bluff. One of the lieutenants had a broken arm that hung limply at his side, but he led a group of seven to the top, even though he got hit again on the way. Another lieutenant carried one of his wounded men thirty meters before getting hit himself. "When you talk about combat leadership under fire on the beach at Normandy," Ellery concluded, "I don't see how the credit can go to anyone other than the company-grade officers and senior NCOs who led the way. It is good to be reminded that there are such men, that there always have been and always will be. We sometimes forget, I think, that you can manufacture weapons, and you can purchase ammunition, but you can't buy valor and you can't pull heroes off an a.s.sembly line."

The next morning Pt. Robert Healey of the 149th Combat Engineers and a friend decided to go down the bluff to retrieve their packs. Healey had run out of cigarettes, but he had a carton in a waterproof bag in his pack. "When we walked down to the beach, it was just an unbelievable sight. There was debris everywhere, and all kinds of equipment washing back and forth in the tide. Anything you could think of seemed to be there. We came across a tennis racquet, a guitar, a.s.sault jackets, packs, gas masks, everything. We found half a jar of olives which we ate with great relish. We found my pack but unfortunately the cigarettes were no longer there. "On the way back I came across what was probably the most poignant memory I have of this whole episode. Lying on the beach was a young soldier, his arms outstretched. Near one of his hands, as if he had been reading it, was a pocketbook (what today would be called a paperback). "It wasOur Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner. This expressed the spirit of our ordeal. Our hearts were young and gay because we thought we were immortal, we believed we were doing a great thing, and we really believed in the crusade which we hoped would liberate the world from the heel of n.a.z.ism."

8 - Pointe-du-Hoc

IT WAS A NEARLY100-meter-high cliff, with perpendicular sides jutting out into the Channel. It looked down on Utah Beach to the left and Omaha Beach to the right. There were six 155mm cannon in heavily reinforced concrete bunkers that were capable of hitting either beach with their big sh.e.l.ls. On the 69 outermost edge of the cliff, the Germans had an elaborate, well-protected outpost, where the spotters had a perfect view and could call back coordinates to the gunners at the 155s. Those guns had to be neutralized.

The Allied bombardment of Pointe-du-Hoc had begun weeks before D-Day. Heavy bombers from the U.S. Eighth Air Force and British Bomber Command had repeatedly plastered the area, with a climax coming before dawn on June 6. Then the battleship Texas took up the action, sending dozens of 14-inch sh.e.l.ls into the position. Altogether, Pointe-du-Hoc got hit by more than ten kilotons of high explosives, the equivalent of the explosive power of the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. Texas lifted her fire at 0630, the moment the rangers were scheduled to touch down.

Col. James Earl Rudder was in the lead boat. He was not supposed to be there. Lt. Gen. Clarence Huebner, CO of the 1st Division and in overall command at Omaha Beach, had forbidden Rudder to lead D, E, and F Companies of the 2nd Rangers into Pointe-du-Hoc, saying, "We're not going to risk getting you knocked out in the first round."

"I'm sorry to have to disobey you, sir," Rudder had replied, "but if I don't take it, it may not go." *

Lt. James W. Eikner, Rudder's communications officer on D-Day, comments in a letter of March 29, 1993, to the author: "The a.s.sault on the Pointe was supposed to be led by a recently promoted executive officer who unfortunately managed to get himself thoroughly drunk and unruly while still aboard his transport in Weymouth harbor. This was the situation that decided Col. Rudder to personally lead the Pointe-du-Hoc a.s.sault. The ex. ofc. was sent ash.o.r.e and hospitalized-we never saw him again."

The rangers were in LCA boats manned by British seamen (the rangers had trained with British commandos and were therefore accustomed to working with British sailors). The LCA was built in England on the basic design of Andrew Higgins's boat, but the British added some light armor to the sides and gunwales. That made the LCA slower and heavier-the British were sacrificing mobility to increase security-which meant that the LCA rode lower in the water than the LCVP.

On D-Day morning all the LCAs carrying the rangers took on water as spray washed over the sides.

One of the ten boats swamped shortly after leaving the transport area, taking the CO of D Company and twenty men with it. (They were picked up by an LCT a few hours later. "Give us some dry clothes, weapons and ammunition, and get us back in to the Pointe. We gotta get back!" Capt. "Duke" Slater said as he came out of the water. But his men were so numb from the cold water that the ship's physician ordered them back to England.) One of the two supply boats bringing in ammunition and other gear also swamped; the other supply boat had to jettison more than half its load to stay afloat. That was but the beginning of the foul-ups. At 0630, as Rudder's lead LCA approached the beach, he saw with dismay that the c.o.xswain was headed toward Pointe-de-la-Perce, about halfway between the Vierville draw and Pointe-du-Hoc. After some argument Rudder persuaded the c.o.xswain to turn right to the objective. The flotilla had to fight the tidal current (the cause of the drift to the left) and proceeded only slowly parallel to the coast. The error was costly. It caused the rangers to be thirty-five minutes late in touching down, which gave the German defenders time to recover from the bombardment, climb out of their dugouts, and man their positions. It also caused the flotilla to run a gauntlet of fire from German guns along four kilometers of coastline. One of the four DUKWs was sunk by a 20mm sh.e.l.l. Sgt. Frank South, a nineteen-year-old medic, recalled, "We were getting a lot of machine-gun fire from our left flank, alongside the cliff, and we could not, for the life of us, locate the fire." Lieutenant Eikner remembered "bailing water with our helmets, dodging bullets, and vomiting all at the same time." USSSatterlee and HMSTalybont, destroyers, saw what was happening and came in close to fire with all guns at the 70 Germans. That helped to drive some of the Germans back from the edge of the cliff. D Company had been scheduled to land on the west side of the point, but because of the error in navigation Rudder signaled by hand that the two LCAs carrying the remaining D Company troops join the other seven and land side by side along the east side. Lt. George Kerchner, a platoon leader in D Company, recalled that when his LCA made its turn to head into the beach, "My thought was that this whole thing is a big mistake, that none of us were ever going to get up that cliff." But then the destroyers started firing and drove some of the Germans back from the edge of the cliff. Forty-eight years later, then retired Colonel Kerchner commented, "Some day I would love to meet up with somebody fromSatterlee so I can shake his hand and thank him."

The beach at Pointe-du-Hoc was only ten meters in width as the flotilla approached, and shrinking rapidly as the tide was coming in (at high tide there would be virtually no beach). There was no sand, only shingle. The bombardment from air and sea had brought huge chunks of the clay soil from the point tumbling down, making the rocks slippery but also providing an eight-meter buildup at the base of the cliff that gave the rangers something of a head start in climbing the forty-meter cliff.

The rangers had a number of ingenious devices to help them get to the top. One was twenty-five-meter extension ladders mounted in the DUKWs, provided by the London Fire Department. But one DUKW was already sunk, and the other three could not get a footing on the shingle, which was covered with wet clay and thus rather like greased ball bearings. Only one ladder was extended. Sgt. William Stivinson climbed to the top to fire his machine gun. He was swaying back and forth like a metronome, German tracers whipping about him. Lt. Elmer "Dutch" Vermeer described the scene: "The ladder was swaying at about a forty-five-degree angle-both ways. Stivinson would fire short bursts as he pa.s.sed over the cliff at the top of the arch, but the DUKW floundered so badly that they had to bring the fire ladder back down." The basic method of climbing was by rope. Each LCA carried three pairs of rocket guns, firing steel grapnels which pulled up plain three-quarter-inch ropes, toggle ropes, or rope ladders. The rockets were fired just before touchdown. Grapnels with attached ropes were an ancient technique for scaling a wall or cliff, tried and proven. But in this case, the ropes had been soaked by the spray and in many cases were too heavy. Rangers watched with sinking hearts as the grapnels arched in toward the cliff, only to fall short from the weight of the ropes. Still, at least one grapnel and rope from each LCA made it; the grapnels grabbed the earth, and the dangling ropes provided a way to climb the cliff.

To get to the ropes, the rangers had to disembark and cross the narrow strip of beach to the base of the cliff. To get there they had two problems to overcome. The first was a German machine gun on the rangers' left flank, firing across the beach. It killed or wounded fifteen men as it swept bullets back and forth across the beach.

Colonel Rudder was one of the first to make it to the beach. With him was Col. Travis Trevor, a British commando who had a.s.sisted in the training of the rangers. He began walking the beach, giving encouragement. Rudder described him as "a great big [six feet four inches], black-haired son of a gun-one of those staunch Britishers." Lieutenant Vermeer yelled at him, "How in the world can you do that when you are being fired at?"

"I take two short steps and three long ones," Trevor replied, "and they always miss me." Just then a bullet hit him in the helmet and drove him to the ground. He got up and shook his fist at the machine gunner, hollering, "You dirty son of a b.i.t.c.h." After that, Vermeer noted, "He crawled around like the rest of us." The second problem for the disembarking rangers was craters, caused by bombs or sh.e.l.ls that had fallen short of the cliff. They were underwater and could not be seen. "Getting off the ramp,"

Sergeant South recalled, "my pack and I went into a bomb crater and the world turned completely to water." He inflated his Mae West and made it to sh.o.r.e.

71 Lieutenant Kerchner was determined to be first off his boat. He thought he was going into a meter or so of water as he hollered "OK, let's go" and jumped. He went in over his head, losing his rifle. He started to swim in, furious with the British c.o.xswain. The men behind him saw what had happened and jumped to the sides. They hardly got their feet wet. "So instead of being the first one ash.o.r.e, I was one of the last ash.o.r.e from my boat. I wanted to find somebody to help me cuss out the British navy, but everybody was busily engrossed in their own duties so I couldn't get any sympathy."

Two of his men were hit by the machine gun enfilading the beach."This made me very angry because I figured he was shooting at me and I had nothing but a pistol." Kerchner picked up a dead ranger's rifle.

"My first impulse was to go after this machine gun up there, but I immediately realized that this was rather stupid as our mission was to get to the top of the cliff and get on with destroying those guns.

"It wasn't necessary to tell this man to do this or that man to do that," Kerchner said. "They had been trained, they had the order in which they were supposed to climb the ropes and the men were all moving right in and starting to climb up the cliff." Kerchner went down the beach to report to Colonel Rudder that the D Company commander's LCA had sunk. He found Rudder starting to climb one of the rope ladders.

"He didn't seem particularly interested in me informing him that I was a.s.suming command of the company. He told me to get the h.e.l.l out of there and get up and climb my rope." Kerchner did as ordered. He found climbing the cliff "very easy," much easier than some of the practice climbs back in England. The machine gun and the incoming tide gave Sgt. Gene Elder "a certain urgency" to get off the beach and up the cliff. He and his squad freeclimbed, as they were unable to touch the cliff. When they reached the top, "I told them, 'Boys, keep your heads down, because headquarters has fouled up again and has issued the enemy live ammunition.' " Other rangers had trouble getting up the cliff. "I went up about, I don't know, forty, fifty feet," Pvt. Sigurd Sundby remembered. "The rope was wet and kind of muddy. My hands just couldn't hold, they were like grease, and I came sliding back down. As I was going down, I wrapped my foot around the rope and slowed myself up as much as I could, but still I burned my hands. If the rope hadn't been so wet, I wouldn't have been able to hang on for the burning.

"I landed right beside [Lt. Tod] Sweeney there, and he says, 'What's the matter, Sundby, chicken? Let me-I'll show you how to climb.' So he went up first and I was right up after him, and when I got to the top, Sweeney says, 'Hey, Sundby, don't forget to zigzag.' " Sgt. William "L-Rod" Petty, who had the reputation of being one of the toughest of the rangers, a man short on temper and long on aggressiveness, also had trouble with a wet and muddy rope. As he slipped to the bottom, Capt. Walter Block, the medical officer, said to Petty, "Soldier, get up that rope to the top of the cliff." Petty turned to Block, stared him square in the face, and said, "I've been trying to get up this G.o.dd.a.m.ned rope for five minutes and if you think you can do any better you can f-ing well do it yourself." Block turned away, trying to control his own temper.

Germans on the top managed to cut two or three of the ropes, while others tossed grenades over the cliff, but BAR men at the base and machine-gun fire fromSatterlee kept most of them back from the edge. They had not antic.i.p.ated an attack from the sea, so their defensive positions were inland. In addition, the rangers had tied pieces of fuse to the grapnels and lit them just before firing the rockets; the burning fuses made the Germans think that the grapnels were some kind of weapon about to explode, which kept them away. Within five minutes rangers were at the top; within fifteen minutes most of the fighting men were up. One of the first to make it was a country preacher from Tennessee, Pvt. Ralph Davis, a dead shot with a rifle and cool under pressure. When he got up, he dropped his pants and took a c.r.a.p. "The war had to stop for awhile until 'Preacher' could get organized," one of his buddies commented. As the tide was reducing the beach to almost nothing, and because the attack from the sea-although less than two hundred rangers strong-was proceeding, Colonel Rudder told Lieutenant Eikner to send the code message "Tilt." That told the floating reserve of A and B Companies, 2nd 72 Rangers, and the 5th Ranger Battalion to land at Omaha Beach instead of Pointe-du-Hoc. Rudder expected them to pa.s.s through Vierville and attack Pointe-du-Hoc from the eastern, landward side.

On the beach there were wounded who needed attention. Sergeant South had barely got ash.o.r.e when "the first cry of 'Medic!' went out and I shrugged off my pack, grabbed my aid kit, and took off for the wounded man. He had been shot in the chest. I was able to drag him in closer to the cliff. I'd no sooner taken care of him than I had to go to another and another and another." Captain Block set up an aid station.

"As I got over the top of the cliff," Lieutenant Kerchner recalled, "it didn't look anything at all like what I thought it was going to look like." The rangers had studied aerial photos and maps and sketches and sand table mock-ups of the area, but the bombardment from air and sea had created a moonscape: "It was just one large sh.e.l.l crater after the other."

Fifty years later Pointe-du-Hoc remains an incredible, overwhelming sight. It is hardly possible to say which is more impressive, the amount of reinforced concrete the Germans poured to build their casemates or the damage done to them and the craters created by the bombs and sh.e.l.ls. Huge chunks of concrete, as big as houses, are scattered over the kilometer-square area, as if the G.o.ds were playing dice. The tunnels and trenches were mostly obliterated, but enough of them still exist to give an idea of how much work went into building the fortifications. Some railroad tracks remain in the underground portions; they were for handcarts used to move ammunition. There is an enormous steel fixture that was a railroad turntable.

Surprisingly, the ma.s.sive concrete observation post at the edge of the cliff remains intact. It was the key to the whole battery; from it one has a perfect view of both Utah and Omaha Beaches; German artillery observers in the post had radio and underground telephone communication with the casemates. The craters are as big as ten meters across, a meter or two deep, some even deeper. They number in the hundreds. They were a G.o.dsend to the rangers, for they provided plenty of immediate cover. Once on top, rangers could get to a crater in seconds, then begin firing at the German defenders. What most impresses tourists at Pointe-du-Hoc-who come today in the thousands, from all over the world-is the sheer cliff and the idea of climbing up it by rope. What most impresses military professionals is the way the rangers went to work once they got on top. Despite the initial disorientation they quickly recovered and went about their a.s.signed tasks. Each platoon had a specific mission, to knock out a specific gun emplacement. The men got on it without being told.

Germans were firing sporadically from the trenches and regularly from the machine-gun position on the eastern edge of the fortified area and from a 20mm anti-aircraft gun on the western edge, but the rangers ignored them to get to the casemates.

When they got to the casemates, to their amazement they found that the "guns" were telephone poles.

Tracks leading inland indicated that the 155mm cannon had been removed recently, almost certainly as a result of the preceding air bombardment. The rangers never paused. In small groups they began moving inland toward their next objective, the paved road that connected Grandcamp and Vierville, to set up roadblocks to prevent German reinforcements from moving to Omaha.

Lieutenant Kerchner moved forward and got separated from his men. "I remember landing in this zigzag trench. It was the deepest trench I'd ever seen. It was a narrow communications trench, two feet wide but eight feet deep. About every twenty-five yards it would go off on another angle. I was by myself and I never felt so lonesome before or since, because every time I came to an angle I didn't know whether I was going to come face-to-face with a German or not." He was filled with a sense of anxiety and hurried to get to the road to join his men "because I felt a whole lot better when there were other men around."

73 Kerchner followed the trench for 150 meters before it finally ran out near the ruins of a house on the edge of the fortified area. Here he discovered that Pointe-du-Hoc was a self-contained fort in itself, surrounded on the land side with minefields, barbed-wire entanglements, and machine-gun emplacements. "This is where we began running into most of the German defenders, on the perimeter."

Other rangers had made it to the road, fighting all the way, killing Germans, taking casualties. The losses were heavy. In Kerchner's D Company, only twenty men out of the seventy who had started out in the LCAs were on their feet. Two company commanders were casualties; lieutenants were now leading D and E. Capt. Otto Masny led F Company. Kerchner checked with the three COs and learned that all the guns were missing. "So at this stage we felt rather disappointed, not only disappointed but I felt awfully lonesome as I realized how few men we had there."

The lieutenants decided that there was no reason to go back to the fortified area and agreed to establish a perimeter around the road "and try to defend ourselves and wait for the invading force that had landed on Omaha Beach to come up."

At the base of the cliff at around 0730, Lieutenant Eikner sent out a message by radio: "Praise the Lord." It signified that the rangers were on top of the cliff.

At 0745, Colonel Rudder moved his command post up to the top, establishing it in a crater on the edge of the cliff. Captain Block also climbed a rope to the top and set up his aid station in a two-room concrete emplacement. It was pitch black and cold inside; Block worked by flashlight in one room, using the other to hold the dead.

Sergeant South remembered "the wounded coming in at a rapid rate, we could only keep them on litters stacked up pretty closely. It was just an endless, endless process. Periodically I would go out and bring in a wounded man from the field, leading one back, and ducking through the various sh.e.l.l craters. At one time, I went out to get someone and was carrying him back on my shoulders when he was. .h.i.t by several other bullets and killed."

The fighting within the fortified area was confused and confusing. Germans would pop up here, there, everywhere, fire a few rounds, then disappear back underground. Rangers could not keep contact with each other. Movement meant crawling.* There was nothing resembling a front line. Germans were taken prisoner; so were some rangers. In the observation post a few Germans held out despite repeated attempts to overrun the position.