D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (69 page)

As for the implication in the Ranger motto that it took rangers to lead the 116th off the beach, the fact is that the first organized company to the top at Vierville was Company C, 116th. By the time the rangers landed, many other individuals from the 116th had gone up. They preceded the rangers. The members of the 116th still at the seawall came from those companies that had been decimated in the first wave. Although they seemed helpless, they were

just waiting for someone to tell them what to do, and give them some equipment—they had no bangalore torpedoes, no BARs, no machine guns, no radios, no officers—and some support. When the platoon leaders from the rangers started moving, they joined in. It is a small point, and the Rangers certainly had no intention of casting aspersions on the 116th when they adopted their motto, but it rankles with some of the survivors of the 116th.

As Captain Raaen crossed through the gap in the barbed wire, leading his men, he recalled, "There was little Tony Vullo, the smallest man in the battalion, lying across a ruined pillbox with his trousers down, having his gluteus maximus treated for a bullet wound." He had been shot by a single bullet at such an angle that he had four separate bullet holes in his butt. "Of course, the men enjoyed ribbing him as we went by."
²⁷

For some, going up the bluff was relatively safe. Lieutenant Dawson and his platoon from D Company of the 5th Rangers were among those. He reached the top, then turned parallel to the beach and began moving along the crest in a bent-over position, shooting or throwing grenades down on the Germans in the trenches below him.*

Captain Raaen's headquarters company was held up by machine-gun fire. Lieutenant Dawson could see the German firing position. It was seventy-five meters away, on the military crest of the bluff, and held two men. Dawson motioned for his BAR man to come forward, but the German machine gunners spotted his movement, turned on him, and killed him.

Dawson retrieved the BAR and attacked the German position, firing from the hip as he did so. The two terrified Germans jumped out of the pillbox and began to flee up the bluff. Dawson cut them down.

That freed Raaen. He moved on up and encountered heavy smoke from a brushfire. "Captain, can we put on our gas masks?" one of the men called out.

Raaen doubted that it was necessary but reluctantly gave permission. As the smoke thickened, he decided to put on his own. He took his helmet off, put it between his knees, with his left hand

Most of the men who got to the top that morning tended to move straight inland to their assembly point at Vierville. Had more of them done as Dawson did, the 1st and 29th divisions and supporting units would have gotten off the beach much sooner.

ripped open the cover of the gas-mask bag, and pulled out the mask. He had forgotten about the apple and orange he had stuffed in the bag; they went bouncing down the bluff.

He put on his mask, took a deep breath, "and nearly died. I had forgotten to pull the plug on the front that allowed the air to come through. I had to rip off my mask, take a couple more gasps of smoke, put the mask back on, rip off the tab, and I could breathe easily. I reorganized myself, took two steps, and I was out of the smoke. I was so furious that I kept my mask on for about ten or twenty more feet just to punish myself for having weakened and put on the mask."
²⁸

Pvt. Carl Weast was in the area. He heard someone holler "Gas!" Weast put on his mask, but he had cracked the edge of his facepiece and could tell by smell that it was only grass smoke, "so I took my damn gas mask off and threw it away. That's the last time during the entire war that I ever carried a damn gas mask."
²⁹

As Colonel Schneider's HQ group went up the bluff it ran into German prisoners coming down. Schneider told his interpreter, Sergeant Fast, to find out what he could from them. Fast had no training in this sort of thing, but he proved to be a natural at it.

"I picked the youngest, most timid-looking, lowest-ranking Kraut I could find." He moved him away from the others and informed the prisoner, "You are going to tell me what I want to know." Then Fast told the prisoner to relax, "For you the war is over." Then he made threats: "You have three choices. Tell me nothing at all and I'll send you over to the Russians. Give me information and if you leave any doubt in my mind that you're telling the truth I'll turn you over to my Jewish buddy standing here next to me and he'll take you behind that bush over there." (Fast said in his oral history that the Jewish buddy was Herb Epstein, "and he had not shaved for a couple of days, he was big and burly, I remember he had a .45 on his hip and a ranger knife in his boot, and an automatic tommy gun.")

"Third, if you tell me what you know and convince me you are telling the truth I'll send you to America and you will have a good life until the war is won and then you'll get to go home."

Then the first question: "Did you see all the American and British bombers overhead earlier this morning?"

"/a," the prisoner replied. Good, Fast thought, now he is in a yes mood. The prisoner went on to indicate the position of mine-

fields and pointed out hidden fortifications along the bluff. He said there were no German troops in Vierville (which was true) but there were "many" stationed inland, and gave other useful information.
³⁰

Schneider's HQ group got to the top, as did other rangers to the left and right. What they could see was an open field and a maze of hedgerows. Germans with machine guns were firing from behind the bushes.

Private Weast was furious. He wanted to know, "Where the hell was this Air Force bombardment that was supposed to blow all this stuff out of there. Hell, I didn't see a bomb crater nowhere! Nowhere did I see a bomb crater."
³¹

The Army's official history states, "The penetrations of the beach defenses made between 0800-0900 represented a definite success achieved by determined action in the face of great difficulties."
³²

The penetrations had been made by about 600 men, mainly from C Company, 116th, and the rangers. They had penetrated and made it to the top—but they had no radios, no heavy weapons, no tanks, no supporting artillery, no way to communicate with the Navy. All the exits were still blocked, the beach was still jammed with vehicles that could not move, taking heavy artillery fire. The reserve regiments were not coming ashore.

The 116th and the rangers were still on their own. They were mixed together. Moving toward the Germans in the hedgerows, encountering fire, moving to outflank the positions, the ad hoc assault groups tended to split up, resulting in progressive loss of control as movement proceeded inland. When Colonel Canham reached the top, shortly after 0900, and set up his CP, he found rangers and 116th elements scattered all through the field ahead, some headed for the coastal road to Vierville, some engaged in firefights with Germans in the bushes.

The situation was by no means under control. A victory had not yet been won. But there was now a sizable American force on top of the bluff. The battle for Omaha Beach had not gone according to plan, but thanks to men like General Cota, Colonels Schneider and Canham, Captains Raaen and Dawson, and innumerable lieutenants and noncoms, disaster had been averted.

23

CATASTROPHE CONTAINED

Easy Red Sector, Omaha Beach

"Omaha Beach," General Bradley wrote three decades after D-Day, "was a nightmare. Even now it brings pain to recall what happened there on June 6, 1944. I have returned many times to honor the valiant men who died on that beach. They should never be forgotten. Nor should those who lived to carry the day by the slimmest of margins. Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero."
¹

Bradley's command post was a twenty-by-ten-foot steel cabin built for him on the deck of the cruiser USS
Augusta.
The walls were dominated by Michelin motoring maps of Normandy. There was a plotting table in the center of the room, with clerks at typewriters along one side. Bradley was seldom there; he spent most of the morning on the bridge, standing beside Adm. Alan G. Kirk, the Western Naval Task Force commander. Bradley had cotton in his ears to muffle the blast of
Augusta's
guns, binoculars to his eyes to observe the shore.
²

For Bradley, it was "a time of grave personal anxiety and frustration." He couldn't see much except smoke and explosions. He was getting no reports from his immediate subordinate, Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow, commander of V Corps (1st and 29th divisions), no news from the beach, only scattered bits of information from landing-craft skippers returning to the transport area for an-

other load, and they were muttering words like "disaster," "terrible casualties," and "chaos."

"I gained the impression," Bradley later wrote, "that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe, that there was little hope we could force the beach. Privately, I considered evacuating the beachhead. ... I agonized over the withdrawal decision, praying that our men could hang on."
³

Those were the thoughts of a desperate man faced with two apparently hopeless options. At 0930, with the tide rushing in to fully cover all the obstacles, and with hundreds of landing craft circling offshore, while the congestion on the beach was still so bad that all landings were still suspended, sending in the follow-up waves as reinforcements according to the planning schedule would only add to the problem—but not sending them in would leave the forces already ashore isolated and vulnerable to a counterattack.

Bradley's private thoughts notwithstanding, as for retreat, "It would have been impossible to have brought these people back," as General Eisenhower flatly and rightly declared.
⁴
With almost no radios functioning, there was no way to recall the men from the 116th and 16th regiments and the rangers who were already— although unknown to Bradley or any other senior officer—making their way up the bluff. The men at the shingle could have been ordered to fall back to the beach for withdrawal, but if they had obeyed they would have been slaughtered—Omaha Beach was one of the few battlegrounds in history in which the greater danger lay to the rear. In any case, the landing craft ashore were
kaput.
Those offshore were jammed with men and vehicles.

Withdrawal was not an option. Nor was the alternative that Bradley played with in his mind, sending follow-up waves to Utah or the British beaches, not just because that might well have meant sacrificing the men ashore at Omaha Beach but even more because it would have left a gap of some sixty kilometers between Utah and Gold beaches, which would have jeopardized the invasion as a whole.

As head of the U.S. First Army, Bradley had more than a quarter of a million men under his immediate command. But standing on the bridge
of Augusta,
he was a helpless observer, desperate for information. On the beaches the plans could be modified or abandoned as circumstances demanded; on the
Augusta,
Bradley was stuck with the overall strategic plan.

On the amphibious command ship USS
Ancon,
General

Gerow had his command post. For the first three hours of the assault he was as blind as Bradley. He sent the assistant chief of staff of V Corps, Col. Benjamin Talley, in a DUKW to cruise offshore and report on the battle. Talley found that even from 500 meters he couldn't see much. It was obvious that the beaches were jammed, that enemy artillery and machine-gun fire was effective, and that the exits had not been opened. He could not see up the bluff because of the smoke, so he was unaware of the progress of individuals and small units who had managed to reach high ground. Talley was also unaware of the 0830 order from the 7th Naval Beach Battalion commander to suspend landings, so he was disturbed by the failure of landing craft to go ashore. At 0930 he informed Gerow that the LCTs were milling around offshore like "a stampeded herd of cattle."
⁵

At 0945 Gerow made his initial report to First Army. It was sketchy and alarming: "Obstacles mined, progress slow. 1st Battalion, 116th, reported 0748 being held up by machine-gun fire—two LCTs knocked out by artillery fire. DD tanks for Fox Green swamped."
⁶

Five minutes later, Maj. Gen. Clarence Huebner, commanding the 1st Division, received a radio report from the beach: "There are too many vehicles on the beach; send combat troops. 30 LCTs waiting offshore; cannot come in because of shelling. Troops dug in on beaches, still under heavy fire."
⁷
Huebner responded by ordering the 18th Regiment to land at once on Easy Red—but only one battalion was loaded in LCVPs; the other two had to be transshipped from their LCIs to LCVPs, and in any case the prohibition on further landings was still in effect.

Bradley sent his aide, Maj. Chester Hansen, and Admiral Kirk's gunnery officer, Capt. Joseph Wellings, in a torpedo boat to the beach to report, but all he got back was a message from Hansen: "It is difficult to make sense from what is going on."
⁸

From the generals' point of view, disaster loomed, a disaster they could do nothing about. The generals were irrelevant to the battle.

On Omaha, the situation was so bad that the evacuation of the wounded was toward the enemy. This may have been unique in military history. The few aid posts that had been set up were at the shingle seawall. Medics took great risks to drag wounded from the beach to the aid posts. There was little that could be done for

them beyond bandaging, splinting, giving morphine and plasma (if the medics had any supplies). The medical units landed off schedule and on the wrong beach sectors, often without their equipment. The 116th lost its entire regimental supply of plasma in two LCIs sunk off the beach.