D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (73 page)

A major problem for the Americans was keeping up the momentum of the advance. This is always a problem for an attacking force, made much worse at Omaha by the natural and inevitable tendency of the men who had made it up from the hell on the beach to the comparative quiet of the high ground to feel that they had triumphed—and thus done their job for that day. In addition, they were exhausted. Furthermore, as with the paratroopers at Utah, when the men got into a village they had immediate, easy access to wine. Sgt. William Lewis of the 116th recalled spending the afternoon of D-Day "trying to get organized outside Vierville. I had liberated a big jug of wine and we all had a drink."
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(The residents of Vierville were, of course, terrified. Pierre and Fernand Piprel decided to flee to the south. On the way, they saw some soldiers crouching behind a hedgerow. Pierre Piprel said it was "hard to tell who they were since we did not know the Allied uniforms. Arriving close, I asked them, English? and they answered, No, Americans. Seeing their packs of Lucky Strikes, we knew we were safe. They let us go on."
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)

The absence of radios, the lack of unit cohesion, and the nature of the terrain also contributed to the inability to maintain momentum west of Vierville. Where individuals could set an example and lead the way up the bluff, in the hedgerows the brave got cut down when they exposed themselves by dashing forward.

"We were under observation all afternoon long," Cpl. Gale Beccue of the rangers recalled. "One man moving alone would draw sniper fire, but any concentration of men would bring in the artillery and mortar rounds. We had the village secure but outside Vierville we had only fleeting glimpses of the Germans."
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Those who led the way off the beach and up the bluff had a much better chance than those who tried to lead on top. The men behind the seawall could see for themselves that to stay where they were was to die, that they could not fall back, that only by following advancing columns did they have any chance at all. On top, a man crouched behind a hedgerow was safe right where he was.

Isolation contributed to the loss of momentum, as it led many men to the conclusion that their groups were on their own—as was indeed often the case. "From noon through the balance of June 6," Pvt. Harry Parley of the 116th said, "I am unable to recall chronologically what happened to me. The rest of the day is a jumbled memory of running, fighting, and hiding. We moved like a small band of outlaws, much of the time not knowing where we were, often meeting other groups like ours, joining and separating as situations arose, always asking for news of one's company or battalion."

Parley related one incident from the early afternoon. He was moving along a road when he heard the characteristic clank of a tracked vehicle, then the roar of a German cannon. "Terrified, I turned, ran like hell, and dove into a roadside ditch. Already there was a tough old sergeant from the 1 st Division lying on his side as one would relax on a sofa. I screamed at him, 'It's a tank—what the hell do we do now?' "

The sergeant, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, stared calmly at Parley for a few seconds, poker-faced, and said, "Relax, kid, maybe it will go away." Sure enough, it did.
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Colonel Canham, CO of the 116th, moved out of Vierville at around 1200 to set up his HQ at the prearranged CP location, the Chateau de Vaumicel, a half kilometer south of the village. In the process, his HQ group (three or four officers and a couple of enlisted men) got isolated behind a hedgerow just short of the chateau. Pvt. Carl Weast with a platoon of rangers came on the scene; Canham spotted the men and ordered them to act as his CP guard.

The chateau was full of Germans. A German riding a bicycle came up the road. The rangers shot him, then took up outpost

positions around the chateau. Weast watched as a platoon of German soldiers came out of the chateau and formed up in a column around an old two-wheeled horse buggy with wounded in it. The Germans were unaware of the presence of Americans; they had their rifles slung over their shoulders.

"They were pulling the cart along, two guys shoving and two guys pulling. We waited until they got real close, maybe ten yards, and we stepped out in the road with our weapons pointed at them and they surrendered immediately.

"Now, with this kind of a situation, what in the hell do you do with twenty-five prisoners? We put them in an orchard and we put one man guarding them and we tried to interrogate them. Hell, there were no Germans! They were all Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, anything but Germans. There was one German noncom, middle-aged, and this guy looked like he wanted to do anything but fight a war. He was just happy as hell to be a prisoner, although he was concerned about a German counterattack, but not nearly as concerned as we were.

"The situation was becoming very, very tenuous. Here was Colonel Canham with 1500 yards of front to cover, and he had a total of about thirty-five men to do it with, expecting a German armored attack. Oh, man, you talk about bad spirits."

As the afternoon wore on, there was talk among the rangers about shooting the prisoners, but Weast pointed out that "not only is that illegal and immoral, it's stupid." When the light began to fade, "we had them lay real close to each other and we put a man with a BAR at the end and we made it plain to them that when it got dark we wouldn't be able to observe them but we could hear them and if anybody made any move we were going to get the whole bunch of them with the BAR. They lay there through the night and believe me, those were some damn quiet enemy."
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At 1400 Lt. Jay Mehaffey of the rangers was on the outskirts of Vierville. He lost a man who had been crossing a gap in a hedgerow to a German sniper. Just then a ranger came down the road with eight German POWs. Mehaffey lined the prisoners up in the gap, hands clasped over their helmets, then had his men get past the gap behind the prisoners.

"We didn't have time to fool with prisoners," he said, so once safely beyond the gap he just waved to the Germans to continue on down the bluff and find someone to whom they could surrender.
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Colonel Canham's isolation was complete. His only working radio belonged to the liaison officer from the 743rd Tank Battalion and even he could not contact any of the tanks still down on the beach. Canham did get some help—that may not have been needed—from the Navy. At 1350, a signalman on LCI 5 38 at Dog Green beach sent a visual message to destroyer
Harding:
"Believe church steeple to be enemy artillery observation post, can you blast it?"

Harding
replied, "Which church do you mean?"

"Vierville."

"Don't you mean the church at Colleville?"

"No, Vierville."

Harding
called the commander of Force O Forward Observers to report the request. CFOFO replied five minutes later, granting permission to fire on the church for one minute.
Harding's
action report noted, "At 1413 opened fire at a range of 3200 yards and completely demolished church, expending 40 rounds, every shell of which landed on the target."
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The incident was typical in a number of ways of not only D-Day but of the later fighting in France. Whenever the Americans took artillery fire they were convinced that the Germans were using the spires of nearby churches for observation posts and used their own artillery to knock those spires down. Sometimes they were right about the OP, often they were wrong; in any case there were few standing spires left in Normandy after the battle.

In the case of Vierville, the town was in American hands (unknown to LCI 538 and
Harding)
and none of those on the spot thought the spire was being used as an OP.
Harding
claimed a ranger officer later confirmed that the church contained four enemy machine guns "which were completely demolished."

Harding's
claim to have hit the church with every shell was contradicted by Mayor Michel Hardelay of Vierville, who said that the first shell exploded in his house, causing the wall of the second floor to collapse. The second hit the bakery, killing the maid and the baker's baby. The following shells hit the surrounding buildings as well as the church. The GIs in the town took some casualties from the naval fire.
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Such contradictions in the testimony of eyewitnesses, well known among witnesses to traffic accidents, are commonplace in war; in the case of the D-Day fights at Vierville, St.-Laurent, and Colleville, they are exacerbated by the nature of the action—small groups without knowledge of what was going on around them, no radio or other contact, each group engaged in its own battle.

When the American destroyers had a spotter, they could be deadly accurate. Private Slaughter of the 116th saw
Satterlee
do some fine work. Slaughter was on the edge of the Vierville draw. He spotted Sgt. William Presley leading a small band of men. Presley was six feet four inches, weighed 230 pounds, and was, according to Slaughter, "the epitome of a first sergeant: rugged-looking, immaculate, and gifted with a booming voice."

In front of Presley there was a naval forward observer, lying face down, dead, with a radio strapped to his back. Presley had been observing a battery of
Nebelwerfer,
105mm mortars, firing from a fixed position a couple of hundred meters to his front. The shells were playing hell with the reinforcements arriving on the beach. Presley retrieved the radio and made contact with
Satterlee.
He said he had a target and gave the coordinates.
Satterlee
fired; Presley gave a correction; another shell, another correction; then Presley called, "Fire for effect."

Slaughter, watching all this, recalled, "We heard the salvo, 'Boom-ba-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom-ba-be-boom!' Soon the shells came screaming over on the way to the German tormentors. 'Ker-whoom-ker-whoom-ker-whoom! Ker-whoom-oom-oom-ker-whoom-oom-oom!' The ground trembled under us. The exploding shells saturated the area, some of them landing too close for comfort to our position. That action put the
Nebelwerfer
out of action and earned Presley the Distinguished Service Cross."

Shortly thereafter, Slaughter saw his first German prisoner. He was being interrogated by a German-speaking American officer armed with a carbine. The captive was on his knees, hands behind his head. The American demanded to know where the minefields were located. The prisoner replied with his name, rank, and serial number.

"Where are the damn minefields?" the officer shouted. With an arrogant look on his face, the prisoner gave his name, rank, and serial number. The American fired his carbine between the German's knees. With a smirk on his face, the German pointed to his crotch and said,
"Nixhier.
"Then he pointed to his head and said,
"Hier!"

The American interrogator gave up and waved the prisoner away. Slaughter commented, "This convinced me that we were fighting first-rate soldiers."
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"At nightfall the Vierville area was the weakest part of the beachhead," the Army official history states.
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The 5th Rangers

and elements of the 1st Battalion, 116th, with some combat engineers, were holding defensive positions west and southwest of the village. Many were surrounded. (One ranger platoon had, amazingly, managed to make it to Pointe-du-Hoc, almost without incident.) Communication ranged from poor to completely absent. The Vierville draw remained closed almost until dark. Dog Green, White, and Red sectors on the beach were still under heavy artillery fire and few landings had been attempted after 1200, which meant that few reinforcements were coming up to help.

Lt. Francis Dawson of the rangers had already earned a DSC for his actions in getting men off the beach. When he got to Vierville his unit was stopped on the west side by machine-gun fire. "We failed to eliminate this gun, so we withdrew and came back to the Vierville road and tried to outflank it. But as night fell, we were not too far from Vierville. We dug in."
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Others had similar experiences. Lieutenant Mehaffey got through Vierville in the midafternoon, then stopped. "Our right flank was the English Channel, our left flank our own outposts. We held this position the rest of D-Day. We were less than a mile from where we had landed."
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Pvt. Paul Calvert of the 116th, after describing the route his company followed to Vierville, declared, "The end of the day saw this group completely fatigued, demoralized, disorganized, and utterly incapable of concerted military action. The men were scattered from captured German positions overlooking the Vierville draw to the designated CP with Colonel Canham."

But the Germans at Vierville were also fatigued, demoralized, disorganized, and incapable of concerted action. From behind their hedgerows, German snipers and machine gunners could delay and harass and stop the American advance—but they could not push the men from the rangers and the 116th back down the bluff.

The village of Vierville had not been defended by the Germans, but St.-Laurent held a company of infantry from the 352nd Division. The Germans were dug in on the high ground commanding the upper end of the Les Moulins draw. They were on both sides of the road coming up the draw and controlled the approaches to the main crossroad on the western outskirts of the village. Maj. Sidney Bingham, CO of 2nd Battalion, 116th, organized a series of attacks against the German position, only to be stopped by machine-gun fire from positions which his men were unable to locate.

In the afternoon, the GIs at St.-Laurent got help from the 115th Regiment, 29th Division. The 115th landed at E-l draw just before noon, but it took many hours for the regiment to clear the beach and launch an assault on St.-Laurent from the northeast. It was slowed by mines—and by a rumor sweeping through the troops that American mine detectors could not locate German mines, so that the paths marked out by white tape were not safe. German snipers on the bluff caused some casualties and many delays.