Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (45 page)

The gunners on the battleships and cruisers maintained a beach-drenching fire until just before the first Higgins boat reached the shore. It was a fine calculation. If they stopped too soon, the defenders would have a chance to recover; if they continued too long, they might hit their own men. Deyo and Bryant agonized over the proper moment. Then an escorting destroyer signaled that the men were landing, and the big ships lifted fire. It was 6:40 a.m., H-Hour on Omaha and Utah Beaches.

I
T IS AN APHORISM
among military professionals that no plan survives first contact with the enemy. That may be especially true when the plan is as detailed and complex as the eleven-hundred-page, four-inch-thick plan for Operation Neptune. Crafted with so much care and effort by hundreds of men over months of close study, it specified the D-Day assignments of every ship, every landing craft, every vehicle, and nearly every Allied sailor and soldier on almost a minute-by-minute schedule. As Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in 1957: “This scheme was a little too neat.” It was perhaps inevitable that it would not play out exactly as scripted. Moreover, with so many working parts, and a timetable that made each element dependent on so many others, early miscues created a cascading series of difficulties that threatened to wreck the invasion altogether, especially on Omaha Beach. In the end, what saved the day was the ability of the men both afloat and ashore to adapt and adjust.
¹

There were many heroes on June 6, 1944, but surely among the most consequential were those who served at the point of the spear. That certainly
included the Navy and Coast Guard coxswains who took their fragile Higgins boats through the coastal obstacles. It included as well the lieutenants and ensigns who drove their LCTs and LCIs onto the crowded beaches even after it became evident that the elegant plan was going spectacularly awry. It included the Army captains and lieutenants who led their small tank and infantry units into the slaughterhouse ashore, and it included the sergeants and other noncommissioned officers who assumed responsibility on the beach after their officers fell in the first burst of relentless gunfire. Finally—indeed, most of all—it included the enlisted sailors and soldiers, who though terrified to the core, executed their assignments as best they could for as long as they could. In the end, it was the training and instinct of those soldiers and sailors, more than the carefully prepared script, that produced the Allied victory on the Normandy beaches.

THE FIRST ALLIED LANDING CRAFT
arrived on the American beaches within minutes of the moment indicated on the timetable. The Navy and Coast Guard coxswains jammed their Higgins boats up onto the beach, or as close to it as the uneven sub-aqueous terrain and still-visible mined obstacles would allow. The coxswains had been guided to the departure points by patrol craft, but for the final run in to the smoke-enshrouded beach, they simply aimed their craft shoreward and opened the throttles, going “hell bent for election as fast as we could go,” as one put it. More than a few of the boats, running flat out and pushed on by the rising tide, were virtually lifted up by the surf and slammed down violently onto the sand. One sailor remembered that the wooden boats “would just bounce up and down, up and down, until finally they were hard aground.” Some of them “split wide open” and the men had to swim or crawl away. Those not wrecked on the beach became targets of the German artillery which immediately opened fire.
²

Most of the Higgins boats had to thread their way through the obstacles, sometimes with only a few feet to spare on either side. Due to the shallow gradient of the beach, many grounded while they were still well off the surf line. A few of the coxswains backed out and tried to find another section of beach where they could get closer. Others toggled their engines forward and back, trying to force their way over the sandbars. Sooner or later,
however, they concluded that this was as close as they were likely to get, and they dropped their ramps into the water. The coxswains hollered, “Everybody out,” and, released at last from their long purgatory inside the claustrophobic confines of a Higgins boat, the soldiers staggered out into the hell of the beach itself.
³

Though they were on time, their company and platoon leaders saw almost at once that they were in the wrong place. A steady three-knot south-easterly current had pushed most of the landing craft well to the left of their intended targets, especially on Utah Beach. The boat drivers had been supplied with composite photographs assembled painstakingly over many weeks from pictures taken by Army Air Forces pilots who had swooped in low over the beach to photograph the terrain. The idea was that the coxswains could use the photo images to guide them into the proper landing area. But with the ubiquitous smoke and dust over the beach, picking out recognizable landmarks was all but impossible, especially on Utah Beach, where the terrain was unrelievedly flat. During the approach of LCT-853, the skipper kept asking his exec if they were headed for the right beach. The exec examined the composite photograph, glancing up from it regularly to study the beach, but he was “totally unable to see anything because of the smoke.” Like almost everyone else, the skipper of the 853 simply headed for the closest piece of open beach he could see. Consequently, when the soldiers finally staggered ashore, their officers looked about them in vain for any of the landmarks they had studied so carefully for all those weeks back in England.
⁴

The set of the current was strongest off Utah Beach, where the men came ashore more than half a mile south of their intended objectives. Now what? Rejecting the notion that they should work their way back to the right to reconnect to the careful minute-by-minute timetable of the invasion plan, Colonel James Van Fleet, commanding the 8th Infantry, and Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. instead made the commonsense decision to go forward from where they were. Like his father, who had encountered his “crowded hour” at Kettle Hill in Cuba some forty-six years earlier, Teddy Roosevelt sought to lead from the front, and had convinced Eisenhower to let him land with the first wave at Utah Beach. Almost at once he
validated that decision by approving the reorientation of the Utah Beach invasion plan to accommodate the reality on the ground. It required adjusting both the timetable of subsequent waves as well as the logistical support plan, but it got the soldiers off the beach sooner and unquestionably saved many lives. Indeed, the accidental reorientation of the Allied assault on Utah Beach was fortuitous in several ways. The German defenses were somewhat weaker where the men actually landed than where they were supposed to have landed, and the access to routes inland was easier, too. For this and for his other activities that day, Roosevelt was subsequently (and posthumously) awarded the Medal of Honor.
⁵

The offshore current was less assertive at Omaha Beach, but there were other, far more serious problems there. The most salient was geography. Omaha was the only landing beach that was overlooked by high bluffs that ranged from 100 to 150 feet in height. On those bluffs the Germans had erected thirty antitank and field guns as well as an astonishing eighty-five machine gun positions, four times as many as on any of the other invasion beaches. And almost all of their positions were so cleverly camouflaged that it was all but impossible to see them. Worse, the crescent shape of the beach allowed the Germans to fire not only down from the bluffs but also from both flanks. Though the preliminary bombing and gunfire had forced the defenders to keep their heads down, none of the German gun emplacements had suffered a direct hit. As a result, when the first wave of Allied infantry rushed out onto the beach, the men were struck almost at once by an intense crossfire of artillery, mortars, and machine guns. And finally, unknown to the Allies, the Germans had recently reinforced that sector of beach with the 352nd Division, which had been sent there for training. Thus as a result of geography, weaponry, and manpower, Omaha was a much tougher objective than any of the other targeted beaches.
⁶

Among the first to land on Omaha Beach that morning were the men of the Gap Assault Teams (GATs), composed of a Navy Combat Demolition Unit and an Army Combat Engineer group. Technically, all of the men in an NCDU team were volunteers, though many had volunteered in the time-honored military way: when not enough men raised their hands for
this hazardous duty in one particular shipload of new arrivals in England, an ensign simply declared that all the men whose names began with the letters
A
through
C
had just volunteered. On the other hand, none of them objected or tried to escape the duty.
⁷

On Omaha Beach there were sixteen of these teams, each charged with clearing a path, fifty yards wide, through the beach obstructions. Those obstructions took several forms. One type, which the Allies called hedgehogs, consisted of steel sculptures created by welding three steel beams together into free-standing tetrahedrons five or six feet across. They resembled enormous steel jacks, almost as if the children of giants had been interrupted in a game and walked off leaving their toys scattered on the beach. Placed between high and low tide, they could tear the bottom out of small craft at high tide. Another common type was made up of wooden poles resembling telegraph or telephone poles, most of which had plate-like Teller mines affixed to them, so if the pole was jarred, the mine would explode. Even if a vessel successfully navigated between two of the poles, many were connected by wires that would trigger the nearest mine. The Allied decision to land two hours after low tide was to provide an opportunity, however brief, for the NCDU teams to clear at least some of these obstacles. The initial expectation was that by landing immediately after the fury of the pre-invasion bombardment, they would face little if any resistance, though that proved not to be the case.
⁸

Each member of an NCDU team carried a double-sided canvas bag, much like those used by newspaper boys back home, though instead of newspapers, they were filled with sixty pounds of C-2 explosives divided up into two-pound blocks. Struggling ashore through the surf with such a burden was difficult enough, and it became much more so when machine gun and mortar fire erupted from the high ground behind the beach and on both flanks. Since few of the landing craft could maneuver all the way to the surf line, the men in the GAT teams had to disembark well off the beach and wade ashore. Worse, while the water might be only a foot or two deep just off the bow where the vessel grounded, deep runnels scattered unpredictably along the beachfront meant that many of the men took only a few steps shoreward before they floundered into water that was over their
heads. Robert Miller of the 149th Combat Engineers would “never forget the feeling of panic” as he stepped off into a runnel and went straight to the bottom, dragged down by the weight of his pack. He shucked off the pack, pushed hard against the sandy bottom, and struggled up to the surface, gasping for air. Half swimming and half flailing, he managed to make it to the beach. “I was near exhaustion by this time,” he remembered, “and felt as though my body weighed at least three hundred pounds.” NCDU team member Orval Wakefield made it ashore still in possession of his pack, but when he got there he noted with alarm that his legs were so weak he could hardly stand. He wondered briefly if that meant he was a coward, until he realized that his canvas sack had filled with seawater. He used his knife to cut holes in the bottom of each bag so the water could drain out, and found that he could stand up after all.
⁹

Because so many, like Miller, lost their explosives and detonators in their desperate scramble ashore, some waded back out to the boats to retrieve the rubber rafts filled with the team’s reserve explosives. Alas, the rafts, too, had filled with water and were too heavy to move. So the men grabbed as many satchels as they could carry and breasted their way back through the water to the beach. All the while, machine gun bullets churned up the sea around them, making little
zip zip
sounds as they hit the water. On shore, the bullets kicked up the sand when they didn’t find a more yielding target. Many men fell—the casualty rate among the NCDU teams on Omaha Beach that morning was 70 percent. The survivors took cover behind the beach obstacles and, lying prone, began to affix prima cord and C-2 explosives to the poles. Using enemy mines as cover while deploying highly volatile prima cord was extraordinarily hazardous, but there were few activities on Omaha Beach that morning that were not.

Several of the NCDU teams managed to place charges on the obstacles, called out “Fire in the hole!” and exploded them one by one. One team, assigned to the Dog White sector of Omaha Beach near Les Moulins, managed to clear a fifty-yard-wide gap in a mere twenty minutes. Elsewhere, however, the teams were slowed by ferocious enemy fire. One team was wiped out entirely when the LCT taking them ashore was hit by an artillery shell. Another was obliterated when a shell hit their
raft loaded with explosives. Elsewhere, the men had to cut their work short when the infantry began coming ashore—one recalled that “the infantry was right on top of us.” Amid the heavy fire from the bluffs, the arriving soldiers instinctively took cover behind obstacles that had already been wired for demolition, and the men of the NCDU teams had to chase them away in order to trigger the charges. Soon they had to stop altogether, for any more explosions would endanger the arriving GIs. In the end, the sixteen GAT teams on Omaha Beach managed to create only five gaps through the obstacles. Consequently, when the second and third waves got to the beach, they found most of the mined impediments still in place.
¹⁰