Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (46 page)

The men in the first several waves had been told that the bombing and naval gunfire would knock out the enemy defensive positions, and many also expected that the beach would be pockmarked with ready-made bomb craters that they could use as foxholes, but of course neither of those expectations was validated. Some of the German machine guns fired at the astonishing rate of twenty rounds per second, and that created a virtual wall of fire that could not be avoided. Those who made it through the surf to the beach staggered forward to find imperfect cover behind a slight rise in the sand some two hundred yards inland from the surf line. Along part of the beach there was a low concrete seawall that offered additional protection, but elsewhere there was only this slight rise in the shingle—the product of several centuries’ worth of high tides. The men could advance no further due to the ubiquitous fire across the beach, nor could they go back, since any landing craft that had not been wrecked on the beach or hit by German gunfire had already retracted.

Indeed, the destruction of so many landing craft was nearly as disastrous to the Allied invasion plan as the casualties to the soldiers. As one example, the USS
Thurston
(AP-77) lowered a total of twenty-five Higgins boats that morning. One sank when it collided with a submerged tank just off the beach; two others broached during the landing; five were smashed up by hard landings or enemy fire and had to be abandoned; the rest succeeded in landing their soldiers and retracting, but of those, nine were so badly damaged they had to be hoisted back on board the
Thurston
for repairs. As a
result of these and other incidents, of the twenty-five boats employed in the first wave, only three remained available for subsequent ones.
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THE SECOND AND THIRD WAVES
heading for Omaha Beach were only minutes behind the first. In addition to the Higgins boats, these included a large number of the bigger and stouter LCTs. As the men on board them got close enough to peer through the smoke to see what was happening ashore, they were horrified. “For Christ’s sake, they’re pinned down,” a soldier on one LCT called out to no one in particular. Of more immediate concern to the boat drivers was the fact that there was almost no place for them to go. The few gaps between the obstacles created by the NCDU teams were clogged with sunken tanks and wrecked and damaged Higgins boats, as well as other, more grisly impediments. Ensign Karl Everitt, driving his LCT toward the beach, felt compelled to throttle down to avoid running over the many bodies floating in the water. He did not want “to cut them up with my screws,” so he stationed men in the bow with boathooks to push the bodies out of the way. Coxswain George Poe, driving a Higgins boat, also saw that “the water was full of men, some dead,” but he did not slow down, fearing that if he did, his boat would not be able to clear the sand bar.
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The congestion along the beachfront and the artillery fire from the bluffs played havoc with the prescribed formations of the approaching landing craft. Guide ships had escorted them to the departure line. After that, the beach masters were supposed to direct them to appropriate landing sites. But the beach masters—those who were still alive—were no more in control of the situation than anyone else. Coxswains and LCT captains maneuvered back and forth off the shoreline, often getting in one another’s way as they searched desperately for an open section of beach. The result was that, as Hall put it in his subsequent report, “all semblance of wave organization was lost.” More prosaically, a sailor on one of the landing craft recalled that “we ran into one another like little Dodgem cars.”
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Ensign Bill O’Neill, executive officer of LCT-544, lay prone atop the wheelhouse as his ship approached Omaha Beach as part of the second wave at about 6:45. He was watching the chaos ashore when he spotted a beach master signaling frantically. O’Neill stood up to give him the go-ahead signal,
the letter
K
, then read the ensuing message, which was: “Stay low. Keep your head down.” Muttering furiously at such useless advice, O’Neill flattened himself back onto the deck plates atop the wheelhouse. As he scanned the shore, however, he saw that there were no openings—only mined obstacles and wrecked landing craft. His skipper was just a few feet away, standing on the ladder down into the wheelhouse where he could both see and give helm orders. O’Neill looked over at him and, disregarding the niceties of rank in the excitement of the moment, said, “What the hell are you doing here? You’ll get us all killed!” He suggested that they try further off to the right, and the skipper ordered an abrupt turn to starboard. The 544 cruised westward along the beachfront for more than a mile before finding a likely gap in the obstructions and turning for shore.
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Other LCTs did the same. One of them, LCT-305, made several attempts to land. During the first, she was raked by machine gun fire that severely wounded her commanding officer; during the second, the Army captain in command of the embarked tanks declared the site too dangerous. On her third try, with her executive officer now in command, she nudged up onto the beach just to the right of the 544. As she did so, she struck a mine that broke her in half, and at almost the same moment, two German shells hit her, one forward and one aft, smashing up what was left of her hull. On the other side of the 544, LCT-25 also struck a mine that flooded her engine room, and soon afterward she was hit by a phosphorus shell, after which the whole ship “erupted in flames.” That caused the onboard ammunition to cook off, and within minutes the LCT-25, too, was a total wreck.
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Amazingly, with all this going on around her, the 544 was able to land her cargo, which consisted of a bulldozer leading half a dozen jeeps all tied together like a child’s pull toy. The bulldozer clawed its way ashore, dragging the mostly submerged jeeps. But of course they were nowhere near their assigned beach and completely separated from the rest of their unit. Despite orders to retract at once, the crew of the 544 stayed long enough to gather up some of the wounded. With the sailors at the 20 mm guns providing what cover they could, members of the crew ran out onto the sand to drag wounded men back aboard, and only then did the 544 successfully retract.

The fire was so intense on Omaha Beach that on some of the LCTs, the soldiers balked at leaving the ship at all. Beach master Joel Smith watched one LCT come ashore, and noted that the minute it dropped the ramp, “a German machine gun or two opened up, and you could see the sand kick up right in front of the boat.” The soldiers could see it, too, and, as Smith noted, “no one moved.” The Navy ensign in command of the boat “stood up and yelled” at the same moment that, for whatever reason, everything suddenly got quiet, so Smith clearly heard his plaintive entreaty: “For Christ’s sake, fellas, get out! I’ve got to go and get another load.”
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It was not an isolated case. Don Irwin, commanding LCT-614, which was carrying five jeeps, two bulldozers, and sixty-five men, approached the beach under heavy fire. When the 614 grounded and Irwin dropped the ramp, the first two soldiers who stepped forward were immediately shot and had to be pulled back into the well of the boat. After that, the rest of the soldiers simply refused to leave. During the pre-invasion briefing, Irwin had been told that if the men hesitated to disembark, he was to compel them to do so, “at gunpoint if necessary.” But Irwin was unwilling to do that. Bullets were “pinging and ricocheting off the ship,” he recalled, and it was evident to him as well as to them that walking out into that fire was a death sentence. His own crewmen begged him to retract: “Skipper, let’s get out of here!” they pleaded. Irwin tried to comply, but the anchor needed to winch the boat off the beach had snagged on something, and the LCT would not budge. Irwin ordered all engines back full, then all ahead full, then back again, but the 614 was well and truly stuck. For almost ninety minutes the 614 remained on the beach, fully loaded and under nearly constant fire, unable to move. Not until high tide, near ten o’clock, did it manage to retract. When the crew of the 614 finally got the anchor up, they found that it was hooked into a sunken Higgins boat.
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Other LCTs were stranded on the beach due to damage from mines or gunfire or, like the 614, encumbered by wrecked and sunken vessels, jeeps, and even tanks. One Mike boat attempting to retract found its propellers had snagged on something in the water. Two men jumped over the side to clear the obstruction, which turned out to be “the bottom half of a man entangled in the screws.” Even when there were no obstructions, withdrawal
was not an easy matter. When LCT-612 was ready to retract, Ensign Horace “Skip” Shaw ordered a young sailor, whom he remembered only as “Helpy,” to “wind up on that winch and get us off the beach.” The young sailor hung his life vest on the exhaust pipe next to him to have more freedom of movement, and engaged the lever to wind in the stern anchor. A German machine gun had the range, and a storm of bullets “just blew that life jacket to a million pieces.” More bullets flew all around the sailor, thudding into the wheelhouse of the LCT only inches away. Shaw was amazed. “He didn’t bat an eye, that guy,” Shaw remembered. “He just plain wound up that winch, got that anchor up, and got us off the beach.”
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NOT FAR BEHIND THE LCTS
were the troop-carrying LCIs, each of them packed with two hundred or more soldiers. Because the LCIs were lightly armored, they had been assigned to later waves, when, presumably, the beach would be relatively secure. During the approach, “spray over the bow kept the men wiping their faces,” and they could see very little beyond “a smoky haze over the approaching land,” as one sailor recalled. When the beach finally became visible, the men began to discern “shattered Higgins boats on the beach and men running to take cover.” Obviously, the beach was not secure at all.
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The first LCI to land on Omaha Beach was LCI(L)-91, commanded by Coast Guard Lieutenant (j.g.) Armend Vyn. As he approached the beach, Vyn saw that his assigned channel was neither cleared nor marked, and that in any case it was “blocked by what appeared to be a sunken tank.” Maneuvering around the tank and then though “a maze of stakes topped with teller mines,” he nudged his vessel aground at 7:40. Though there was still nearly a hundred yards of water between the ship and the beach, he dropped the twin ramps on either side of the bow so the soldiers could disembark. With machine gun bullets smacking into the ship’s bow and clanking against the twin ladders, the soldiers were naturally reluctant to venture down the ramps, and disembarkation was excruciatingly slow.
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Because of that, and because of the swiftly rising tide, Vyn continuously pushed forward with the engines “to keep grounded.” Soon, however, it was impossible to go further “without detonating mines on the stakes” on both
sides of the ship. One mine off the port bow did explode, blowing a two-foot hole in the forward hull and injuring two soldiers. Going further would endanger the ship itself. Even though he had offloaded only 60 of the 201 soldiers on board, Vyn backed away from the beach and hoisted the signal Baker Queen to notify nearby Higgins boats that they should come alongside to assist in landing troops. But those Higgins boats that were still afloat were all on missions of their own, and Vyn saw that he would have to find another landing site. He spotted one further along the beach and again pushed his ship ashore. As he did so, a mine exploded under the ship, and almost simultaneously a German artillery shell struck the bow. “Within seconds,” Vyn reported, “the entire well deck was a mass of flames.” There was not enough water pressure in the hoses for the crew to fight the fires, and the ship could not retract without sinking. Reluctantly Vyn gave the order to abandon ship.
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At that moment, the 91’s sister ship, LCI(L)-92, was also headed for the beach. Though crewmen on the bow could see that the 91 was “enveloped in flames and smoke,” the 92 pushed on nonetheless. The men on board could feel the concussion of near misses as tall funnels of water erupted on both sides. Then “a terrifying blast lifted the whole ship upward with a sudden lurch.” The concussion threw men to the deck, and the heat was so powerful that one crewman felt like he was in “the midst of a blast furnace.” Only seconds later, “another shattering explosion shook the ship like a toy boat.” Like the 91, the 92 had been struck by an enemy shell only seconds after hitting a mine. The mine “blew out a hole in the starboard side big enough to drive a Higgins boat through,” and the shell landed among the soldiers who were bunched forward preparing to disembark. Forty-one of them were killed instantly. Another shell hit the starboard ramp, and soldiers and sailors began jumping over the side, though others stayed on board and tried to fight the fires. The rising tide pushed the crippled LCI(L)-92 sideways up onto the beach, a complete wreck. Like the survivors of the 91, the crew of the 92 and those soldiers who made it off the ship joined the growing mass of humanity on the beach.
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