ABOVE THE ENGLISH CHANNEL, RAF bomber pilots flew through thick cloud and then broke through into an open sky and, looking down, marveled at the hundreds of minesweepers and other ships bathed in a faint moonlight. For thirty miles, the invasion fleet trailed across the dark waters: huge battleships such as the USS Nevada, sunk by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor but refloated and now armed with ten vengeful 14-inch guns; hospital ships painted an eerie bone white; command ships such as the USS Augusta, carrying General Omar Bradley, the eighteen-knot westerly wind whistling through its tangle of radio and radar antennae. On every ship’s bridge there was a hushed quiet, but every captain, every admiral, and every signalman was wide awake, many of them exultant, waiting for the sound of eight bells, at 4 A.M., to mark the call to battle stations.
Aboard the USS Barnett, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt moved from one group of 4th Division soldiers to another, encouraging them in a soft voice. He had not slept that night and looked gray-faced and gaunt. For some months he had suffered from chest pains. He knew he had a bad heart, but he would rather breathe his last in Normandy, on the battlefield, than miss the greatest invasion in history.
The father whom he idolized, whose greatness no son could reasonably hope to emulate, had famously once said, “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”1 In his mind, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was already halfway to Utah.
“Where in hell is my lifebelt?” he asked his aide.
“I’ve given you four already.”
“Well, give me another. I’ve lost the whole damn lot.”2
Amid the men gathered on deck nearby was F Company commander Leonard Schroeder, awaiting the final order to board landing craft, ready to lead his company in the first wave. “We all had our lucky charms,” he recalled. “I carried a watch that my wife had given me on my right wrist and the one the army had given me on my left one. Everyone had a bracelet, given by his family, or wife. Under my helmet, I also had a photo of my wife.”
They were fourteen miles from France when landing craft were lowered into the sea. As the men prepared to board, Roosevelt found Schroeder.
“Moose, have you got a place for me on your landing craft?”3
Schroeder could indeed take Roosevelt with him in the first wave. But as it turned out, Roosevelt chose to go in not with Schroeder but with Captain Howard Lees, leading E Company, scheduled to land around two hundred yards to Schroeder’s right.
It was still dark on deck, and silent, other than the occasional rasp of wind. Schroeder knew there were hundreds of ships nearby. At 4:05 A.M., he and other men in the 4th Division’s first wave began to board their landing craft, climbing or jumping five feet down into boats.
Roosevelt stood at the ship’s rail, about to get into Captain Lees’s craft. He was wearing a knit watch cap, not the regulation helmet, and looked more like “a frazzle-arsed old sergeant” than a general, as one man described him.4
A soldier held out his hand.
“Here, General, let me help you.”
“Dammit,” protested Roosevelt, “you know I can take it as well as any of you. Better than most.”
Roosevelt boarded the landing craft unaided.
Up on deck, Roosevelt’s aide turned to Lieutenant Colonel George Mabry, the 2nd Battalion’s operations officer.
“Did you notice his armament?” the aide asked Mabry. “A pistol and seven rounds, and his cane. He says that’s all he’ll need.”5
LIEUTENANT GEORGE KERCHNER, platoon leader in the 2nd Ranger Battalion’s D Company, stood at the bow of his landing craft as it pulled away from the HMS Amsterdam.6 He passed several battleships, ghostly hulks in the choppy seas. It was around 5 A.M. when one of the ships, the USS Texas, opened fire, bellowing with a deep bass, flames stabbing from its ten 14-inch guns. “It was a terrifying sound,” Kerchner later recalled. “The 14-inch guns shot far over our heads, but were still close enough for us to hear and feel some of the muzzle blast.”
Kerchner’s platoon was seasick and looked tired. None, guessed Kerchner, had slept much the night before, and several shivered from the cold water that doused them every time the flimsy wooden craft crashed through a wave. They had spent months climbing ever higher and more rugged cliffs. On the Isle of Wight, they’d scaled the famous white chalk Needles, towering two hundred feet above the Solent, the channel of water separating the island from mainland England, and had also scampered up Tennyson Down, all 350 feet of coarse rock, named after the famous English poet who penned “Charge of the Light Brigade,” with its immortal lines “Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die.”7 But at this moment, in the cold darkness, with the sound of angry waves slapping against the plywood hull, Kerchner’s fellow Rangers didn’t appear to be an elite unit, ready to kick the hell out of Hitler’s best. They looked a forlorn, bedraggled, pathetic crew indeed, fit only to vomit and die.
They had trained so long and so hard. Kerchner could get up a hundred-foot cliff face, loaded down with full combat gear, in less than a minute. He could fire a rocket, with a grappling hook attached to it, with impressive accuracy. He’d seized pillboxes under live fire, crawled through barbed wire, bullets zipping just feet above his helmet. But never, not once, had he been launched with his men miles from an enemy-held coast in storm-tossed seas.
Kerchner was five miles from the French coast when a flotilla of craft appeared and fired hundreds of rockets at defenses on Pointe du Hoc. “It was one continuous sheet of flame going up,” remembered Kerchner, who then heard the drone of bombers overhead. “We couldn’t see [the bombers] because there was a low overcast in a dull gray sky with clouds down to one or two thousand feet. But we could hear the bombs dropping and see them exploding as we came closer to the shore.”8
The bombers were 115 Lancasters belonging to Number 9 Squadron RAF, which began their bombing runs at 4:53 A.M. and dropped 634.8 tons of bombs, more than twenty per acre, on Pointe du Hoc, killing dozens of Germans and deafening and paralyzing many others with terror. One shell-shocked machine gun crew ran for their lives. Another group of defenders found refuge in the wine cellar on a nearby farm and quickly got drunk.9
The Lancaster raid was not without casualties on the Allied side. Just after 5 A.M., in the first air battle of D-Day, fighter pilot Captain Helmut Eberspächer attacked the last bombers to hit the battery. In less than five minutes, the Luftwaffe ace downed three planes.10
Out at sea, Lieutenant Kerchner spotted amphibious Sherman tanks. They were struggling in the rough conditions, their canvas skirts swamped and battered. Then he saw a landing craft less than a hundred yards away. It was also in trouble, taking on water. It was in fact LCA 860, carrying other men from D Company, including company commander Captain Duke Slater, a good friend of Kerchner’s. Then the craft disappeared beneath the waves.11 D Company had lost its first men.12 “That convinced me our landing craft were not unsinkable,” recalled Kerchner. “We immediately began bailing with our helmets and [that] managed to keep us afloat, even though we were taking on a lot of water.”13
A Stars and Stripes reporter in a boat nearby saw Slater and his men trying to keep their heads above water. “There was nothing we could do to help those poor guys,” he reported. “Just say a little prayer that they would be picked up before they froze to death. We all wanted to help but the success of our mission was too vital, and the Rangers knew they were expendable.”14
Slater and twenty other men would eventually be rescued after surviving for several hours in the cold seas. “Give us some dry clothes, weapons and ammunition, and get us back in to the Pointe,” implored Slater as he was fished out of the water. “We gotta get back!” His shivering and soaked men were, however, too numb from the water, a chilling 54 degrees Fahrenheit,15 to be effective in combat and were ordered to return to England to recuperate instead.16
Slater’s fate meant that George Kerchner, leader of his unit’s first platoon, was now D Company commander.17 It would be up to him, if his craft managed to reach France without sinking, to lead more than a hundred men up the sheer cliffs of Pointe du Hoc, towering a hundred feet above crashing surf.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL TERENCE Otway crouched down in the pitch darkness near rolls of barbed wire, fifteen feet thick and five feet high, that encircled the Merville Battery. He had finally reached his target, arguably the most heavily defended on D-Day. Beyond the jagged wire lay a minefield a hundred yards wide and then another belt of barbed wire, even denser and higher than the first. Some two hundred yards farther on stood four hulking casemates made of steel-reinforced six-foot-thick concrete, each housing Czech-made howitzers aimed toward Sword Beach that could also destroy Allied ships approaching the port of Ouistreham, at the mouth of the Orne River, marking the far eastern limit of the planned Allied beachhead.
Because Otway had so few men, two groups rather than four would attack, one through gaps that had to be blown through the wire and the other via the battery’s main entrance. There were bound to be heavy casualties as Otway’s men charged toward the casemates while others engaged 130 defenders manning a large blockhouse, fifteen machine gun nests, and an anti-aircraft gun position.
“Do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will!” Those had been the parting words, before leaving England, of Otway’s commanding officer. How true had been his prediction. Everything that could have gone wrong had done so.
The commander of A Company, Major Allen Parry, approached Otway.18
“Have you decided what to do, sir?” whispered Parry.
“Do?” snapped Otway. “Attack in three minutes, of course. Pass it on.”19
A few minutes later came the haunting cry of a hunting horn, blown by one of Otway’s lieutenants. The moment had come to take out the guns at Merville.
Otway turned to his men.
“Get ready.”20
It was 4:30 A.M.21
Otway was not afraid of dying, but he was terrified of being mutilated.
“Everybody in! We’re going to take this bloody battery!”22
Men dashed forward with Bangalore torpedoes, tubes that delivered an explosive charge that could clear paths several yards wide through barbed wire. Loud detonations followed. Otway’s men took their cue and sprinted through the wreaths of smoke and the blown wire defenses, shouting like banshees, just as they had been trained.
A young officer was hit in the leg and fell to the ground, where he lay, like a “sheep on its back,” and proudly watched his men fight their way toward one of the casemates.
A sergeant led eight men to a German gun position.23
“Paratruppen!” cried a German. “Paratruppen.”24
Otway’s men kept yelling, running, fighting hand to hand, gouging, stabbing, firing from the hip at shadows in the darkness, zigzagging through the battery to make themselves less of a target.
“Bastards!” shouted one man. “Bastards! Bastards!”25
The rips and whooshes of explosions were followed by the screams of men with legs blown to shreds.
“Mines!”26
Still Otway’s men kept going, through a hail of bullets and brightly colored streams of tracers.
Lieutenant Raimund Steiner, the German commander of the Merville Battery, remembered the utter chaos of the combat: “There was artillery fire, machine gun fire, single shots everywhere. You couldn’t tell who was shooting at whom, where the enemy was, where the fire was coming from.”
A bullet tore through Otway’s battle smock, just missing his chest. Another punctured his canteen. Unharmed, he ordered his men to take out several machine guns some fifty yards ahead. Bren guns blazed as grenades exploded and then volleys of MG42 machine gun fire stitched the darkness. Some paratroopers kept attacking even when severely wounded. One private, hit in the abdomen, was spotted holding in his insides with one hand while with the other he fired a Sten gun into a pillbox.
The assault appeared to Otway to be a “shambles . . . a mess . . . There was smoke about. There were German artilleries with shells firing on us . . . There were wounded lying about on the ground, getting wounded again by the German shells.”27
The thick concrete casemates were covered in grass. Otway’s men spotted air vents and were quickly hurling grenades down them. That did the trick, and in no time, it seemed, stunned and bloody defenders were staggering out of the casemates’ iron doors.
“Kamerad! Kamerad! Kamerad!”28
Near one casemate, a man emerged with his hands in the air.
“Russki! Russki!” he shouted.
One of Otway’s privates was confused.
What the hell is he on about?29
The man was a Russian who had been captured on the Eastern Front and forced to fight in Normandy.
The private watched as the last enemy soldier emerged from a casemate: a fat, ugly man, wearing spectacles, crawling on his hands and knees, in severe shock.30 Most of the other defenders had by now been killed or wounded. In fact, only six men from 130 would survive unscathed and escape to fight another day.31
There was a heavy silence, broken every few seconds by the groans of the badly injured. A young sergeant would later remember a “most peculiar smell, from freshly turned earth, torn flesh, and blood and that sort of thing and it’s a smell you never forget. Almost like [when] you go in for an operation in a hospital, and you smell ether for the first time—you never forget it.”32
Otway was close to one casemate when a private approached and saluted.
“Battery taken as ordered, sir.”
“Have you destroyed the guns?”
“I think so.”
“Bloody well get back up there and make sure those guns are out of action.”33
Otway soon learned that every one of the casemates had indeed been seized and the guns inside disabled.34 It was around 5 A.M. when he gave the order to pull out and head to a prearranged meeting place. His battalion had succeeded against the odds, at great cost, in seizing the battery, thereby sparing the lives of many British troops due to land on Sword Beach in a couple of hours’ time. Now Otway needed to get a message to the HMS Arethusa, offshore. In around thirty minutes, the British light cruiser was due to open up on the battery with her 6-inch guns. There was no need to do so, and the last thing he wanted was to get hit by friendly fire after already losing half of his men. “I had no radio to send a success signal,” he recalled, “but I lit a yellow signal flare and an RAF plane went over, saw it, and waggled its wings. And my signals officer, unbeknown to me, had got a carrier pigeon with him, brought it all the way from England in his airborne smock, and he tied a victory message around its leg and sent it off.”35
The RAF spotter plane radioed to the Arethusa with only minutes to spare.
As men began to move away from the battery and head for the rendezvous point, Otway spotted a guard dog, tied up beside a pillbox, and approached the animal. A wounded lieutenant lay nearby.
“Don’t touch that, you bloody fool,” the lieutenant cried. “It’s a booby trap.”36
Otway did as he was told and a few minutes later came to the edge of a minefield.
“How the hell do we get out of this place?” Otway asked one of his surviving officers. “The bloody mines are still there.”
Otway’s men had taken twenty-three Germans prisoner.
“Show me the way,” Otway told the prisoners in fluent German.37
They refused.
“Well, okay,” said an exasperated Otway, “we’re going to make you walk forward and if you don’t show us the way through the mines we’re just going to start shooting the ground and you’re going to lose your feet and maybe the mines will go up, too.”38
They understood enough of Otway’s threat to realize he was deadly serious and obediently began to lead Otway and his men through the minefield. They came across a young officer, Captain Havelock Hudson, a close friend of Otway’s. He lay badly wounded in the minefield, blood soaking his wool uniform.
A soldier knelt beside Hudson and drew a breath in shock when he saw a gaping wound.
Otway approached.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I think so,” said Hudson, clearly in agony.
“He’s been hit in the stomach,” said the soldier.
“Oh, bad luck,” said Otway.
The good news, added Otway, was that they’d taken the battery.
“Fuck your bloody battery,” replied Hudson.39
They continued through the minefield. One of Otway’s men glanced back at the battery. “The area was strangely silent with men moving slowly out, some wounded and others quite still on the ground where they had fallen,” he remembered. “The impression was of all passion spent but I personally felt strangely privileged and maybe a little satisfaction that I had been a member of this unit who had, I feel, achieved all that was asked of them.”40
Otway needed to rest, to recuperate, before the fighting inevitably flared up again and killing and dying resumed. He made his way to the planned assembly point—a calvary with a bone-white effigy of Jesus Christ being crucified, atop a concrete square beside a crossroads almost a mile from the Merville Battery. He then told his men to set up a defensive perimeter nearby. But there was only so much they could do, given their depleted ranks. Of the 150 men with whom Otway had attacked the battery, there were just seventy-five who could now stand and fight.41 What they had achieved would enter the annals of British military history as one of the greatest feats of arms of all time.42
Below the white stone figure of Jesus Christ hanging from the cross, Otway sat, exhausted, as around him dozens of wounded, many on stretchers, were attended to by medics.43 Other men rested nearby, bleeding, battered, utterly spent. Some stood motionless, in a daze, no doubt replaying the fierce firefight and unnerving close calls in their heads. One lieutenant stared at his commanding officer, seated below the Christ, head in hands. Otway “had been through a tremendous amount,” recalled the lieutenant. “To take what few men we had in to attack the battery was beyond human expectancy. What he’d put up with. Organizing the job and then to do it with so few tools, and knowing full well we had a full day in front of us . . .”44
A soldier pushed a wheelbarrow that carted an officer who’d been hit in the legs.
Otway’s second in command, Major Allen Parry, pulled out a flask of brandy, swallowed a mouthful, and grinned.
“A jolly good battle, what?”45
Bewildered, grim-faced men finally managed to smile.