CHAPTER 6: By Dawn’s Faint Light, The First Wave

CHAPTER 6 By Dawn’s Faint Light

THE LONG-AWAITED DAWN. It was exactly 5:58 A.M. when daylight arrived.¹ The lean faces of young commandos, wearing green berets, were no longer cast in shadow but clear to see, whitened by the daylight, creased with fear and strain. On all the boats carrying Lord Lovat’s two thousand commandos, each soldier had cleaned his boots, washed, and shaved—a regimen that never changed, whether they were in training in the misty glens of Scotland or about to launch a hit-and-run raid from a boat in some Norwegian fjord. Not once had Lovat’s warriors fought with stubble on the chin.²

Now they waited, seated on benches. A few looked at their mates and tried to smile or crack a joke. They had waited to board trucks, waited to board ships, waited as they puked up their breakfasts, bouncing all the way across the bloody English Channel. They were sick to death of waiting. That was when their hearts and minds were weakest. Once they landed, they’d be too busy to worry, too focused to wonder if they’d die a virgin or ever down a pint again.³

Léon Gautier stood leaning against his eighty-pound rucksack, pressing against the metal side of LCI 523, one of two craft taking Number 4 Commando toward Sword Beach. He could feel every wave as it slapped against the boat.⁴

He had been drilled over and over—move fast, “split arse,” as the Tommies said.

“Nip off a bit lively,” an officer in Number 4 Commando had advised the previous evening. “Get off the beach a bit sharpish, and then go hell for leather for a place called Ouistreham to destroy the battery there.”⁵

Stop for nothing and no one. Leave the wounded. Don’t touch them, even if they’re your best mates. Don’t waste bullets. Don’t stab and slash wildly. Creep up behind Jerry and slit his throat, or pull him firmly onto your sharpened Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife, making sure its tapered “stiletto” blade slips between the ribs to the heart, like a surgeon’s scalpel.

There would be no margin for error. Hitler had ordered that any man captured in a commando uniform be shot on the spot.⁶ And the ever ruthless Lovat had made it known that any man who slipped up would never go into action with him again, a fate almost as painful as execution in the minds of Gautier and his comrades, bound together like blood brothers, “men on the same rope,” in Lovat’s words.⁷

Unlike most of his 176 French comrades in Number 4 Commando, Gautier was not seasick.⁸ The smell of diesel fumes and the high seas were nothing new to him. It was now four long years since he had arrived in England to join de Gaulle’s forces, having served aboard the French dreadnought Courbet, which had escaped France just two days before the armistice with the Nazis had been signed on June 22, 1940—what Gautier still regarded as the humiliation of his beloved France. It was hard to believe he was now nearing his homeland as one of Lovat’s lads, a Frenchman wearing the green beret of the British commandos, his muscles hardened by months of speed-marching ten miles per day with an eighty-pound pack, his mind sharp, his hunger to avenge his countrymen’s defeat greater than ever.⁹

Less than a mile behind Gautier, aboard his landing craft, Lord Lovat looked at the sea and noted that its color was changing to an oyster-shell gray with the dawn. Lovat was armed with a hunting rifle, dressed for a good day’s walk on the moors: a white turtleneck sweater, suede vest, khaki corduroy pants, and a duffle coat, which he would leave behind when he went ashore.¹⁰

Lovat spotted the naval officer in command of his 105-foot boat, Lieutenant Commander Rupert Curtis, a steel helmet hiding his shock of red hair but not his “serious face.” Curtis was in fact a flotilla commander, responsible for getting twenty-two pitching boats through swept minefields and to France on time.¹¹

“Twenty miles from the coast and twelve to lowering point,” shouted Curtis, who later recalled feeling exhilarated, glad to be alive, grateful to be able to play his part.¹² As he peered into the distance, straining his eyes, he imagined what it would be like back in England later that morning when Churchill announced the news of the invasion.¹³

A sailor aboard the HMS Stork, in the distance off Lovat’s port bow, stood with an Aldis lamp and signaled: “GOOD MORNING, COMMANDOS, AND THE BEST OF BRITISH LUCK.”

A fitting reply was sent from Lovat’s boat.¹⁴ “THANKS; THINK WE ARE GOING TO BLOODY WELL NEED IT.”¹⁵

FIRST LIGHT. Dawn had stripped away the camouflage of the night. The lettering on a sign jutting from a brick building close to Pegasus Bridge was clear to see: HOTEL RESTAURANT GONDRÉE—TABLE RECOMMANDÉ. From a window, owner Georges Gondrée saw paratroopers digging foxholes in his vegetable garden. Were they British? They didn’t sound like the short-tempered German officers who harangued the lazy Polish or Russian conscripts who formed most work details in Normandy. Not long after, he heard knocking on the front door of the café. Gondrée opened it and found two men, their faces blackened. They wanted to know if there were any Germans inside his café. He shook his head, but they weren’t about to take his word for it, and before long he was showing them from room to room before leading them down to the cellar, where he had hidden his family.

“It’s all right, chum,” one of the soldiers reassured him.

The other soldier pulled out a bar of chocolate for Gondrée’s children. Gondrée started to cry, so strong were his emotions. Of late, he had been living on his nerves, not knowing if the next knock on the door would herald a visit from the Gestapo, followed by torture, execution, or banishment into the Nacht und Nebel—night and fog—of the Third Reich’s vast archipelago of concentration camps where more than eighty thousand French patriots had disappeared, never to return. He had fed important information about German defenses at Pegasus Bridge to the local Resistance, at great risk. His wife, Thérèse, had been born in a German-speaking region of France, Alsace, and had overheard snippets of conversation among the Germans; this, too, had been reported and had in fact helped in the formation of Major John Howard’s plan of attack.¹⁶ Now Monsieur Gondrée watched as his wife embraced the soldiers, kissing them, the men’s black face paint staining her pale cheeks.

Howard’s men soon began using the café as an aid station. “I remember the casualties being brought into the café,” recalled one of the Gondrées’ daughters. “The tables had been pushed aside in the main room and the soldiers were laid out there. The kitchen was used as a reception area and the dining room as an operating theatre. Two officers operated at the dinner table. My mother was a trained nurse, and all her old skills came back.”¹⁷

The Gondrées provided other favors for their liberators.¹⁸ Word spread among Howard’s men that the first French family to be liberated were popping open bottles of champagne, ninety-seven of which they had stashed secretly upon the Germans’ arrival in 1940.¹⁹ Before long, men who had carried their comrades to the aid station were sipping a little bubbly, some no doubt for the first time.²⁰ On the other side of Pegasus Bridge from the café, Howard was talking with a fellow officer near a pillbox. Hearing the popping corks from the opposite side of the canal, Howard crossed over to the café to investigate. He quickly sent men back to their posts and then returned to the pillbox, but not before he had had a sip of nectar himself. It was wonderful champagne and, besides, the taking of Pegasus Bridge “really was something to celebrate.”²¹

A few minutes later, the skies erupted with noise and the ground shook and trembled beneath Howard’s feet as Allied warships began to bombard shore defenses along a fifty-mile front. The concussive effect of the explosions felt like being punched over and over in the ears.

“Blimey, sir!” said one of Howard’s men, standing close by.²²

Howard’s thoughts returned to the men on the landing craft—the first wave on the boats he had seen before midnight, the “seaborne chaps.” He could see clouds of smoke rising near Sword Beach, five miles away. “I was very pleased to be where I was,” he later stressed, “and not with the poor buggers coming by sea.”²³

THE LANDING CRAFT carrying some of the “seaborne chaps”—the 2nd Ranger Battalion—bucked up and down in the high seas, moving painfully slowly toward Pointe du Hoc. The craft followed a guide vessel, Motor Launch (ML) 304 of the Royal Navy, captained by Temporary Lieutenant Colin Beever. At forty years of age, he was one of the oldest men landing first-wave troops on D-Day. It was his job to lead Colonel James Rudder’s force all twelve and a half miles to what looked on a map to be a small point on a craggy French coastline.

Conditions were so bad that morning that Rudder, in LCA 888, directly behind Beever, had in the darkness been able to see no more than eight feet ahead of him, following the phosphorescent glow created by ML 304’s wake.²⁴ Rudder’s and other LCAs now sat low in the water, overloaded, buffeted by the fifteen-mile-per-hour winds gusting from the west, tugged relentlessly eastward by a powerful current. Rudder had been forced to trust Beever as he stood anxiously at the bow of his landing craft—he would be the first one out—beside an armor-plated cabin where a British coxswain steered. The coxswain was under orders to act only on the command of a British naval officer, not Rudder.

When men lifted their heads and looked toward shore, they could see fires, several miles in the distance, caused by a massive naval shelling that had begun at 5:50 A.M. A black cloud of smoke and dust smothered the coastline, and an ominous red glow pulsed from just inland.²⁵ It seemed as if the whole of Europe was ablaze.²⁶

Beever lacked experience in navigation, and as the coastline came into view, he made a costly mistake, believing that Pointe de la Percée, three miles from his objective, was in fact Pointe du Hoc.

Colonel Rudder looked ahead and did not like what he saw. In the early-morning light, the distant headland did not resemble Pointe du Hoc. Had Beever led his 250 men to the wrong place?

Rudder was not alone in his fears.

Twenty-four-year-old First Sergeant Len Lomell, a senior noncommissioned officer in D Company, stood in LCA 668 beside his friend Sergeant Jack Kuhn, the man who had helped design the ladders some men would soon use to scale the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc.²⁷

“Hey, Jack, look,” said Lomell. “What the hell’s going on? That’s not the Pointe. That’s C Company’s target . . .”

Kuhn stood up to get a good look.

“You’re right . . . I wonder what’s up.”²⁸

In LCA 888, just half a mile from shore, Colonel Rudder turned to a British naval officer standing behind the coxswain. Hoc, in Old French, meant “jib.”²⁹ But it was no jib that loomed ahead. It was Pointe de la Percée, Rudder was convinced. Unfortunately, only the British naval officer aboard his LCA had the authority to alter course. Would he do as Rudder ordered?

Rudder politely told the officer that he thought they were badly off target.

He was ignored.

Rudder stood up.

“Goddammit, turn right!”³⁰

The coxswain reacted fast, steering to the starboard.

The British naval officer signaled to other boats that they should do the same and follow Rudder’s craft, which would lead the way to the correct destination. It was approaching H-Hour for the Americans, but Rudder was still at least three miles from his target. His craft plowed against a powerful current below cliff defenses manned by well-armed and forewarned Germans. There would be no surprise, no coup de main.³¹ The captain of a British destroyer, the HMS Talybont, who stood on its deck watching Rudder’s landing craft struggle slowly westward, believed the Rangers’ new course was “suicidal.”³²

The Germans, sure enough, began firing at Rudder’s force. All fifteen Rangers aboard Rudder’s boat cowered down as shots started to ring out.³³ Five men in another craft were struck by 20-millimeter rounds and killed, their bodies ripped apart by bullets designed to bring down Allied bombers. It would take at least half an hour more to reach Pointe du Hoc. God only knew if Rudder and his men would survive the trip.

ABOVE OMAHA BEACH, at a strongpoint overlooking Easy Red sector, a young German machine gunner with the 352nd Artillery Regiment stood in a trench, peering through his commanding officer’s binoculars, scanning a beach dotted with defensive obstacles—more than 3,700 of them, a higher concentration than in any other place in Normandy.

“See anything?” asked a sergeant.

“Nothing’s happening. Not a thing.”

The sergeant heard a distant groan from above the clouds.

“Bombers . . .”³⁴

Before long, 448 B-24 bombers arrived over Omaha Beach. Unable to see through the dense cloud cover, and under orders to avoid killing American troops arriving in the first wave, the bombardiers delayed their release by vital seconds. As a result, none of their thirteen thousand bombs actually exploded on the six-mile-long beach or on any of thirteen Widerstandsnester—strongpoints comprising concrete bunkers and machine gun nests—but they did kill plenty of cows, as well as French civilians as far as three miles inland.³⁵

Another German manning his gun at Widerstandsnest 62 (WN62) prayed as bombs rained down and the earth shook as if he were at the epicenter of an earthquake.³⁶ Stunned, he looked out of a slit in his strongpoint and spotted the invasion fleet.

“They’ve got more boats than we’ve got soldiers.”³⁷

Out at sea, on a boat ferrying soldiers of the Big Red One toward shore, Lieutenant John Spalding stood at the bow, staring up at Allied fighters soaring overhead—elegant Spitfires and rocket-carrying Typhoons with Overlord black and white stripes freshly painted on their wings to avoid friendly fire from below. (Naval gunners were notoriously trigger-happy at the sound of approaching aircraft.) Spalding’s craft was soon within range of the four machine guns, two 75-millimeter artillery pieces, and two anti-tank guns at WN62. Massive volleys of rockets screeched overhead, but unfortunately, most missed their targets, falling short and landing amid the pewter-colored, swelling seas. The twenty-seven Germans manning WN62, several of them teenagers, were unharmed, and now they waited with bated breath for the order to open fire.

With Spalding in the LCA was his second in command, twenty-four-year-old Sergeant Philip Streczyk. The son of Austrian-born immigrants, Streczyk had a long face and a prominent, dimpled chin. He stood a few inches shorter than Spalding, but in the eyes of the seasick men in the craft, his stature was far greater. Although Spalding was nominally in charge of the platoon, it was to the battle-tested Streczyk that the veterans looked for clear orders and decisive leadership. Every man knew that the smart thing to do, if he wanted to survive Omaha Beach, was to trust Streczyk to lead the way.

A truck driver before the war, Streczyk knew how to get a job done. Soldiering was no different. During the Battle of El Guettar, in March 1943, amid the rocky scrub of the Tunisian desert, Streczyk had single-handedly attacked enemy gunner positions without hesitation, destroying them. Four months later, in Sicily, with his men pinned down, he again rushed forward and cleared enemy machine gun nests. Less than a week later, he came to the rescue when officers leading his unit were killed or wounded; he “saved his company from annihilating enemy fire,” according to one report, employing “brilliant tactics.”³⁸ Now approaching the beach in his third amphibious invasion, he was the only combat veteran in E Company who had been awarded the Silver Star three times.

Every GI in the boat, cold hands gripping their cellophane-wrapped M1 rifles, knew that Streczyk would have their backs. He’d do everything he could to keep them alive. “He wasn’t West Point material,” one soldier said of him, “but there wasn’t a braver man that ever walked the ground.”³⁹ Nothing seemed to faze him. “Maybe he figured the Good Lord was watching over him,” another man had wondered back in Africa. “He just didn’t seem to care. We had an awful time keeping a helmet on him. When someone would start shooting at us, everyone would keep their heads down, taking little peeks out of the foxholes. Not Streczyk. He would be popping up like a robin.”⁴⁰

Shells fired from destroyers passed overhead, most landing well inland. It was as if the whole sky were screaming.⁴¹ Lieutenant Spalding spotted several yellow rubber lifeboats holding soaked men, survivors from floating tanks that were supposed to have landed ahead of the infantry, clearing a path and destroying strongpoints like WN62.⁴² Most of the tanks, fitted with air-filled canvas skirts—so-called bloomers—that easily kept them afloat in calm waters, had unwisely been launched more than two miles from shore. Battling fierce headwinds and heavy seas, the tanks’ bloomers quickly became swamped and the heavy vehicles sank, with only a few bedraggled survivors, shivering in shock and thanking God they’d gotten out of the hatches in time.

Just two of the twenty-nine tanks put to sea off Omaha would make it to the beach to support the 1st Division’s first wave, which comprised four infantry companies—some seven hundred men in twenty-four landing craft—and which was soon eight hundred yards from Omaha Beach. It was low tide, and therefore some three hundred yards of beach lay exposed, dotted with ugly defensive obstacles that would be submerged in just ninety minutes—the tide rose at an unnervingly fast rate, about a foot every ten minutes, which meant that wounded Americans, in profound shock and unable to crawl, would quickly be drowned.⁴³

In an observation post near WN62, a German lieutenant waited as the first wave drew closer and closer. When the landing craft were around four hundred yards from the beach, he would give the order to open fire. He could clearly see the craft carrying E Company, approaching in two columns, lined up abreast, for the final run into Easy Red.⁴⁴ There was a strong crosswind, and the tips of sea waves were lashed into white curls.

Spalding’s orders were to land to the right of a small house near the beach, lead his platoon across an area of shingle with stones the size of golf balls, then across an anti-tank ditch and a seawall before pushing inland to a village called Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer. The young officers in E Company had been assured that by the time they arrived onshore, the air force would have laid waste to enemy defenses, clearing their way to land “without any great opposition.”⁴⁵ But when Spalding looked at the beach, he saw that little, if anything, had been destroyed. “We had been led to believe German troops would be in a state of shock from aerial and naval bombardment,” Spalding later recalled. “How little we knew, how great our faith! The navy promised us that we would be dumped ashore without even getting our shoes wet.”⁴⁶

There were no shell craters to offer protection, no gaps blown in the “Belgian gates”—metal obstructions designed to stop landing craft—at the waterline, nor was there any shelter a few hundred feet beyond, amid the wooden stakes with Teller mines attached, or among the steel-beamed “hedgehogs” closer to the actual beach. Nothing had been hit. Not one bomb had dropped on Easy Red, and therefore Spalding and his men were just moments from becoming ensnared in a death trap.

Coxswains aimed between the obstacles. The noise of diesel engines muffled all but shouted last orders as men checked their weapons yet again.⁴⁷ Time for a nod, maybe a quick, ironic smile at a buddy, and then they were bouncing through surf, on their way in.

In his observation post near WN62, a German lieutenant picked up a telephone and contacted a gun battery three miles inland. Machine gunners at several strongpoints overlooking Easy Red and in seventy more nests along Omaha’s bluffs took aim at the first wave, in particular the crafts’ ramps, ready to squeeze their triggers as soon as GIs appeared.⁴⁸

ON UTAH BEACH, ten miles to the west of Omaha, the bespectacled twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Arthur Jahnke, the commander of strongpoint 5 (WN5), looked out to sea. “Here was a truly crazy sight,” he later remembered. “I wondered if I were hallucinating.” Was that a tank? Floating out at sea? It was indeed. “This must be the Allies’ secret weapon,” thought Jahnke, who began to issue brisk orders.

With his full cheeks and thick spectacles, Jahnke may have looked like an absentminded schoolmaster, but he knew how to handle himself and those under his command when the bullets started to fly. That April he had stood proudly as he was awarded the Knight’s Cross for heroism as a platoon leader on the Eastern Front, where he had been badly wounded. He had also met with Rommel himself on May 11 and was determined not to disappoint the finest German general of his generation, who had carefully inspected Jahnke’s positions.⁴⁹ Rommel had been in the habit of handing out a harmonica to officers when satisfied, but along Utah the Desert Fox, as he was almost fondly known to the British, had not been impressed and had not awarded even a single concertina.⁵⁰ At WN5, he had listened impatiently as Jahnke explained how he had tried to make the best use of barbed wire.

“Let me see your hands for a minute, Lieutenant,” Rommel had asked.

Jahnke removed his suede gloves, revealing scratches on his rough hands. Rommel looked pleased and nodded. “Well done, Lieutenant. The blood on an officer’s hands from fortification work is worth every bit as much as that shed in battle.”⁵¹

In the distance, Jahnke heard the drone of aircraft. The noise grew louder, becoming a constant roar. Dozens of planes were heading toward Utah, coming out of the west.

It was 6:20 A.M., and Colonel Wilson Wood was flying parallel to the Normandy coast in what was possibly the most crowded airspace in history. Two hundred and ninety-three other B-26 bombers, known as “Widowmakers” due to early models’ high rates of accidents during takeoff and landing, were also converging on seven target zones on Utah, each around a hundred yards square.

Most of the planes—also nicknamed “Flying Prostitutes” because they were “fast” but had “no visible means of support”—were just two hundred feet or so below the clouds. The chance he might collide with another plane worried Colonel Wood far more than the desultory German flak that in any case he couldn’t do anything about.⁵² Then, at 6:24, his 250-pound instant fuse bombs were falling, whistling down toward the scraggly low dunes, and Wood was pushing his control stick to the left, banking away, back toward the whitecapped sea.⁵³ As he looked to his left he saw the shoreline erupting, countless explosions flashing like gargantuan Fourth of July firecrackers.

Far below, in the bow of his landing craft, Theodore Roosevelt, his face so weather-beaten it resembled tanned leather, heard a “ripple of thunder” and then saw “blazes of light, clouds of dust,” and a Widowmaker from Wood’s unit passing overhead, headed back to England. One of Wood’s planes was hit, recalled Roosevelt, and he watched it fall to the sea, “flaming like a meteor.”⁵⁴

In all, 4,414 250-pound bombs were dropped in just a few minutes on defenders in the most accurate carpet-bombing of D-Day. Ten miles away, above Omaha, bombers had flown due south, crossing the coast in a few seconds, and it had therefore been almost impossible to hit targets along the hundred-foot bluffs. By contrast, around one in six of the bombs dropped on Utah made a direct hit on defenses. There was so much smoke and dust from debris that gun crews out at sea could no longer identify targets, and many coxswains, including Captain Schroeder’s and Brigadier General Roosevelt’s, lost sight of landmarks to help guide them ashore.

In his shelter, Lieutenant Jahnke crouched down, eyes shut tight. A bomb landed just a few yards away, and sand and debris buried the shelter. He was still conscious, he realized, but also in agony, wounded in the arm. He struggled, in shock, to dig himself out of the shelter.

All of Utah appeared to be aflame.

Selbst in Russland habe ich das nie gesehen.

Even in Russia I’ve never seen this.⁵⁵

Yet Jahnke’s agony was not over. Already hit hard, the lieutenant’s unit of seventy-five men cowered, hands pressed to their ears, as yet more bombs rained down, followed by nerve-shattering naval fire. The combination destroyed all of Jahnke’s heavy guns and most of the bunkers and other defenses at WN5. Almost the entire position was pulverized, with the command center receiving a direct hit.

Somehow Jahnke survived, and now he lay sprawled at the base of a bomb crater. Daring to lift his head aboveground, he groggily began to assess the extent of the destruction. There was just one anti-tank gun and a couple of machine guns left intact, nowhere near enough to stop a concerted attack. Then he looked once more out to sea and for the first time saw hundreds of ships dotting the horizon as far as the eye could see. It was low tide, yet all of his remaining guns, including the lone anti-tank weapon, which in any case was damaged, had been pre-sighted in the belief that the Allies would land at high tide. Rommel had been certain of it and given the requisite orders.

Jahnke tried his best to do his duty and ordered his shell-shocked men to shoot at the enemy. The French 47-millimeter anti-tank gun managed to fire just one round before it was destroyed. The culprit was—unbelievably, it seemed—an American tank, a white star emblazoned on its green turret, one of twenty-eight amphibious Sherman DD “Donald Duck” tanks that had reached Utah ahead of the first wave of troops and were now pounding, at close range, strongpoints with their 75-millimeter guns.⁵⁶ Fortunately, these tanks had been launched just a thousand yards from Utah rather than several miles, so only four had failed to reach the shore.

A couple of the tanks, spewing black exhaust fumes, trundled toward Jahnke and began blasting away at what remained of his positions, each cannon shot sounding like a hammer being pounded close to the head. Jahnke ordered Goliaths—small radio-controlled tanks—to be deployed, but the bombing had destroyed the cables leading to them.⁵⁷ The Shermans, with their canvas skirts raised, as if in mockery, clanked closer and closer, gears and tracks grinding.

“Looks like God deserted us,” Jahnke told a man beside him. “Where’s our air force?”⁵⁸

Around 6:25 A.M., a middle-aged mess orderly emerged from his hiding place, not far from Jahnke.

“Everything’s wrecked!” he cried. “Everything’s wrecked.”⁵⁹ The man ran toward Jahnke. “We’ve got to surrender!”

Jahnke told the man he was crazy. He shouted at survivors nearby to grab shovels and dig foxholes.⁶⁰ Yet it was a vain cry for action. The few traumatized survivors could barely lift a shovel, let alone find functioning weapons amid the smoking debris of WN5. When some dared to look out to sea, they spotted landing craft in the 4th Division’s first wave. What little was left of their morale evaporated.

One of the craft carried Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt and E Company commander Captain Howard Lees. Behind both men stood Roosevelt’s aide, busy puking over the side of the craft, which carried heavy equipment and a jeep.⁶¹ The aide and other men had managed to play a few half-hearted hands of poker on its hood on the way to shore while a helmetless Roosevelt and Lees had conferred with a British coxswain steering the craft.⁶²

Roosevelt looked over the side of the craft as it crashed into the waves. It was impossible to get his bearings, so thick was the haze created by the bombing. Then the beach appeared, “a long stretch of sand studded with wire and obstacles,” he recalled.⁶³

Meanwhile, Captain Leonard Schroeder stood at the bow of his plywood Higgins boat, at the center of a line of eight craft.⁶⁴ He was leading the first wave from the 8th Infantry Regiment toward the Uncle Red sector of the beach, in front of the once formidable WN5 strongpoint.⁶⁵ The enemy’s guns made what sounded like a “raging groan”⁶⁶ as Schroeder felt the slapping of waves against his hull and smelled vomit and diesel fumes—four out of every five men on his thirty-six-foot-long craft were seasick.

The steel ramp dropped and Schroeder was off first, wading ashore, holding his .45 Colt pistol above his head. It was 6:28 A.M. “I knew my company was in the first wave, but I didn’t know I was actually going to be the first ashore,” recalled Schroeder. “Besides, I was too scared to think about it.”⁶⁷ Then he was quickly onto the sands and sprinting, ahead of his men, across the beach toward WN5.

Theodore Roosevelt heard a crunch as his craft struck rock and sand. He, too, jumped into waist-deep water. “We splashed and floundered through some hundred yards of water while German salvos fell,” he remembered. “Men dropped, some silent, some screaming.” Then his feet were on the sand and he began to run, huffing and puffing, across three hundred yards of open beach toward a five-foot-high concrete seawall.

Less than a hundred yards away, Captain Schroeder saw German mortar rounds begin to explode on the beach, sending vicious geysers of sand into the air, and then he spotted Roosevelt running to the seawall while shouting and gesticulating at men from F Company, “with his hand on his cane, from which he was never separated . . . The sight of this man of fifty-six directing his troops like a conductor with his baton was something.”⁶⁸ Schroeder kept moving across the gentle slope of the yellow beach, sprinting across the corrugated runnels, then dry sand strewn with driftwood and shells, heading toward the first protection, the seawall. “My mission was to breach it and then to lead my men to the small village of Sainte Marie du Mont.”

Engineers blew gaps in the seawall, and from just beyond it Roosevelt watched as Captain Lees, “a great tower of a man,” led his soldiers inland, moving swiftly through tall seagrass and low dunes to destroy several German strongpoints. Roosevelt tried to orient himself and quickly realized that he and the entire 8th Infantry’s first wave had landed in the wrong place. He scrambled across some dunes and spotted a windmill he’d seen in reconnaissance photographs and knew that he was two thousand yards from where he should have come ashore. “I had to hot-foot it from left to right and back again,” he later wrote, “setting the various commanding officers straight and changing the task.” At Roosevelt’s side was an aide, a lieutenant called Marcus Stevenson, “devoted and competent as always, his tommy gun ready to defend us if it became necessary.” Before long, Stevenson and Roosevelt had set up a first command post and radio communication in the ruins of a building near Lieutenant Jahnke’s WN5.⁶⁹

Captain Schroeder was meanwhile leading his men to the east across dunes toward two strongpoints, WN1 and WN2, close to a small village called Pouppeville, at the very southern end of Utah Beach. Both strongpoints had to be dealt with if later waves of troops were to access a nearby causeway, leading through flooded fields. Dozens of German troops, most of them shell-shocked and terrified, emerged from dunes with their hands in the air. Some of them were Polish and Czech conscripts, no admirers of Adolf Hitler, and once they realized they would not be shot, they appeared delighted that their war was finally over.

There was the occasional heart-jolting crack of sniper fire and the odd mortar explosion, but no serious German resistance until Schroeder and his men approached the hamlet of Pouppeville and the Germans spotted them. “Shrapnel broke my pistol in two,” remembered Schroeder. “We had to carry on, to continue to advance . . . to shoot, and unfortunately, to kill . . . I killed two men. Like me, they had family, maybe children. Many years later, that came back to haunt me. But I had to look after myself.”⁷⁰