LIEUTENANT JOHN SPALDING hunched down amid the brush at the top of a bluff above the Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach. He was the first officer to lead men off Omaha, an extraordinary achievement, without doubt one of the most heroic and notable of D-Day, given how deadly the sands below had proved for so many of his fellow Americans. In the distance, tiny figures from later waves of troops struggled ashore, wading in ragged lines through the bullet-whipped surf. Abandoned equipment, corpses, and weapons cluttered the waterline. Some men clustered around burning tanks and landing craft as others clung in terror to beach obstacles.
Spalding got back to business, leading his men once more along the top of the 120-foot-high bluffs toward the E-1 draw, a few hundred yards away, the vital exit at the western end of Easy Red sector. Not for first time, Sergeant Streczyk volunteered to scout ahead. Spalding wasn’t about to stop him. Streczyk had more than lived up to his formidable reputation. He’d stepped forward first, inspiring others to fight and follow ever since they’d gotten across the beach. “We crossed through two minefields,” recalled Spalding. “One had a path through it, which looked like it had been made for a long time. When we got through it we saw the Achtung Minen sign. No one was lost.”1
It was around 9:50 A.M. Out at sea, the chaos and carnage on the beach was clear to any man with binoculars. Rear Admiral Carleton F. Bryant, commander of the Omaha bombardment force, sent an urgent message to the captains of his destroyers: “Get on them, men, get on them. We must knock out those guns. They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can’t have any more of that. We must stop it.”2 Twelve destroyers duly responded, some scraping the seabed as the ships edged closer to the shore in search of targets of opportunity.
All along Omaha Beach, men were trapped below the bluffs, being methodically picked off by German snipers and machine gunners, their bodies jolting with the impact of bullets and shrapnel. It was all so one-sided. The enemy couldn’t be seen, and few men returned fire, not knowing what to shoot at or not wanting to expose themselves. In any case, many men’s rifles were jammed by sand and salt water. The wounded, if they could find the strength, scrambled to stay ahead of the flood tide, only to be shot by snipers. Young Americans, too badly hit to crawl, held out their arms to their traumatized comrades, just feet away but out of the field of fire, and screamed and begged them to reach over and pull them to safety.
Parts of the beach, those nearest to the heavily defended exits, resembled a slaughterhouse. There were simply too many wounded for medics to cope with. And still, mercilessly, the Germans kept up the massacre, carrying out Rommel’s orders that the invaders be defeated, at all costs, on the beach, before they could press inland. “These goddam Boche just won’t stop fighting,” complained General Huebner, commander of the Big Red One.3 Another message was brutally succinct: “We are being butchered like a bunch of hogs.”4
Aboard the USS Augusta, a gravely worried General Omar Bradley was seated at a plotting table, wearing spectacles and a helmet, asking aides what the hell was happening on the beach and wondering what he should do next.5 The operation had largely been his plan, and now it appeared to be a bloody disaster. His failure, above all, to destroy defenses had cost so many hundreds of men their lives. He had almost no information from officers on the beach—so many radios had been lost and so many men carrying them killed. But from observers aboard boats closer to shore, he understood that there had been “an irreversible catastrophe.” The situation seemed hopeless. Should he order an evacuation?6
Should more waves of men be needlessly sacrificed? If Omaha remained in German hands, there would be a thirty-mile gap between British and American forces that Rommel, a master of swift counterattack, would ruthlessly exploit. The success of the entire invasion now appeared to be at stake. Omaha had to be secured, but to do so, hundreds of ever more desperate junior officers would need to follow Lieutenant Spalding’s example and get their units off the damned beach.
The first two waves from the 1st Division had suffered great casualties, but at least they had enjoyed an element of surprise when landing. Subsequent waves had walked into the sights of hot-barreled machine guns. “It was very tragic,” recalled E Company commander Edward Wozenski, pinned down on Easy Red. “It was real sad to see the number of bodies that were in the water. Wave action will normally distribute logs or bodies or anything else head to toe along any given length of beach. But there were so many bodies that I saw a number of areas where they were two and three deep, just rolling in the waves.”7
Frontal assaults on the heavily defended draws would not work. At the E-1 draw and other exits, they had led only to slaughter and defeat. The least fatal routes off Omaha were via the bluffs farthest from German strongpoints. But to get up the bluffs would require extraordinary courage and leadership: officers like Spalding who could make petrified men stand up and follow them into the line of fire.
So many young Americans were now jumbled in traumatized clusters, for the most part leaderless. Where Lieutenant Spalding was supposed to have landed, near the E-1 draw, men lay like a “human carpet” on a pebbly rise, not daring to lift their heads above the large stones.8 One German machine gunner, hidden in a nest overlooking the draw, would later claim to have fired twelve thousand rounds. “The number of dead was appalling,” recalled a medic with the 16th Infantry Regiment who had landed near the draw in the third wave. “The water was pink, and there were many bodies floating face down as well as body parts.”9 It seemed that men were literally drowning in their own blood.10
“Medic! Medic!”11
A corporal from the 16th Infantry Regiment was among those pinned down near the entrance to the E-1 draw. He heard a scorching whoosh—a sergeant had blown a gap in thick wire, opening a way for him and others to get away from the beach.
The corporal yelled with relief.
An officer nearby screamed at the corporal, but he could barely hear him, so loud was the noise of the battle.
The officer yelled again.
“Go back to Colonel Taylor.”
Taylor commanded the 1st Division’s 16th Infantry Regiment.
“Where’s the command post?”
“It’s supposed to be on our left!” the officer barked. “Find the colonel . . . Now!”
The corporal sprinted across the beach, searching for Colonel Taylor. “Scurrying like a mad rabbit, I jumped over all the corpses,” he remembered. “I stumbled once on somebody’s leg and fell onto a dead dogface. Getting up, I careened into the surf, but the bodies blocked me. Swerving from the water to the sand and back again, I ran until I thought my heart would burst.”
The corporal spotted Taylor, crouched behind a seawall with another officer. He dropped down beside Taylor.
There was a way through.
The corporal stared in disbelief as Taylor calmly got to his feet and stood straight up.
He was crazy, surely?
Other men saw Taylor standing upright, seemingly oblivious to enemy fire.
“There are two kinds of men out here!” Taylor shouted. “The dead! And those who are about to die! So let’s get the hell off this beach and at least die inland!”12
Taylor paced the immediate area, cursing, exhorting, kicking, ordering men to get off their backsides and get off the goddamn beach, transforming a “bewildered mob,” as one report put it, “into a coordinated fighting force.”13
“It’s better to be shot to death than drown like rats on the beach!”14
Men did as they were ordered, some pushing in single file up the narrow, winding path that Spalding’s unit had used, and which Sergeant Streczyk had first scouted, scanning the scuffed ground warily for any sign of mines. Still more men followed, and before long, according to an official after-action report, “the entire [force landed on Easy Red] was attempting to clear inland by [Spalding’s] route despite the fact that it was being swept by machine gun, artillery, mortar, and anti-tank fire.”15 No junior officer or platoon had done more to change the outcome of the battle on Omaha than Spalding and his men. Against the longest odds, in the worst imaginable circumstances, their courage and initiative had made a critical difference when it mattered most.
As soldiers escaped the charnel house of Omaha via the route that he and his platoon had first opened, Spalding was peering into a half-built pillbox above the E-1 draw.16 Inside were radios and what Spalding remembered as “excellent sleeping facilities.” Spalding moved on to another pillbox, close by. One of his men approached a ventilator, grenade in hand.
“Hold on a minute,” said Sergeant Streczyk, who fired three times down the concrete steps that led into the pillbox and then cried out in both Polish and German for the men inside to get out. Four men emerged, carrying two wounded comrades with them. Again the rip and snarl of an MG42. This time the bullets came zipping from the right, farther west.17 Two of Spalding’s men scouted ahead, determined to take out the machine gun. Then the earth shook and the sky erupted with noise. Express trains seemed to be barreling overhead. Destroyers had moved closer to shore, and their fire was now being directed from the beach by forward observers. The results were devastating as 5-inch shells from one destroyer, the USS Doyle,18 a thousand yards off Omaha, exploded in the nearby E-1 draw and amid its defenses.19
Around 10 A.M., the naval fire abated. Spalding and his men began mopping up the last German positions at WN65, overlooking the eastern slopes of the E-1 draw. “We had a short fight with thirteen men,” he recalled. “They threw three grenades at us, but they didn’t hit anyone. We found one dead man . . . but don’t know if we killed him. If we did, he was the only German we killed. [Then] I did a fool thing. After losing my carbine in the water I had picked up a German rifle, but found I didn’t know how to use it too well. When I started to check on the trenches I traded the German rifle to a soldier for a carbine and failed to check it. In a minute I ran into a Kraut and pulled the trigger, but the safety was on. I reached for the safety catch and hit the clip release, so my clip hit the ground. I ran about 50 yards in nothing flat . . . That business of not checking guns is certainly not habit forming.”20
Meanwhile, one of Spalding’s men, nicknamed “Dig,” was clearing out a pillbox with a flamethrower, sending jets of scorching gasoline inside. After thirty seconds, the flamethrower’s tank was empty and some Germans, their uniforms on fire, scurried out with their hands in the air.
Again the sky seemed to be torn asunder as naval fire hit what was left of German defenses around the E-1 draw. Spalding and his men took cover as shells screeched overhead. The concussive effect of the shells was powerful enough to uproot trees and could leave men stripped of their uniforms, totally naked. Before long, Spalding and his men were “getting pretty jittery,” in Spalding’s words, so he ordered one of his men to let off a yellow smoke grenade, the last he had, so the Doyle would direct its fire away from them.21
It was around 10:45 A.M. when the burly Captain Wozenski, Spalding’s company commander, approached him from the east, having followed in his footsteps up the bluffs.22 Spalding was delighted to see Wozenski, who told him he should head next to the nearest village, Colleville-sur-Mer. It had been a tough morning for the company. Three of Spalding’s fellow platoon leaders had been killed on the beach.23 The landing had been a bloodbath, but now, finally, hundreds of men from the regiment were attacking inland.
All along the six-mile-long crescent of Omaha, young leaders like Spalding also had men on the move, seizing strongpoints and exits from the rear and flanks, pulling victory from the jaws of defeat.24 “The battle belonged that morning,” General Bradley would write, “to the thin, wet line of khaki that dragged itself ashore on the Channel coast of France.”25
ON UTAH BEACH, where less than two hundred men had fallen—ten times fewer than on Omaha—every exit from the beach had been secured by midmorning and thousands of Americans from the Ivy Division were landing in successive waves, weaving with ease between the few landing craft and vehicles that had been hit, greasy smoke hanging over them. Senior officers were both surprised and relieved that the operation had been so successful. The lack of steep bluffs and the intense and accurate bombing of beach defenses had made all the difference.
By 10:30 A.M., Captain Leonard Schroeder, leading F Company, had moved off Utah Beach and seized a group of farm buildings labeled LA GRANDE DUNE on his map, seven hundred yards from where he had landed, encountering occasional sniper fire. Farther inland, a group of Germans surrendered to Schroeder and his men. “They were armed to the hilt,” recalled Schroeder, “so I pulled out my trench knife and proceeded to cut all their web equipment from their bodies. One German soldier hit the panic button and ran toward the beach. I suppose half of the company put bullets into him, thinking he was trying to get away.”26
Meanwhile, one of Schroeder’s fellow officers, twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant Colonel George Mabry, led the battalion’s advance. As he neared a bridge rigged with demolition charges, gunfire rang out, and Mabry spotted around a dozen German paratroopers running toward him. He and his men opened fire, hitting several of the enemy soldiers as they neared the bridge. As it turned out, the Germans had been fleeing the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne, and now, realizing they were trapped between two American forces, they quickly surrendered. Mabry pulled out an orange flag—to avoid incidents of friendly fire, the army had provided the flags to be waved if a unit’s identity was in doubt. Mabry lifted the orange flag, attached to a stick, over his head. An orange flag appeared in response. Then a 101st Airborne paratrooper jumped into his path, pointing his M1 rifle at Mabry.27
Realizing they were on the same side, the pair shook hands. The paratrooper told Mabry that General Maxwell Taylor, the commander of the 101st Airborne, was not far away. A few minutes later, forty-two-year-old Taylor, the first Allied general officer to land in France on D-Day, crawled out of a hedgerow. Mabry saluted and shook hands with Taylor, a tall, ramrod-straight West Point graduate fluent in several languages.28 It was a momentous encounter, “an historic moment,” according to Taylor, “the long-planned junction of the air and seaborne assaults on Hitler’s fortress Europe.”29
Captain Leonard Schroeder and F Company pushed on, through minefields and orchards, alert for the assassin’s stab of a sniper and for booby traps at gates. German resistance stiffened more the further they probed. There was the sudden stutter of a machine gun and Schroeder was hit in the arm by two bullets. He was so excited, so focused, that he felt no pain, even as blood soaked the sleeve of his uniform. He carried on leading his men forward, through yet another minefield, toward the village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, five miles inland from Utah, finally arriving just two minutes before schedule. Schroeder had done his job. He had reached all of his D-Day objectives on time. He had led the first men to break out from Utah Beach. But he had also lost a great deal of blood and now he collapsed. A medic came to his aid. It was a million-dollar wound. He’d survive, but his war was damn sure over. And he’d be very lucky to keep the arm. It was a mangled mess.
Schroeder lost consciousness. He came to several hours later in a tent, surrounded by doctors.
“We’re going to have to amputate your arm.”
Schroeder blacked out again.
He awoke once more many hours later, this time in a British medical clinic. “The guy in the stretcher next to me had a bullet in his head,” he remembered, “and another guy had the skin covering his entire back torn off. He died the next day. For me, the war was over but I had five more operations before the surgeons succeeded in saving my arm. I wanted to go back to the front to join my true family. It was forbidden.”
One morning, a nurse brought Schroeder some newspapers.
He refused to read them.
The nurse insisted. “Read them. Look. You’re a hero!”30
It was true. Back home, in the American press, Schroeder had been tagged as “the first GI to invade Europe.” According to his hometown paper, The Baltimore Sun: “When his boot touched French soil, it was a great moment in history.”31
AS THE PARATROOPERS and foot soldiers converged behind Utah Beach, Lord Lovat and his commandos crept into the village of Saint-Aubin-d’Arquenay, two-thirds of which lay in smoking ruins, the result of Allied bombardment.32 Shards of broken glass frosted the sidewalks, also strewn with smashed tiles and pieces of masonry. Telephone wire lay in twisting coils on the ground between snapped poles. Lovat was now less than two miles from Pegasus Bridge, where Major John Howard awaited reinforcement. He had a sense of foreboding—he hated street fighting, which suited German snipers, their cheeks bruised from the recoil of their Mausers, over the fast-moving, lightly armed commandos. At a road junction in the village, some distraught Frenchmen and women pointed at a building that had been destroyed. Family members lay badly injured in the ruins, desperate for medical aid. Lovat turned and gestured toward medics who were some way behind him. A sniper’s bullet hit a wall close to Lovat’s head with a startling crack. Stone chips flew through the air.
“He’s over there,” shouted one of Lovat’s men as he sprinted across the street, determined to kill the sniper who had fired on Lovat. A grenade through a window. A flat explosion. A door kicked in. Tommy gun bullets spraying a room. Dead and done.
Germans were spotted, around thirty, crossing nearby fields, sun in their eyes, unaware of Lovat and his men.
Lovat pulled off his eighty-pound Bergen rucksack. It felt good to be free of the weight. He knelt down behind it, aiming his short-barreled US Army carbine.
The Germans kept coming, oblivious. Some of Lovat’s men set up a Vickers K machine gun on the roof of a shed.
Whispered orders.
“Pick the officers and NCOs and let them come right in.”
A blond-haired German officer spun as he fell, dust flying off his back as bullets thumped into his chest. Others who had bunched up lay in a grotesque heap, riddled by the vengeful commando fire.
Lovat pressed on, hearing the sound of intense fighting in the distance, the dull hammer blows of artillery and the steady tonk of mortars firing. He knew it was the Germans counterattacking. “The Airborne sounded in trouble,” Lovat recalled, “and it was our job to bail them out.”33
At Pegasus Bridge, Major John Howard had just one thought.
How long could he and his men hold out?
He had been given very clear orders.
Hold until relieved.
Howard looked at his watch.
Come on lads . . . Where are the bloody commandos?
Howard’s nerves were raw. The wait was excruciating, perhaps the hardest part of the whole D-Day operation.
Hold until relieved.
Hold until relieved . . .
But how long for?34
It was approaching 1 P.M. when Howard heard an odd sound amid the crackle of machine gun fire and distant explosions.
Several hundred yards away, out of Howard’s view, Bill Millin walked at the front of a group of commandos, playing his pipes.
Lord Lovat sauntered behind Millin as they passed a row of poplar trees.
Millin spotted a sniper in one of the trees, off to his right.
The sniper opened fire and Millin saw a flash. Lovat dropped to his knee, and Millin stopped playing the pipes. Then several commandos ran past, firing at the sniper, who shimmied down the tree and sprinted into a cornfield. “I could see his head bobbing up and down,” recalled Millin. “Lovat was shooting, his rifle was blazing away, and then we stopped and Lovat sent some commandos into the field to drag the body out and we dumped him at the side of the road.”
Lovat ordered his men to keep on toward Pegasus Bridge.
“Well, start playing your pipes again, piper.”35
The sound of pipes could now clearly be heard on Pegasus Bridge. Some of Howard’s men thought they were dreaming—it had been a very long morning.
Not far from the bridge, a paratrooper turned to a man next to him.
“I can hear bagpipes.”
“Don’t be stupid,” replied the man. “We’re in the middle of France, you can’t hear bagpipes.”
Then they spotted Millin playing his pipes.
“Do the Germans play the bagpipes?” asked another man.
“I don’t think so,” someone said.36
John Howard was astonished at the sight of Millin marching along the towpath beside the Caen Canal. With the wail of the pipes, modernity in that moment fell away. The skirl was answered by another ancient noise, evoking battles from distant ages. “A bugle sounded in reply from the 7th Para,” recalled the major, “and the skirl of the bagpipes became louder. We could see Lovat striding ahead of his men, clad in his trademark Aran wool jumper with Millin beside him blowing away for all he was worth.”37
Some men broke into tears as the pipes grew louder.38
Millin stopped outside the Café Gondrée, just a few yards from the bridge. His arrival with his fellow commandos had not gone unnoticed by the enemy. German snipers opened fire from wheat fields to the southwest. “Even where I was standing,” Millin remembered, “I could hear the shrapnel or the bullets, whatever, hitting off the metal side of the bridge. The wounded were being carried up from along the canal banks and into the café. It was a real hot spot.”39
Lovat approached John Howard.
They shook hands.
“About bloody time!” said Howard.40
Lovat apologized for being a few minutes late.
“John,” he added, “today we are making history.”41
Howard advised Lovat to keep on going.
Lovat turned to Millin.
“Right, we’ll cross over.”
Millin put his pipes on his shoulder, ready to play.
“No, don’t play,” ordered Lovat. “Wait until you get over.”42
Millin ran across with a group of commandos while Lovat walked calmly, unflustered by the intense crack, crack, crack of sniper fire. Howard watched Lovat cross and would never forget his “courage and panache,” for which he would always have “an immense respect.”43
On the other side of Pegasus Bridge, Lovat caught up with Millin. “Right,” said Lovat, “play now and keep playing all the way along this road, about two hundred yards, until you come to the Ranville Bridge and keep playing right across that. No matter what, just keep playing.”44
Millin did as he was told.
The fields nearby were a grim spectacle. Lovat saw dead horses lying with their legs in the air, “while others dragged around, tripping on spilled insides, bellowing their agony.”45
They arrived at the narrow, metal-sided Ranville bridge, which spanned the Orne River.
Millin spotted two British airborne troops in a slit trench on the other side of the bridge.
“Get back!” called one of the troops.
The bridge was under sniper fire.
Millin then saw that Lovat was walking ahead, yet again as calm as could be, as if he were strolling along a lane on his 200,000-acre estate in Scotland.
“Carry on, carry on,” ordered Lovat.46
Again Millin obeyed, this time playing “Blue Bonnets over the Border,” with its stirring words, so familiar to every proud Scotsman:
March! March! Ettrick and Teviot-dale,
Why my lads dinna ye march forward in order?
March! March! Eskdale and Liddesdale!
All the blue bonnets are over the border . . .
Snipers quickly opened up on Lovat’s commandos, several falling as they hurried across the Ranville bridge. “You didn’t hear the shot,” remembered one man, “you just saw them crumple. These chaps with great big packs, loaded up, had marched inland and were jolly tired. They were so tired. I think they felt ‘If we’re going to be sniped then we’re going to be sniped’ sort of thing.”
Still piping, Millin crossed the Ranville bridge as the sniper fire pinged around him. “The two airborne chaps in the slit trench thought we were crazy . . . But I got over, stopped playing the pipes and I shook hands with the two chaps. Then from across the road appears this tall airborne officer—red beret on. He came marching across, his arms outstretched towards Lovat. ‘Very pleased to see you, old boy.’ Lovat said, ‘And we are very pleased to see you, old boy. Sorry, we are two and a half minutes late!’”47 The critical linkup between seaborne forces and paratroopers had now been achieved on both flanks of the fifty-mile-long Allied front.
Beyond the Ranville bridge, two senior officers were waiting for Lovat in the shelter of tall trees on a rise.48 Lovat learned that he had arrived just in time. Elements of the 21st Panzer Division were finally attacking in strength from the south. Lovat’s commandos would be needed to fend off the counterattack and to aid Lieutenant Colonel Terence Otway, whose force had been reduced to just two hundred men and had now taken up positions in Amfreville, two miles north on the high ground running to the east of the Orne.
The real test of Lovat and of his men’s mettle was imminent. Time now for hard pounding. “So far, so good,” he recalled. “We retained the initiative and events had clicked into place. The sea crossing, dry landing, rapid break through and intact bridges were bonus marks. Shock tactics had proved a complete success. [But] how would we get on after losing the element of surprise? It is one thing to go on the warpath; quite another to stay put and take what’s coming to you . . . We’d had a flying start: could we prove our staying power and face the music?”49
BY 2:30 THAT AFTERNOON, the Green Howards’ Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis found himself in command of 16 Platoon—its previous leader, a young lieutenant, had been killed just thirty minutes before. “We advanced inland through fields of ripening corn and small green pastures surrounded by banks and hedges—the dreaded Bocage,” recalled Hollis’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robin Hastings, who accompanied Hollis and D Company’s commander, Major Ronnie Lofthouse,50 and who was before long giving orders to clear the enemy from buildings near the village of Crépon, 2.5 miles inland from Gold Beach.
Hollis and his platoon approached an old farmhouse and passed through a gate. The front entrance to the farmhouse was locked, so Hollis broke the door in.51 “I went up the stairs into the various bedrooms,” he remembered, “and I burst into one of the bedrooms and there was a small boy about 10 or 11 years old, and I just saw him disappear round the corner . . . I was covered in blood and he must have been terrified. I’m convinced he thought I was going to kill him.”52 There was no sign of Germans, so Hollis decided to reconnoiter behind the farmhouse. As he looked around a corner, a bullet blew a chunk from the wall, splintering the stone inches from his head. He saw a hedge in the distance. Two dogs stood in a gap in the hedge, wagging their tails. Hollis knew their German owners must be close by.
Hollis turned to some of his men.
“Just open up with Bren guns and shoot the hedge up.”53
The men sprinted into the open near a rhubarb patch. A stream of bullets greeted them. All were killed, “stone dead,” in a few moments.
Hollis pulled back and reported to his company commander, Lofthouse.
“Get a PIAT gun,” said Lofthouse, “and crawl forward through that rhubarb patch.”
Hollis located a PIAT, powerful enough to destroy a field gun, and selected two men to accompany him. They slithered through the rhubarb patch toward the Germans, Hollis leading the way. Once in position, obscured by a rhubarb plant, he poked his PIAT through the leaves and fired, but he missed the German position, hitting the roof of a nearby house instead. Pieces of stone and masonry flew through the air.
A German machine gun snarled and Hollis’s two companions were wounded, hopelessly pinned down in the rhubarb patch, bullets whipping above their heads. Having spotted the source of the enemy fire, Hollis reacted instantly and sprinted across open ground, spraying rounds at a hedgerow, within a few seconds silencing the German machine gun. Then he and the two men scrambled back toward the rest of D Company. “Stan Hollis was a remarkably resolute fighter,” recalled one of Hollis’s senior officers. “He was one of those people who through the force of his own personality could change the course of a battle.”54
Later that afternoon, D Company regrouped and mopped up the last German resistance in Crépon and then pushed on, heading for the unit’s final D-Day objective, a main road leading from Caen to Bayeux. For risking his own life to save two others, as well as for exemplary and extraordinary courage throughout D-Day, Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis would receive the Victoria Cross, the highest award in the British Army for valor.55 Incredibly, he was the only British warrior to be so recognized for his courage on June 6, 1944.
WHILE STANLEY HOLLIS was saving the lives of his fellow Green Howards, Lord Lovat and his commandos prepared to attack the village of Le Plein, two miles north of Pegasus Bridge. The village ran along high ground with a main street of creamy yellow limestone buildings a half mile long and was occupied by a large force of Germans who’d been ordered to hold their vital positions overlooking the Orne River valley.56
Piper Millin watched as the commandos under Lovat’s command checked their Bren and Sten guns and then began to advance along a lane, shoulders hunched like boxers ready to parry and jab. Lovat was standing at a crossroads, urging his men on, when the Germans launched a well-aimed mortar strike, groups of bombs landing and spraying chunks of shrapnel in erratic patterns, bracketing commando positions, slicing and slashing at feet and legs. Clearly, Lovat and his men were under close observation. Two valuable officers were wounded. Enemy fire intensified, the violence of explosions steadily mounting. “The fire fight was thickening,” recalled Lovat, “but men were being killed; the Germans had started to react fiercely. We had run into trouble. The enemy had to be dislodged without delay.”57
Millin moved closer to Le Plein, coming across a quarry where badly wounded commandos had been placed. He was deeply saddened to see so many men in agony—they were also petrified by the German mortars landing near the quarry. He returned to the crossroads, where he found Lovat still issuing orders for the attack on Le Plein.
Mortar fire grew more intense, dozens of explosions ripping up open ground. Millin took cover in a ditch, where he looked back at Lovat.
“Goodness, thirty-two years of age,” thought Millin. “Right enough he’s old . . . But what a responsibility, aged thirty-two, and all these people have been killed and seriously injured.”58
On the road leading into Le Plein, one of Lovat’s young commandos, an eighteen-year-old private, saw a sergeant get hit. A phosphorus grenade in the sergeant’s pocket exploded and he began to burn fiercely. A fellow officer appeared and shot the sergeant to death—he had to be put out of his misery.
The battle for Le Plein raged on. Several men near the private were felled by anti-tank fire from a Russian-made gun. A man a few feet away had his stomach gouged by shrapnel and died in the private’s arms. Yet another commando had gotten it in the “arse,” and someone else had lost a foot.
The young private was carrying a first-aid kit and realized that he alone could help the wounded. His unit’s medical officer was busy back on Sword Beach.
“Is my wedding tackle all right?” asked one wounded man. “Is my wedding tackle all right?”
“For Christ’s sake,” replied the private. “You’ve got it through the arse. You haven’t got it through anything else.”
The private applied a field dressing to the man’s backside.59
“Hold it. Get your hand on it. Hold it and really push in.”
The mortars were still firing with a furious whooshing sound. Then came the crash of explosions and the hiss of countless shards of shrapnel slashing through the air.
It was safest to keep moving or get underground.
One man approached, covered in blood. He was barely able to stand and was dragging a tommy gun along the road.
“Well,” thought the private, “he ain’t going to go far.”
The private moved toward the man.
Someone called out.
“Let him go . . .”
It was a waste of time for the private to try to help the man. Another commando was dragged over to the private, who ripped open the man’s brown canvas jacket. He was a hopeless case, too, his chest “just one mass of jelly.”60
The private pulled out some morphine vials. He could ease the pain, at least. The man with the chest wound could not speak. Blood seeped from his nostrils and mouth. Then he died, yet another one of Lovat’s finest killed in his prime.
Meanwhile, Lovat had spotted a group of cows around four hundred yards from where he had taken up position, just outside Le Plein. He was convinced that a German, perhaps a sniper, was hidden close to the cattle. Time for a little hunting. “Two animals were taking an interest—as cows do, sniffing and throwing their heads—at a thorn bush,” recalled Lovat. “It was good light, but the carbine did not get the distance. The first round from a borrowed rifle, however, scored a bull’s eye, winging a prone civilian who jumped up, nicked through the fleshy part of his shoulder.”
A sergeant was sent to bring in the “shifty-looking yokel in plain clothes.” While doing so, he paced off the distance of Lovat’s superb shot. The yokel was clearly a spy: He had a pair of binoculars and a wad of cash and spoke in a strange accent. Lovat handed him a spade and made him dig a trench, and he looked relieved not to have been shot.
The afternoon dragged on as Lovat waited for Number 4 Commando to arrive to reinforce his men as they fought their way through Le Plein. German shells landed sporadically, keeping every man on his toes, nerves taut. All of Lovat’s lads, their Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knives close to hand, many wearing their green berets rather than helmets, were before long in the fight, bayonets fixed, their blood up, hunting Germans from yard to yard and house to house in Le Plein.
There was no reserve. They had no backup.
Would help reach them before the formidable tanks of the 21st Panzer Division?61 Who would arrive first: the tanks or their fellow commandos?62
BY MIDAFTERNOON, Lieutenant John Spalding and his platoon were several hundred yards inland from Omaha, having received orders to head across cow pastures to the village of Colleville. Roses were in bloom, their scent mixing in some places with the sickly-sweet stench of animal corpses—countless cows had been killed by bombardment and shelling, and in the fields some were still standing, stiff with rigor mortis. On the outskirts of the village, near a stone church where snipers had earlier lurked, Spalding and his unit joined others from the 1st Division, and in all some forty-five men set up positions, using drainage ditches near an orchard so they did not have to waste energy digging in.
It was around 3 P.M. when the Germans tried to kill Spalding yet again. One man nearby had his gun shot out of his hand, the stock shattering as he was hit in the thigh by a shell fragment. A medic quickly gave first aid, and others joked that the wounded man was “too big to be missed.” The next casualty was no laughing matter. The sergeant who had kicked down the ramp on Spalding’s craft that morning was hit in the throat and face and killed.63
If this was not sobering enough, at around 4 P.M. a navy artillery shell landed just a couple of hundred yards away. Then another exploded and another, sending shock waves along the ground, knocking men off their feet. Spalding and his men were under friendly fire, a common experience for men on D-Day on both sides. Spotters out at sea could finally identify landmarks, including the church, and now began to level it, not realizing Americans were in the vicinity.
One of Spalding’s fellow officers, Captain Joe Dawson, G Company commander, hunkered down as yet more shells flew over, landing in and all around the village of Colleville, shredding apple orchards, leaving only splintered stumps, reducing buildings to mounds of stone, and killing or wounding seven of Dawson’s men. He had already lost all thirty-three soldiers who had lined up behind him in his landing craft at H-Hour, obliterated by a direct hit from artillery. The shelling had “leveled the town,” he recalled, “and in doing so we suffered the worst casualties we had the whole of the day—not from the enemy, but from our own Navy. I was angered by it, angered beyond all measure, because I thought it was totally disgraceful . . . I was frantically throwing up smoke bombs to alert them to the fact that we were in the town, but it was too late.”64
Spalding watched as orange and yellow flames stabbed toward the low gray skies.65 All they could do was curl up in the rotting leaves and dirt of the ditch and make themselves as small as possible, hands over their ringing ears or their genitals, and curse and curse or pray the next shell would not have their name on it. Finally, after what must have felt like an eternity, around 5 P.M., the naval fire stopped.66 Spalding looked back toward the beach and to his shock saw several squads of Germans heading his way, and then a GI out in the open, a runner from G Company. The Germans opened fire on the runner and he fell to the ground. Spalding watched as they then pumped at least another hundred rounds of machine gun bullets into the young American.67
Spalding and his men were before long in a ferocious firefight and starting to run low on ammunition. Spalding counted his rounds—he had just six left. In all, he and his men had fewer than a hundred bullets between them. In a lull in the fighting, Spalding and two other lieutenants discussed the situation with Sergeant Streczyk, the most experienced combat veteran among them. What should they do? There were mumblings about surrender. Neither Spalding nor Streczyk was having any of that. “We decided to fight our way back to the battalion,” recalled Spalding. “We sent word for men to come to us in the ditch where we were; we were several hundred yards south and west of Colleville.”
Reinforcements did not arrive, so early that evening Spalding and others crawled in single file along a ditch, hoping they had not been spotted. They came to a road, sprinted across it, thankfully without hearing the crack of a sniper’s round, and then made their way, combat jackets covered in mud and grass stains, along another ditch. “We passed a German machine gun with two dead Germans and one live German,” remembered Spalding. “Without saying a word we exchanged the German’s life for our own safety. I was sure that I saw a twinkle in the German’s eye as I crawled past him.”68
Finally, no doubt to their great relief, Spalding’s platoon came across men from C Company who had been sent to help them. Before long, they had found extra ammunition and set up new positions, guarding a road into Colleville, half a mile from where they had been surrounded earlier. After the friendly fire incident, they knew it was suicide to not dig in or find cover belowground.69 Thankfully, Spalding and his platoon were now reinforced by men from C Company and several squads operating heavy machine guns. The extra firepower was reassuring indeed.70
Spalding later recalled being “tired, hungry and scared” as he settled down to await an inevitable German counterattack.71 In a medical report, he would state that he had “adjusted well to his first combat experiences.” He had felt “normal fear” but had been able to control it. He should have been killed or wounded. Indeed, he had been exceptionally lucky to survive, given that “Germans [were] sitting there waiting for us.” In his view, “no man” in the first wave on Omaha “had a right to come out alive.”72
For several hours that morning, the outcome on Omaha had been uncertain. Victory had depended on Spalding and others of his ilk, young men who had risked their lives over and over as they led terrified Americans off the beach—these were the exceptional warriors who had ultimately won the day on Omaha. According to an after-action report, Spalding’s company had in fact tipped the scales in favor of the invaders: “It is an obvious fact that Company E, as much as, if not more than any other unit, seemingly by strength of will and courage alone, saved the entire beach-head from being thrown back in the sea. It was an experience few men underwent and lived, and for a month afterwards, those who did, remained almost in a daze.”73
Later that afternoon, the commander of E Company, Captain Wozenski, did a head count and was stunned when he saw how few soldiers had survived the twelve hours since landing in the first wave. Of the men in E Company who had stormed the beach with him, only sixty remained to fight. “Sixty of us left!” he shouted. “Where are my men? . . . What did they promise us?”74 E Company had in fact suffered more than any other 1st Division unit, with forty men killed, forty missing, and thirty-seven wounded.75
They had been told it would be a cakewalk. The air force was supposed to have bombed the entire beach, but nothing had been touched. It had been as flat as a pancake, with not a single crater to offer the promised protection. Indeed, not one bomb “was dropped on Omaha Beach by our airplanes,” recalled a naval commander.76
Wozenski and E Company, like so many others in the Big Red One, had deserved far better. They had done their duty in North Africa and Sicily, only to be sent like so many cattle to the slaughter. It had been a damn waste of good soldiers, warriors who should by rights have long since been sent home. So many had been cut down before even firing a shot.77
As survivors huddled in foxholes, shaking from nervous exhaustion, startled by the slightest sound, some of their comrades—from the 35,000 men landed that day on Omaha—still lay in agony among minefields along the bluffs, still waiting for a medic to reach them before they bled to death.
In all, the United States had landed some 55,000 men on D-Day. By far the greatest losses had been suffered on Omaha, where more than nine hundred were killed.78 For their heroism on Omaha Beach, 153 men would receive the Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second-highest award for bravery. Remarkably, among the thirty-two men in Lieutenant John Spalding’s platoon, three other than Spalding and Streczyk would get the medal.79 No fewer than ten men from the platoon earned the Silver Star. Seven men had been wounded that June 6. Miraculously, only two had been killed.
Some of the medals received for extraordinary courage on Omaha should have been Medals of Honor—without doubt in both Spalding’s and Streczyk’s cases—but army officials far from the maw and horror of the front lines worried that “too many men” would get the highest award for bravery and its significance would somehow be diminished.80 In the end, scandalously, just three soldiers would receive the Medal of Honor for their actions on Omaha Beach, two of them belonging to the Big Red One.81 Of the three, only one would survive the war.82