ABOARD THE USS BARNETT, in the middle of the English Channel, twenty-five-year-old Captain Leonard Schroeder ate steak and eggs, served by a British marine in an immaculate uniform. Some of his fellow officers from the US Army’s 8th Infantry Regiment of the 4th Division could not help but think they might be tasting their last suppers.1 “If you fellows ever want to get home,” their division commander, Major General Raymond Barton, had told them a few hours before, “you have to be the meanest, dirtiest son-of-a-bitches the world has ever seen.” The division’s acting deputy commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., had added, for good measure, “Don’t you ever think for one minute that the [Germans] won’t shoot to kill you.”2
Schroeder considered several of his fellow officers to be close friends, having served with them in the 4th Infantry “Ivy” Division since 1942. He had memorized the names of all 219 men in F Company, which he led, and could recognize each man in the dark by the sound of his voice. Many were from the South and were described by a fellow officer as “country boys from Florida, Alabama and Georgia . . . squirrel-shooters who weren’t afraid of the dark, who could find their way home in woods and feel at home.”3 Born just below the Mason-Dixon Line himself, Schroeder was no backwoods boy, having been a star soccer player at the University of Maryland, where he had enjoyed a full scholarship.4
It was almost time to board the landing craft, but before doing so, Schroeder and other company commanders slated for the first wave were called to a meeting with the 2nd Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Carlton MacNeely, and General Roosevelt, the eldest son of the twenty-sixth president of the United States. The arthritic Roosevelt, who at fifty-six sported a bad heart and a bum leg, had begged his superiors repeatedly to allow him to go in with the first wave. “I personally know both officers and men of these advance units,” he had stressed, “and believe that it will steady them to know that I am with them.”5
“The general was reading western stories when we arrived,” Schroeder later recalled as he and the other officers assembled in Roosevelt’s quarters. Schroeder and Roosevelt were on good terms—Roosevelt called the thickset athlete “Moose” because of his muscular build, and Schroeder was proud of the nickname. Several days prior, Schroeder had come down with a high fever and had been sent to the sick bay. He had quickly given up hope of being released in time to lead his men on D-Day, but then, to his surprise, he had found Roosevelt standing before him.
“Moose, get dressed and come with me,” ordered Roosevelt.
Schroeder had done as he was told. He followed the general past guards, keeping a poker face, and rejoined his company.
One last time, Schroeder listened as his commanders went through the invasion plan for the 2nd Battalion. They would be the first seaborne forces to fight on D-Day, landing in the first wave, supported by amphibious tanks, and would break through a seawall before securing vital causeways leading off Utah Beach. “All commanders reported everything was ready,” recalled Schroeder. “All we wanted was to get going.”
As the meeting broke up, officers wished each other the best of luck and shook hands. MacNeely put his arm around Schroeder’s broad shoulders.
“Well, Moose, this is it. Give ’em hell!”
MacNeely was emotional, all “choked up,” as was Schroeder.
“Well, Colonel,” Schroeder blurted, “I’ll see you on the beach!”6
That night, aboard the Barnett, Roosevelt penned a letter to his wife, Eleanor. “We are starting out on the great venture of this war,” he wrote, “and by the time you get this letter, for better or for worse, it will be history. We are attacking in daylight the most heavily fortified shore in history, a shore held by excellent troops . . . The men are crowded below or lounging on deck. Very few have seen action. They talk of many things, but rarely of the action that lies ahead. If they speak of it at all it is to wise-crack.”7
It was after midnight when Captain Schroeder stepped onto the Barnett’s deck. Hundreds of men stood in the darkness, waiting to form boat teams and then be called to the landing craft that hung, ominously, from davits along the sides of the former British passenger steamer. The sky was black. The wind howled above the thrum of the ship’s engines. Then a loudspeaker blared and Schroeder heard a recording of Eisenhower’s final message to the Allied forces: “You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade . . . The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”8
Deeply moved by Eisenhower’s words, Schroeder returned to his quarters. For half an hour, he wrote a last letter to his wife, Margaret, his high school sweetheart to whom he’d been married since December 1941 and with whom he had a two-year-old son. “I told her where I was,” recalled Schroeder, “what I was about to do, and how much I loved her.”9
ABOARD THE HMS Amsterdam stood twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant George Kerchner, waiting for the order to clamber down the ship’s side netting and take his place in a flimsy landing craft with other men from D Company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion.10 A platoon leader with dark hair, a broad, handsome face, and bright eyes, he was inordinately proud of the yellow diamond on the back of his helmet, his unit’s insignia. He had never worked so hard, never endured so much, to belong to the elite, all-volunteer Rangers—only one in four men who had applied to join the five-hundred-strong battalion had made the grade.
A devout Catholic, Kerchner had left high school in the eleventh grade to help feed his family, working as a soda jerk at the Arundel Ice Cream Company and as a railroad security guard in his native Baltimore. He enlisted a year after Pearl Harbor, before volunteering for the Rangers in 1943.11 He’d spent a brutally cold and wet winter in Scotland, practicing how to kill swiftly in silence and how to scale cliffs, driven hard by merciless British commandos.12 Like so many men braced for combat on D-Day, he was anxious to prove himself, to get the job done and go home to his wife, Violet, whom he had dated in high school and married a year before the war in Europe began.
Kerchner had a great deal on his mind, so many concerns it was impossible to prioritize what he should worry about most. The previous afternoon, the Amsterdam’s British captain had admitted to Kerchner that his crew was “running out of food and fuel” after circling near the Isle of Wight for several hours, impatiently awaiting the final order to head to France. “The British food wasn’t all that good,” remembered Kerchner, “so that didn’t worry us too much, but the fuel did.”13 Would the pre-invasion bombardment work? He had been told that fighter aircraft would attack Pointe du Hoc, a headland midway between Utah and Omaha Beaches, just three minutes before he and his men from D Company were to land. This would ensure that the Germans were kept back from the cliffs and would not be able to cut the Rangers’ ropes as they climbed. But what if the Germans were well dug in on top of the cliffs, able to withstand rocketing and strafing?
To make matters worse, there had also been a recent, disconcerting change in command. A few days before, some of Kerchner’s fellow officers had held a “little party.” After having perhaps one too many slugs of gin, Major Cleveland Lytle, usually all “spit and polish,” had gotten into a violent argument with other officers. Lytle was in command of D, E, and F Companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion—“Force A”—assigned to attack a battery of guns at Pointe du Hoc, above hundred-foot cliffs. Intelligence reports had indicated that the Germans had placed six 155-millimeter guns atop the sheer cliffs.14 The guns could fire as far as fifteen miles, hitting both American invasion beaches and Allied ships in the Channel. They had to be destroyed, but doing so would be one of the most formidable challenges of D-Day—“the toughest of any task,” according to General Omar Bradley.15
Lytle had studied the most recent intelligence reports and concluded that the Rangers were being sent on a pointless mission. “We’re all going to be killed,” Lytle had protested. “There’s not going to be one man left and it’s all going to be for nothing.”16
What was the point in dying if they didn’t achieve any objective?
“Look at your maps, for chrissakes. What does it say?” Lytle continued, pulling out a map.
“Read it!”
Lytle pointed at the map. Two guns, numbers 4 and 5 on his map, had a comment scrawled beside them: “Guns dismantled.”
“Whether you guys know it or not, intelligence says the guns aren’t there,” Lytle had stressed. “Our new orders simply state: ‘The mission of the Rangers remains unchanged.’ It’s suicide, I tell you. And what for chrissake for?”17
Kerchner’s fellow officers had tried to calm Lytle, but he punched the battalion surgeon, the much respected Captain Walter Block.18 It had required several men to hold Lytle down and then take him to his quarters.19 As soon as the 2nd Battalion’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder, was informed of the incident, he had decided that Lytle was in no fit state to command men, let alone inspire their confidence, so he had taken charge of Lytle’s force at the eleventh hour. Rudder himself would lead men up the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc.20
While his men steeled themselves for combat, Colonel Rudder reported to Major General Clarence Huebner, the 1st Division’s commander, aboard the USS Ancon. He told Huebner what had happened with Lytle, and of his intention to join the assault on Pointe du Hoc. He would not be staying on the Ancon, the headquarters ship.
“I can’t let you do that,” Huebner had said. “I need you here to oversee the entire Ranger operation. We may have Rangers spread over a four- or five-mile stretch of beach. You can’t risk getting knocked out in the very first round.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to have to disobey you,” Rudder replied. “If I don’t take it—it may not go.”21
Rudder had then left the Ancon and taken a motorboat across the dark, swelling waters to the HMS Ben Machree, where he formally relieved Lytle, who had to be removed, screaming and kicking, from a stairwell. “The process of arresting and leading off the former commander of the operation was a noisy one,” remembered one bystander. “I opened the door to find out what was going on, only to see a group of struggling and shouting uniforms, and was immediately ordered back inside by Colonel Rudder.”
Rudder had first learnt about Pointe du Hoc five months before, in a second-floor room, blackout curtains drawn, in General Omar Bradley’s headquarters in a stately London home. An officer had explained the mission in detail to Rudder and Lieutenant Colonel Max Schneider, who had trained the 1st Ranger Battalion. “When we first got a look at a photo of Pointe du Hoc,” recalled Rudder, “Max just whistled through his teeth. He had a way of doing that. He’d made three landings already, but I was just a country boy coaching football a year and a half before.”22
A naval officer had dismissed Rudder’s chances, saying that “three old women with brooms could keep the Rangers from climbing that cliff.”23
The plan had looked just as crazy to Rudder. General Bradley, commander of the US First Army, couldn’t be serious?
It had been no joke, and now, past midnight on June 6, 1944, it was abundantly clear to his men that Rudder was under enormous stress. “He knew where we were going and what we were going to do,” recalled one Ranger. “He knew we were going to lose eight out of every ten men. That means only two guys out of ten weren’t going to get hurt. I looked at it this way—I wasn’t going to get hurt; who would the other one be? That’s the way I think most everybody looked at it.”24
Tension mounted as the ships carrying the Rangers steamed closer to France.25 After a meager breakfast of coffee and flapjacks at 2 A.M., in order to kill time, many men lost themselves, their worries, and their savings in intense gambling sessions. Few truly cared about winning or losing, so long as they didn’t have to think about fighting and dying.
Belowdecks on the HMS Amsterdam, Staff Sergeant Jack Kuhn, a whippet-thin twenty-four-year-old who belonged to Lieutenant Kerchner’s platoon in D Company, watched as a fellow Ranger dealt out cards for what he knew might be his last-ever poker game.26 Kuhn had held a special role in the run-up to the invasion. Faced with the daunting task of mounting a sheer wall of rock while under fire, Colonel Rudder had chosen Kuhn to liaise with a British company called Merryweather, which supplied ladders to the London Fire Brigade. Sworn to complete secrecy, Kuhn had explained to designers at Merryweather & Sons the extraordinary challenge facing the Rangers, and the firm had designed a one-hundred-foot extension ladder to be mounted in the base of an amphibious truck, a DUKW. Once beached, the truck could drive to the base of a cliff and the ladder could be placed against the cliff. Successful trials had followed at cliffs near Swanage, on England’s south coast. Now, in just a few hours’ time, some of Kuhn’s fellow Rangers would dash up the made-to-order ladder, scaling Pointe du Hoc as if it were a tall building during an air raid.27
Kuhn studied the cards dealt to him—he had a hot hand at last. Then someone announced that Father Lacy was holding a final service up top.
“We gotta go and do a little praying,” said one devout gambler. “Maybe we’ll get some protection for tomorrow.”
Three men cashed out and headed to the main deck to listen to Lacy and pray.
Father Joe Lacy was a plump Catholic priest from Hartford, Connecticut. At forty years of age, he cut an almost comical figure among the young, lean bodies of the Rangers, men who had been trained to reach peak fitness, like racehorses for a hard steeplechase. He was thirty pounds overweight, wore thick glasses, and was six long inches short of six feet, even in his jump boots—“a small, fat old Irishman,” as one Ranger described him.28
“When you land on the beach and you get in there,” Lacy told the Rangers gathered around him, “I don’t want to see anybody kneeling down and praying. If I do I’m gonna come up and boot you in the tail. You leave the praying to me and you do the fighting.”29
Meanwhile, Jack Kuhn had stayed behind to play out his hand.30 None of the men who quit the game to pray would survive D-Day.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL TERENCE OTWAY, commanding officer of the 9th Battalion, Parachute Regiment, stood in the open door of a shaking plane as it approached the English Channel. With a lean and sensitive face, Otway looked more like an introspective academic than the leader of 750 of the toughest men in the entire British invasion force. Otway and his battalion had been tasked with seizing the heavily defended Merville Battery, whose guns pointed at the British invasion beach, Sword, where 29,000 men were scheduled to land on D-Day. Destroying the battery was so crucial, yet so difficult, that only the finest unit in the British 6th Airborne had been considered for the job.
Having studied the battery’s formidable defenses, Otway had decided that sixty men from his battalion—average age just twenty—would crash-land in three gliders on top of the battery itself, thereby avoiding a fifteen-foot-thick perimeter of barbed wire and a surrounding minefield that was a hundred yards wide.31 “Our plan was . . . to have three glider-loads of troops land inside the battery,” recalled Otway, “stopping themselves by knocking their wings off the [gun] casemates and taking the garrison entirely by surprise. The last part of the gliders’ journey would be lit up by mortar flares laid by us.”32
When Otway had asked for volunteers to go in with the gliders, every man in one company had stepped forward. He had been forced to select fewer than a third, each of them unmarried, knowing that most would be lucky to come home alive, “such was the nut to be cracked.”33 It was indeed “a Grade A stinker of a job,” as one senior officer had put it. In his last address to Otway and his men, the 6th Airborne’s commander, General Sir Richard Nelson “Windy” Gale, had hardly inspired confidence. “The Hun thinks only a bloody fool will go there,” Gale had said. “That’s why we’re going.”34
So stressed had Otway been before leaving his final base in England, after months of obsessive preparation, that he had spent a sleepless night pacing back and forth, hiding his anxiety from his officers and men, turning over every detail of his complicated assault plan. Thankfully, he had slept well the previous night, having been so exhausted from lack of rest and worry. Now he felt calm, utterly focused.35
Otway was not one to go easy on any man, friend or foe.36 His father had been killed in the last war against the Germans, and his youth was overshadowed by the loss. There were bitter memories of his mother struggling to make ends meet on a war widow’s pension, thanks to the bloody Hun. After graduating from Royal Military College, Sandhurst, he had been posted to the Far East and, based in heavily bombed Shanghai, had witnessed the carnage and horror of the Sino-Japanese War. He had also served on the North-West Frontier in India, where his men had frequently fought hand to hand with swords against local tribesmen.
Otway was a fastidious, unrelenting perfectionist, the second-oldest officer in the battalion and one of only two who had, as he put it, “ever actually been on the wrong end of artillery or rifle fire.”37 In training, he had made his men march fifty miles with sixty-pound packs on their backs. Some had suffered such bad blisters and their feet had bled so badly that their socks, encrusted with mud and blood, had to be cut away from their toes.38 An experienced sergeant described Otway as “a man that you couldn’t get through to. He was a very hard man, very standoffish, as you would expect a commanding officer to be. No tolerance for a fool whatsoever. You could not make a single mistake. He was a man I must say in all honesty I hated intensely as our commanding officer.”
Otway didn’t waste his time wondering what his men thought of him. “I may sound pompous and conceited,” he retorted, “but I don’t think a senior officer’s job is to work on being liked. He should be respected. Yes, I wanted to be respected and I wanted to be considered a fair person but I wouldn’t go out of my way to get popularity. I wanted an efficient, well-run, happy battalion and I reckon I had it.”39 To make sure his lads were in tip-top shape, he’d banned them from drinking for the past forty-eight hours.
Now Otway and his men were nearing the coast of France.40
“Twenty minutes to go, lads!” a man shouted. “Equipment check!”41
None of us is going to die, one of those lads thought. We’re all brave men. We’re not going to die.
Another of Otway’s men, an eighteen-year-old, worried about his Sten gun. How many rounds were in each magazine? Would he run out of bullets when it mattered most? One of the most common fears among the first-wave troops on D-Day, and indeed all troops, was running out of ammunition in a firefight. Many paratroopers, knowing they might well need every bullet they could carry, were overloaded with extra magazines.
“We’re approaching the coast!”42
Anti-aircraft fire opened up, becoming a steady bark as 22-millimeter shells exploded in black smudges among the clouds. Otway and his men could also see tracer bullets glowing, the color of amber, as they probed the sky. Any second now, the jump light would turn green and it would be time to drop, helplessly, dangling beneath a silk parachute, onto the enemy below.
IT WAS 12:50 A.M. At Pegasus Bridge, John Howard heard the steady drone of Stirling bombers, bringing in the 3rd and 5th Parachute Brigades of the 6th Airborne Division.43 Searchlights illuminated the drop, showing white chutes falling like silken confetti as far as the eye could see. Tracer fire—green, orange, red—spat skyward. Howard could not help but stand and stare at the heavens: “It really was the most awe-inspiring sight.”
Then Howard blew on his whistle.
Dat, dat, dat . . . Daaaa . . .
The bridges were in British hands.
The sound of the whistle carried for hundreds of yards, lifting the spirits of teenagers who were lost and alone in the darkness. “Paras who had landed in a tree or a bog, in a farmyard and away from their own friends,” recalled Howard, “could hear that whistle. It not only meant that the bridges had been captured, but it also gave them an orientation.” The question now was whether the men hearing the whistle, and others from the widely dispersed 6th Airborne, would be able to reinforce Howard before the 21st Panzer Division, based near Caen, could attack. If German armor arrived anytime soon, Howard would be in serious trouble without adequate anti-tank weaponry. His men could be massacred.
While Howard blew his whistle, his pilot, Jim Wallwork, was busy ferrying ammunition from his downed glider to Howard’s command post, near Pegasus Bridge. “There was Howard, tooting on his bloody whistle and making all sorts of silly noises,” recalled Wallwork, who had been ordered to bring hand-thrown explosives, called Gammon bombs, from the smashed glider to Howard’s position.
“Gammon bombs!” Howard stressed. “Gammon bombs! Gammon bombs!” The major knew his men would need all the firepower they could find, but Wallwork reported that he had already searched the glider and found none.
“I put those Gammon bombs on the glider,” Howard insisted. “Get those bloody Gammon bombs.”
Wallwork did as instructed, returning to the glider to look once more, crawling inside its broken shell. But then he made a stupid mistake, deciding to use his flashlight to search for the elusive Gammon bombs. There was the metallic rip of machine gun fire—the enemy had spotted his light. He quickly flicked it off.
Back near Pegasus Bridge, less than thirty yards away, Howard’s radio operator continued to send out the code words for the successful taking of the bridges. Howard was sure he heard a word of frustration added to the message, to which he had yet to get a reply from higher up in the division. “HAM AND JAM. HAM AND BLOODY JAM.”
Around 12:52, paratroopers from the 5th Parachute Brigade of the 6th Airborne were spotted approaching Pegasus Bridge.44 In the lead was thirty-six-year-old Brigadier Nigel Poett, who had jumped with pathfinders and landed not long after Howard and his men. “John Howard’s Platoon Commander had not told him of my arrival,” recalled Poett, “nor that I was on my way to see him. He was surprised, and a little put out, as I walked unexpectedly into his position. But he was so thrilled with his success, and with my very warm congratulations, that his Platoon Commander was quickly forgiven.”45
Poett stood beside Howard, scanning the bridge and the landing area.
“Well, everything seems all right, John.”
Poett had spoken too soon. Not long after came the sound of enemy tanks in the distance, drawing closer. A sergeant was told to get ready with a PIAT, an anti-tank weapon, the only one that could be found. Then a Panzerkampfwagen IV, with a black cross just below its turret, lumbered into view, tracks clanking louder and louder. Another followed behind, protected by three-inch-thick armor and boasting powerful 7.5-millimeter guns.
“Hold your fire!” shouted one of Howard’s men.
The soldiers waited for the first tank to lumber within range of the sergeant’s PIAT. By now he was so nervous he was “shaking like a bloody leaf.” “The lads behind me were only lightly armed with Bren guns, rifles and grenades,” he recalled. “They knew I wouldn’t stand a chance if I missed and the whole operation would be over.”
The tank rolled closer.
“This is it!” the sergeant said to himself. “You mustn’t miss.”
He pulled the trigger on the PIAT and made a direct hit. In a couple of seconds, remembered the sergeant, the tank lit up like a “fire-work display,” and then “machine-gun clips inside the tank set off grenades which set off shells. There was the most enormous explosion, with bits and pieces flying everywhere and lighting up the darkness . . . The other tank fled.”46
Howard and his men had won an important reprieve. But how long would it be before the Germans struck again? Would reinforcements arrive, along with more vital anti-tank weapons, before Howard had to face a much more powerful counterattack?