“I jumped out in waist-deep water,” Sergeant Pike recalled. “We had 200 feet to go to shore and you couldn’t run, you could just kind of push forward. We finally made it to the edge of the water, then we had 200 yards of open beach to cross, through the obstacles. But fortunately most of the Germans were not able to fight, they were all shook up from the bombing and the shelling and the rockets and most of them just wanted to surrender.”³

Capt. Howard Lees, commander of E Company, led his men over the seawall to the top of the dunes. “What we saw,” Sergeant Pike remembered, “was nothing like what we saw on the sand table back in England. We said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like what they showed us.’ ”⁴ Roosevelt joined them, walking calmly up to their position, using his cane (he had had a heart attack), wearing a wool-knit hat (he hated helmets), ignoring the fire. About this time (0640) the Germans to the north in the fortifications at Les-Dunes-de-Varreville began shooting at 2nd Battalion with 88mm cannon and machine guns, but not accurately. Roosevelt and Lees conferred, studied their maps, and realized they were at the wrong place.

Roosevelt returned to the beach. By now the first Sherman tanks had landed and were returning the German fire. Commodore James Arnold, the Navy control officer for Utah, was just landing with the third wave. “German 88s were pounding the beachhead,” he recalled. “Two U.S. tanks were drawn up at the high-water line pumping back. I tried to run to get into the lee of these tanks. I realize now why the infantry likes to have tanks along in a skirmish. They offer a world of security to a man in open terrain who may have a terribly empty sensation in his guts.” Arnold found a shell hole and made it his temporary headquarters.

“An army officer wearing the single star of a brigadier jumped into my ‘headquarters’ to duck the blast of an 88.

“ ‘Sonsabuzzards,’ he muttered, as we untangled sufficiently to look at each other. ‘I’m Teddy Roosevelt. You’re Arnold of the Navy. I remember you at the briefing at Plymouth.’ ”⁵

Roosevelt was joined by the two battalion commanders of the 8th Infantry, Lt. Cols. Conrad Simmons and Carlton MacNeely. As they studied the map, Colonel Van Fleet, CO of the regiment, came wading ashore. He had landed with the fourth wave, carrying the 237th and 299th ECBs.

“Van,” Roosevelt exclaimed, “we’re not where we were supposed to be.” He pointed to a building on the beach. It was supposed to be to the left. “Now it’s to our right. I figure we are more than a mile further south.” Van Fleet reflected that ironically they were at the exact spot he had wanted the Navy to land his regiment, but the Navy had insisted it was impossible because the water was too shallow.

“We faced an immediate and important decision,” Van Fleet wrote. “Should we try to shift our entire landing force more than a mile down the beach, and follow our original plan? Or should we proceed across the causeways immediately opposite where we had landed?” Already men were crossing the seawall and dunes in front of the officers, while Navy demolition men and engineers were blowing up obstacles behind them.

Roosevelt became a legend for reportedly saying at this point, “We’ll start the war from right here.” According to Van Fleet that was not the way it happened. In an unpublished memoir, Van Fleet wrote: “I made the decision. ‘Go straight inland,’ I ordered. ‘We’ve caught the enemy at a weak point, so let’s take advantage of it.’ ”⁶

The important point was not who made the decision but that it was made without opposition or time-consuming argument. It was the right decision and showed the flexibility of the high command. Simmons and MacNeely immediately set about clearing the German beach opposition, preparing to seize the eastern ends of exits 1 and 2, then cross the causeways to drive west. First, however, they needed to get their men through the seawall and over the dunes.

THE ENGINEERS AND naval demolition teams came in right after the first wave, also landing opposite exit 2. They were taking more fire than the first wave and could see that the spot they were headed for was not the place they had studied back in England. They could also see that they were going to be dropped in waist-deep water, so they began to lighten up their packs. The first thing that went, Sgt. Richard Cassiday of the 237th ECB remembered, were cartons of cigarettes. He had six—one man carried ten cartons. Cassiday tore open a carton, grabbed a pack out of it, and threw all the rest away. So did others. “We were wading in cigarettes up to our knees in that boat.”⁷

The demolition teams consisted of five Navy Seabees (combat demolition units) and two or three Army engineers. There were ten teams. Each man carried between fifty and seventy-five pounds of explosives on his back, either TNT or composition C (a plastic explosive developed by the British that looked like a bar of laundry soap; it would burn if lit or explode when properly detonated). The Seabee personnel tended to be older than most D-Day men; most of them were trained by miners from the western United States who where explosive experts.

The Seabees were responsible for the outermost set of obstacles, the ones that would be the first covered by the tide. The Seabees were prepared to work underwater if necessary (although without anything like the special equipment modern “frogmen” use). Orval Wakefield recalled that when the recruiter came around to ask for volunteers for the underwater demolition teams, he said that experience in the Pacific had shown how critical the teams would be to a successful invasion.

“He also explained that it was extremely hazardous duty and they needed good swimmers and we would have special training physically, mentally, and we would be expendable. We would be working with booby trapped and mined obstacles. The good thing was that we would pull no KP duty. Everything turned out to be true.”

At Utah, Wakefield’s team prepared the outer obstacles for demolition while incoming 4th Division troops dodged around them. The team set up their charges, got them wired together, shouted “Fire in the hole!” and blew them apart. Wakefield and his buddies then went up to the seawall, where they got into a slit trench and “just watched what was happening on the beach. When we first came in there was nothing there but men running, turning, and dodging. All of a sudden it was like a beehive. Boats were able to come through the obstacles. Bulldozers were pushing sand up against the seawall and half-tracks and tanks were able to go into the interior. It looked like an anthill.”⁸

The Army engineers simultaneously went after the next set of obstacles, closer in to the beach. They attached their explosives to the obstacles, whether single poles with mines or Belgian gates, then connected the individual charges by primer cord, so that everything would go up at once. Sgt. Al Pikasiewicz was with a team from the 237th ECB. He and his buddies got their explosives in place on one set of obstacles, all connected, and ran toward the seawall to set off the primer cord. “Fire in the hole!” they shouted.

“Just before the explosions went off,” Pikasiewicz remembered, “when we were up against the wall, some of the landing craft were coming in. The ramps were dropping and the men ran in and they didn’t realize what they were heading into. When they heard us yelling and screaming at them they laid down behind the obstacles for protection. ‘My God,’ I said to Jimmy Gray, a medic. So I left the wall and ran back and grabbed men by their field packs and started screaming, ‘Get the hell out of here because this is ready to blow.’ I pulled about six men and yelled at the rest and headed back toward the wall. I was fifteen to twenty feet away when everything blew and a piece of shrapnel hit me in the helmet.”