“Omaha Beach,” General Bradley wrote three decades after D-Day, “was a nightmare. Even now it brings pain to recall what happened there on June 6, 1944. I have returned many times to honor the valiant men who died on that beach. They should never be forgotten. Nor should those who lived to carry the day by the slimmest of margins. Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero.”1
Bradley’s command post was a twenty-by-ten-foot steel cabin built for him on the deck of the cruiser USS Augusta. The walls were dominated by Michelin motoring maps of Normandy. There was a plotting table in the center of the room, with clerks at typewriters along one side. Bradley was seldom there; he spent most of the morning on the bridge, standing beside Adm. Alan G. Kirk, the Western Naval Task Force commander. Bradley had cotton in his ears to muffle the blast of Augusta’s guns, binoculars to his eyes to observe the shore.2
For Bradley, it was “a time of grave personal anxiety and frustration.” He couldn’t see much except smoke and explosions. He was getting no reports from his immediate subordinate, Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow, commander of V Corps (1st and 29th divisions), no news from the beach, only scattered bits of information from landing-craft skippers returning to the transport area for another load, and they were muttering words like “disaster,” “terrible casualties,” and “chaos.”
“I gained the impression,” Bradley later wrote, “that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe, that there was little hope we could force the beach. Privately, I considered evacuating the beachhead. . . . I agonized over the withdrawal decision, praying that our men could hang on.”3
Those were the thoughts of a desperate man faced with two apparently hopeless options. At 0930, with the tide rushing in to fully cover all the obstacles, and with hundreds of landing craft circling offshore, while the congestion on the beach was still so bad that all landings were still suspended, sending in the follow-up waves as reinforcements according to the planning schedule would only add to the problem—but not sending them in would leave the forces already ashore isolated and vulnerable to a counterattack.
Bradley’s private thoughts notwithstanding, as for retreat, “It would have been impossible to have brought these people back,” as General Eisenhower flatly and rightly declared.4 With almost no radios functioning, there was no way to recall the men from the 116th and 16th regiments and the rangers who were already—although unknown to Bradley or any other senior officer—making their way up the bluff. The men at the shingle could have been ordered to fall back to the beach for withdrawal, but if they had obeyed they would have been slaughtered—Omaha Beach was one of the few battlegrounds in history in which the greater danger lay to the rear. In any case, the landing craft ashore were kaput. Those offshore were jammed with men and vehicles.
Withdrawal was not an option. Nor was the alternative that Bradley played with in his mind, sending follow-up waves to Utah or the British beaches, not just because that might well have meant sacrificing the men ashore at Omaha Beach but even more because it would have left a gap of some sixty kilometers between Utah and Gold beaches, which would have jeopardized the invasion as a whole.
As head of the U.S. First Army, Bradley had more than a quarter of a million men under his immediate command. But standing on the bridge of Augusta, he was a helpless observer, desperate for information. On the beaches the plans could be modified or abandoned as circumstances demanded; on the Augusta, Bradley was stuck with the overall strategic plan.
On the amphibious command ship USS Ancon, General Gerow had his command post. For the first three hours of the assault he was as blind as Bradley. He sent the assistant chief of staff of V Corps, Col. Benjamin Talley, in a DUKW to cruise offshore and report on the battle. Talley found that even from 500 meters he couldn’t see much. It was obvious that the beaches were jammed, that enemy artillery and machine-gun fire was effective, and that the exits had not been opened. He could not see up the bluff because of the smoke, so he was unaware of the progress of individuals and small units who had managed to reach high ground. Talley was also unaware of the 0830 order from the 7th Naval Beach Battalion commander to suspend landings, so he was disturbed by the failure of landing craft to go ashore. At 0930 he informed Gerow that the LCTs were milling around offshore like “a stampeded herd of cattle.”5
At 0945 Gerow made his initial report to First Army. It was sketchy and alarming: “Obstacles mined, progress slow. 1st Battalion, 116th, reported 0748 being held up by machine-gun fire—two LCTs knocked out by artillery fire. DD tanks for Fox Green swamped.”6
Five minutes later, Maj. Gen. Clarence Huebner, commanding the 1st Division, received a radio report from the beach: “There are too many vehicles on the beach; send combat troops. 30 LCTs waiting offshore; cannot come in because of shelling. Troops dug in on beaches, still under heavy fire.”7 Huebner responded by ordering the 18th Regiment to land at once on Easy Red—but only one battalion was loaded in LCVPs; the other two had to be transshipped from their LCIs to LCVPs, and in any case the prohibition on further landings was still in effect.
Bradley sent his aide, Maj. Chester Hansen, and Admiral Kirk’s gunnery officer, Capt. Joseph Wellings, in a torpedo boat to the beach to report, but all he got back was a message from Hansen: “It is difficult to make sense from what is going on.”8
From the generals’ point of view, disaster loomed, a disaster they could do nothing about. The generals were irrelevant to the battle.
ON OMAHA, THE situation was so bad that the evacuation of the wounded was toward the enemy. This may have been unique in military history. The few aid posts that had been set up were at the shingle seawall. Medics took great risks to drag wounded from the beach to the aid posts. There was little that could be done for them beyond bandaging, splinting, giving morphine and plasma (if the medics had any supplies). The medical units landed off schedule and on the wrong beach sectors, often without their equipment. The 116th lost its entire regimental supply of plasma in two LCIs sunk off the beach.
Nevertheless, as a staff officer of the 116th recalled, “First-aid men of all units were the most active members of the group that huddled against the seawall. With the limited facilities available to them, they did not hesitate to treat the most severe casualties. Gaping head and belly wounds were bandaged with rapid efficiency.”9
The situation looked worse to the medical teams than it did even to the generals offshore. Maj. Charles Tegtmeyer, regimental surgeon of the 16th, who landed at 0815, described what he saw: “Face downward, as far as eyes could see in either direction were the huddled bodies of men living, wounded and dead, as tightly packed together as a layer of cigars in a box. . . . Everywhere, the frantic cry, ‘Medics, hey, Medics,’ could be heard above the horrible din.”
Tegtmeyer’s medics, now wading, now stumbling over prone men, bandaged and splinted wounded as they came upon them, then dragged them to the shelter of the shingle. “I examined scores as I went,” Tegtmeyer declared, “telling the men who to dress and who not to bother with.” In many cases it was simply hopeless. Tegtmeyer reported a soldier with one leg traumatically amputated and multiple compound fractures of the other. “He was conscious and cheerful,” Tegtmeyer noted, “but his only hope was rapid evacuation, and at this time evacuation did not exist. An hour later he was dead.”10
Confusion in the planned landing sequence compounded the chaos. The first men of the 61st Medical Battalion to wade ashore on Easy Red were members of the headquarters detachment. They landed with typewriters, files, and office supplies on a beach strewn with dead and wounded. They abandoned their typewriters, scavenged for medical equipment among the debris, and went to work on the casualties around them. Forward emergency surgery never got started on Omaha that day; of the twelve surgical teams attached to the 60th and 61st Medical battalions, only eight reached shore and none of them had proper operating equipment. Like the clerks from the HQ detachment, the surgeons pitched in to give first aid.11