When Raaen set up his company CP in a field outside Vierville, it came under artillery fire. He quickly learned another lesson. “After five minutes under artillery fire, you learned when you had to duck and when you didn’t. You could tell from the sound of the incoming rounds where they were going to hit. If they were going to hit fifty yards away, it was too much trouble to hit the dirt. You just stayed up and kept moving. Of course, if they were going to come in a little closer than that, you hit the dirt and prayed.”

The objective of the 5th Ranger Battalion was Pointe-du-Hoc. That meant moving through Vierville and west along the coastal road. But Colonel Schneider, always quick to make a decision on the basis of what he was seeing even when it meant abandoning the plan, sent a patrol from Raaen’s company to the left (east) to link up with patrols coming up the Les Moulins draw. Raaen did, moving in the ditches and sunken roads between the hedgerows, and “we ran into a patrol of 1st Division troops [actually, Company K of the 116th Regiment, 29th Division, attached to the 1st Division for June 6]. It included one paratrooper from the 101st who had landed in water off Omaha Beach, and the 1st Division boys had fished him out and he was now fighting with them.”

The linkup, probably the first for the Americans coming up at Vierville and those coming at St.-Laurent, cut off the Germans on the bluff between Dog Green and Easy Green beaches, as well as those between the crest and the coastal road. Raaen observed that “any reasonable commander should have attempted to move his troops off the beach defenses and inland so that they could continue to fight instead of being captured in the mop-up operations.” But the Germans—and the Ost troops on whom German NCOs held pistols—remained loyal to their führer’s and Rommel’s doctrine of standing and fighting in place. Raaen felt that they had to have known “they were being caught in a trap,” but they stayed in their trenches and pillboxes. Something similar was going on over to the west, near Colleville.¹

LIEUTENANT FRERKING OF the Wehrmacht, who had been directing fire on the beach through the morning, finally was blasted out of his bunker. A Sherman tank got it. His last message before fleeing was: “Gunfire barrage on the beach. Every shell a certain hit. We are getting out.” He had waited too long. His battery was out of ammunition, and he and most of his men were killed trying to escape.

Other German batteries were running low on ammunition. Colonel Ocker, commander of the artillery of the 352nd Division, telephoned to tell 1st Battery that a truck with more shells was coming. “It’s on its way already,” he promised. It was, but it took a direct hit from a 14-inch naval shell. The explosion left nothing describable.²

Most Germans did not know it yet, but they had lost the battle. They had expended most of their immediately available ammunition and failed to stop the assault. Things were in reverse. With land lines of communication, the Germans should have been able to move unlimited quantities of ammunition to their guns—as they had done in World War I. But Allied naval and air power had turned the Calvados coast into something like an island, which meant the Germans in the front lines would have to fight with what they had at hand. Meanwhile, the Americans should have found it difficult to supply their men ashore as they had no ports and everything from bullets to shells had to be brought in over water to an open beach. Yet it was the Americans who had a steady stream of reinforcements and fresh supplies coming into the battle and the Germans could do nothing to stop them.

The general German failure to fall back and regroup once American patrols had infiltrated the German line was a major mistake. Still it had some benefits: Germans in observation posts on the bluff and crest could call in artillery fire on the beaches and keep the exits under fire, so long as ammunition held out, while those in the trenches and pillboxes could continue to direct aimed fire on the beaches. But the price was far too high. Staying in place meant the Germans could not form up for concentrated counterattacks against the squads, platoons, and companies that had made it to the top at a time when the GIs had no artillery support and no weapons heavier than BARs, .30-caliber machine guns, and mortars.