AT 1900, THE 1ST DIVISION CO, General Huebner, landed on Easy Red and set up his CP. At 2030 General Gerow and the advance HQ of V Corps left the Ancon for shore. On the high ground inland, the men of the 29th and 1st divisions were scattered and isolated in eighteen different pockets around the three villages. There was no continuous line. They had no artillery or heavy mortars, only a few tanks, no communications with the naval or air forces. For the night, they were on the defensive, dug in.
But they were there. The presence of so much brass on the beach was proof that they had secured the beachhead and won the battle.
THE GERMAN DEFENDERS had inflicted very heavy casualties on the assaulting force at Omaha Beach. V Corps suffered 2,400 dead, wounded, and missing in putting 34,000 troops of the 55,000-man assault force ashore. Losses of 7.2 percent in one day are horrendous, but that was five percentage points less than anticipated.24
THE 352ND DIVISION suffered 1,200 killed, wounded, and missing, or about 20 percent of its total strength. The 29th and 1st divisions had accomplished their basic objective, establishing a foothold, even if they had not driven anywhere near as far inland as they had planned or hoped. The 352nd Division had not accomplished its objective, stopping the assault on the beach.
THE EXPERIENCES OF Pvt. Franz Gockel of the 352nd provide some vivid images of what the day was like for a German infantryman. At 0830 he had thought the battle won, but the Americans had continued to land. To his left and right, American squads and platoons had bypassed WN 62, then attacked it from the rear, “making it necessary for us to defend ourselves from attack from behind.” At noon, he got a half ration of bread and a mess tin of milk, but no supplies or reinforcements came in. A runner sent to get help was never seen again. The Americans pressed on and “our resistance became weaker.”
Gockel was shot through the left hand. The medic who put a bandage on smiled and said it looked like a good Heimatschuss (million-dollar wound). American troops got into the network of trenches and suddenly they were only twenty meters away.
Gockel grabbed his rifle and ran toward Colleville. On the outskirts he linked up with his company CO and the few survivors from WN 62. The Americans were already in the village.
The CO ordered Gockel and fifteen other wounded men into a truck for transport to a hospital in Bayeux. The route was blocked. Ruins and rubble covered the crossroads—here was the payoff from the B-17s and battleship bombardment. “Dead cattle lay in the pastures. The supply units had also suffered their share of casualties. Many of them were immobilized.”
Gockel’s truck came under fire from a strafing RAF fighter plane. He and his comrades jumped out. Those with light wounds proceeded on foot toward Bayeux. En route they commandeered a French farmer’s horse and wagon. In Bayeux they found that the hospital had been evacuated. They were told to proceed to Vire. They found that city badly damaged and still burning from air bombardment. They spent the night in a farmhouse, drinking Calvados.
Of the twenty men from WN 62, only three escaped unwounded, and they were taken prisoner. Gockel concluded, “None of my comrades who had survived the invasion continued to believe in victory.”25
THE GERMAN FAILURE at Omaha Beach had many causes. The attempt to defend everywhere had scattered the division in driblets here, droplets there. Furthermore, the CO of the 352nd, General Kraiss, completely misinterpreted Allied intentions. At 0200, when he received reports about paratroopers landing on his left flank between Isigny and Carentan, he thought that the Americans were trying to separate the 352nd from the 709th. At 0310 he ordered his division reserve, called Kampfgruppe Meyer after the CO of the 915th Regiment, to move from its positions south of Bayeux all the way to the Vire estuary. But it was a wild-goose chase; the paratroopers were a handful of 101st men who had been misdropped.
At 0550 Kraiss realized his error. He told Meyer to halt the Kampfgruppe and await further orders. Within a half hour the Americans began landing at Omaha, but not until 0735 did Kraiss commit reserves to the area, and then he sent only one battalion from the Kampfgruppe. At 0835 he sent the other two battalions against the British 50th Division at Gold Beach. Splitting the 915th in this fashion meant it was nowhere able to strike a telling blow. The battalions were also hours late in arriving at the battle areas, because as they moved they were shot up by Allied fighters and hit by Allied bombers.
Inadequate intelligence in many cases, and none at all in others, badly hampered Kraiss, but he was as guilty of passing on bad information as he was a victim of receiving it. At 1000 he reported penetrations in the forward positions of the 352nd at Omaha but indicated that they were not dangerous. At 1335 he advised Seventh Army HQ that the American assault had been hurled back into the sea, except at Colleville, which he said was being counterattacked by the 915th. Not until 1800 did he admit that the Americans had infiltrated through the 352nd’s strong points, but even then he claimed that only Colleville was in danger.
At 1700, Field Marshal Rundstedt demanded that the Allied bridgehead be wiped out that evening. A few minutes later, General Jodl sent out an order from OKW—all available forces should be thrown into the battle. At 1825, Kraiss ordered his last uncommitted unit, the engineer battalion, to move to St.-Laurent and fight as infantry. By the time the engineers got there, it was dark, too late to do anything but dig in and wait for daylight.
Shortly before midnight, June 6, Kraiss admitted to his corps commander, General Marcks, that the 352nd desperately needed help. “Tomorrow the division will be able to offer the enemy the same determined resistance it did today [but] because of heavy casualties . . . reinforcements must be brought up by the day after tomorrow. Losses of men and material in the resistance nests are total.”
Marcks replied, “All reserves available to me have already been moved up. Every inch of the ground must be defended to the utmost capacity until new reinforcements can be brought up.”26
In sum, the fighting power of the 352nd had been frittered away in stubborn defensive action by small groups who were able to delay but not to stop the American advance. Rommel’s insistence on close-up defense of the beach had made the initial assault phase harder for the Americans but at excessive cost for the Germans—and it had not worked. “In that respect,” the Army’s official history states, “V Corps had surmounted a severe crisis, and the success of its hard fight should be measured in other terms than the size of the beachhead.”27
The 352nd was used up. No reinforcements were immediately available. Those coming to the sound of the guns from the interior of France, whether infantry or panzer, were going to have to run a gauntlet of air and naval gunfire to get there.
The Atlantic Wall had been cracked at Omaha Beach, and there was nothing behind it in the way of fixed fortifications—except those awful hedgerows.
HOW DID V CORPS DO IT? The sheer weight of the assault was one of the deciding factors, but by itself not enough to ensure victory. Pvt. Carl Weast of the rangers has an answer to the question. In his oral history, he was relating a story about his company commander, Capt. George Whittington.
“He was a hell of a man,” Weast said. “He led people. I recall the time a week or so after D-Day when we shot a cow and cut off some beef and were cooking it over a fire on sticks. Captain Whittington came up and threw a German boot next to the fire and said, ‘I’ll bet some son of a bitch misses that.’ We looked at the boot. The German’s leg was still inside of it. I’ll bet by God he did miss it.”
That same day, Weast heard the executive officer of the 5th Ranger Battalion, Maj. Richard Sullivan, criticizing Captain Whittington for unnecessarily exposing himself.
“Whittington said to Sully, ‘You saw it happen back on that goddamn beach. Now you tell me how the hell you lead men from behind.’ ”
Weast’s introduction to combat came on D-Day. He fought with the rangers through the next eleven months. He concluded that the Allied high command had been right to insist that “there be practically no experienced troops in the initial waves that hit that beach, because an experienced infantryman is a terrified infantryman, and they wanted guys like me who were more amazed than they were frozen with fear, because the longer you fight a war the more you figure your number’s coming up tomorrow, and it really gets to be God-awful.”
Weast made a final point: “In war, the best rank is either private or colonel or better, but those ranks in between, hey, those people have got to be leaders.”28
At Omaha Beach, they were.
I. Fifty years later, many of those centuries-old hedgerows are gone. As Norman farmers began to acquire tractors after World War II, they needed bigger gaps to get in and out, and bigger fields to work in, so they began knocking down the hedgerows. One of the best places to see hedgerows as the GIs saw them is along the Merderet River west of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and Ste.-Mère-Église.