THE MAN in the foxhole was P.f.c. Henry Meyers. He felt he was looking at himself from outside himself, with sorrow and pity, as people sometimes do when events are almost too much for them. The real Henry Meyers, the I of his existence, the schoolmaster from Brooklyn, the man who was loved by Molly his wife, did not seem the same person as the soldier crouching like an animal in the hole he had scraped in the sand, made numb by the concussion of explosions, and staring aghast at the sand spurting from the strikes of bullets and the bodies dead and half-dead on the shore. His emotions were in disorder and his only clear thoughts were why in hell am I here? What am I doing in this mad place?
The merely factual answers to those questions are easy enough to record, though of course they were not the answers which puzzled him. He had never wanted to be called up. The call-up had interrupted his vocation as a teacher of mathematics, and his marriage which was only a few months old, and the placid life he enjoyed among all the bustle and noise of an industrial part of New York. The army had wrenched him away from all that, and discovered he was a mathematician and made him, by army logic, into a signaller. Of course he knew the necessity for army service as well as anyone else. He would not have dodged it if he could, and he had done his best at it; but he had never pretended he had any ambitions in soldiering for its own sake, or that he wanted anything more than to get it over as quickly and efficiently as he could, and go home and start teaching again. In the army, he just made himself feel content to do what he was told. Whenever he was faced with some unpleasant chore he cheered himself up with the thought that if he did not do it, somebody else would have to. He had even made himself interested in the mechanics of signalling, but he could not help despising it as a mental exercise when he compared it with the beauty of pure mathematics.
When Meyers’s small unit had been packed on board a troopship and told that this was really the invasion, he had been glad. He did not need to be told that invasion was the quickest way to end the war, or that any minute degree of help he could give would be help in the right direction. On the Channel crossing, this glad resolution had been almost swamped by seasickness—he was so sick that he wished he was dead—but he felt better again when he boarded the landing craft, where at least the air was fresh; and as it pitched and rolled on its way to the beach, he felt ready for anything. The companionship was encouraging: all his own unit grouped together joking and shouting, men he knew well, all very literally in the same boat together, all keyed up for the adventure.
Henry Meyers could not see much from his position in the boat, wedged in among other men who were taller than he was. He could not move much either. Apart from his equipment and his rifle, he was carrying a heavy coil of wire over his shoulder. It was telephone wire, and he and a couple of friends were supposed to lay it from the beach to some place inland which somebody would show them. But he could hear. There was a tremendous noise, and as the boat came nearer to the beach the noise grew louder. He had never heard such a noise before. It was infinitely worse than the practice runs with the live ammunition, but he supposed it was all right and was only what had to be expected. In the last few seconds, above the ramp of the boat, he had a glimpse of shell-bursts and of clouds of yellowish smoke and the crest of a green hill showing dimly through it: and at that same moment he heard a different noise, alarming and very close: the unmistakable splatter of bullets on the ramp itself. And then the boat grounded, the ramp went down, the men in front ran forward.
Meyers knew he hesitated, but for such a short time that nobody would have seen it. It was not the danger which made him hesitate, because he still could not see very much and still had no real idea of what he was in for; it was just an instinctive ridiculous reluctance to do anything so unnatural as to jump in the sea with his boots and trousers on. But then he was in, and it was warmer than he expected; and he could see.
He could see men in front of him falling: and not just stumbling, but falling limp face-down in the water and making no effort to rise. On the edge of the sea where the waves were breaking, he could see bundles washing in and out, rolling over and over: bodies. Beyond, he could see the sandy beach, very wide, and bodies lying there too, and a tank burning, men clinging to its shelter like a cluster of bees; and here and there, all the time, the beach was erupting in sprays of sand and debris where shells or mortar bombs fell, while small flicks of sand from machine-gun bullets ran across and across it like wicked living things. Far away up the beach was a bank of shingle, and behind that in the smoke the low hills, flashing with fire, but whether from shells bursting or guns firing he could not have told, because he had seldom seen either before. And the noise was so terrible that he could not think: his brain stopped dead.
They had told him to run. Instinct told him the same. But instinct would not allow him to run up the beach: he could not, simply could not run that way. He turned to the right and ran along the water’s edge, splashing through the little rims of foam.
It was difficult to run in wet clothes, the rifle and the coil of wire jolting awkwardly on his shoulder. He had an impulse to throw the wire away. But that brought him up; the wire. The wire was what he was there for. They would be stuck without it. He had a job to do, and if he didn’t do it somebody else would have to. He stopped and stood still for a second, every inch of his body expecting the horrible whack of a bullet: and then he started to run up the beach.
He ran terribly slowly in spite of his utmost effort, like another childhood dream, the one in which one runs and runs to escape from a monster but cannot move at all; and while he was running he was only conscious of a little area of sand around him, a yard or two on each side and ahead. It was such ordinary sand, he thought. It was so like the sand on the beaches on Long Island where children built castles and ran and shouted, and he and Molly had sunbathed; sand of bathing-dresses, sun-tan lotion, ice creams, Coke in bottles with straws; sand that got into the picnic basket. Things came into the little circle of his vision as he ran: a German obstacle, a mangled body in uniform, blood, wreckage, rifles, torn equipment. He ran over them or round them, and hardly knew they were there.
Then the high water mark, the line of sea-wrack, and then the dry sand where he could not run any more but only drag his feet forward; and then the bank of shingle. They were big stones, three or four inches, like cannon balls; and men were lying elbow to elbow, hugging the steep face of the shingle for cover, or squatting in holes in the sand, some wounded. He dropped down there, aware for the first time of the rasping of his own breath and his heart thumping, and he peered at the men near him, hoping to see his friends and his officer. But there was nobody there that he had ever seen before.
What ought he to do? Above the dreadful noise, he heard thin screams, and shouts which might have been orders, but if they were he could not understand them, and nobody moved. What ought a good soldier to do? With nobody to tell him, the answer could only be: keep alive, if you can, till they need you. So he started to dig. He was trembling from the shock of what had happened; and that is no wonder, because that same shock, the shock of the instant transition from the companionship and shelter of the boats to the very whitest heat of war, where every man is always alone in spirit, had strained every man who landed to the limit of what brain and will can stand. Some had run up the beach, as he had in the end, and they had a chance to survive; and some had been unable to make the decision, as he had at first, and they lingered on the edge of the water and died.
Desperately digging in the loose dry sand, Meyers threw down his coil of wire beside the hole. There it lay, half a mile of it, and something must have gone wrong, he thought, the landing could not have been meant to be like this; because he was meant to go on and lay the wire to some place inland, but nobody, so far as he could see, had even been able to cross the bank of shingle.
He was right; since the very beginning, an hour before he landed, almost everything had gone wrong, and at that moment the landing on Omaha was only being saved from total failure by blind tenacity and the last shreds of courage, and by the very impossibility of the idea that it could have failed. In calm analysis the causes which led to this situation can be listed and understood: the weather was bad, the bombardment had failed, the beach was naturally a good position for defence, the German forces manning it were better troops than had manned it when the attack was planned, and finally—though this may still be a matter of opinion—there were basic mistakes in the plans. But the men who were suffering on the beach that morning were only aware of two of these causes: the weather, and the formidable hills they were expected to assault.
Omaha Beach is five miles long, and very slightly curved, and like Utah Beach it has sand which is firm and yellow and slopes so gently that the tide runs out for three or four hundred yards. But that is its only resemblance to Utah. Behind it, instead of dunes and flat meadows, there is first the bank of shingle which Henry Meyers reached, and then a stretch of marshy land two hundred yards across, and then green grassy hills or bluffs, 150 feet high, which are easy to climb but too steep for trucks or tanks. At each end of the beach, the bluffs run out into vertical cliffs which extend for nearly ten miles in each direction. There are four small valleys in the bluffs, with trees and bushes in them. Before the invasion, one of them, the most westerly, had a good road in it, which led down to a few seaside villas on the flat strip behind the shingle, and the other three had lanes. The military importance of these otherwise insignificant little valleys was equally obvious to the attack and the defence: except for one isolated gap at Port-en-Bessin, the four valleys were the only possible ways for a mechanised army to move inland on the whole of the stretch of twenty miles of coast from the mouth of the River Vire to the village of Arromanches.
From almost anywhere on the bluffs, the whole length of the beach can be seen. On flat beaches like Utah, the Germans had to build their pillboxes and emplacements close to the edge of the sand; attacking infantry did not have very far to go before they could get to grips with them. But on Omaha, the gun positions were built on the sides of the bluffs. Overlooking the beach, they had an enormous field of fire, and to reach them, infantry would have to cross not only the beach itself, but also the shingle bank which had barbed wire on top, and the flat strip behind it which was mined; and then they would have to climb the slopes. For the whole of this journey of five or six hundred yards, they would be plainly visible from the bluffs, except in the couple of yards where they could hide behind the shingle.
The Germans had grouped their defences mainly round the mouths of the valleys, but the whole of the beach was covered by their fire. The heavy guns were in concrete emplacements from which they could only fire along the beach, not straight out to sea, the seaward sides of them being protected by fifteen to twenty feet of concrete which made them almost proof against naval gunfire. Each group of emplacements was connected by trenches and tunnels, with underground magazines and living quarters. It was estimated that the beach was covered by over sixty pieces of artillery, besides mortars and a very large number of machine guns.
In addition to these manned defences, the Germans had made great use on Omaha Beach of the underwater obstacles which had occupied so much of the energy of British and American reconnaissance. Aerial photographs had shown four different kinds. About two hundred and fifty yards out, not far from low water mark, there was a row of what the reconnaissance men had called Element C. These were like very large and heavy field gates of steel, facing the sea and buttressed behind by girders. Farther up the beach, there were rows of wooden ramps, with their pointed ends towards the sea, and of stout wooden posts driven into the sand with contact mines on top. Finally, on the upper part of the tidal flat, steel “hedgehogs” were scattered about. They were made of three lengths of angle iron or railway line, welded together in the middle so that they formed a kind of double tripod, with spikes sticking up whichever side they lay on. These obstacles were laid so thickly that a landing craft which tried to go through them would stand perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of getting in, but a smaller chance of getting out again by turning or going astern. The first step in the plan of attack was to remove the obstacles before the tide rose over them.
The plan had been as follows. H Hour was 6.30, which was soon after low water. From 5.50 till 6.27, a tremendous naval bombardment had been arranged. From 6 o’clock till 6.25, over 400 bombers were to attack the shore defences. At 6.29, 64 amphibious tanks were due to land; at H Hour itself, 32 ordinary tanks and 16 armoured bulldozers; and one minute later, 8 companies of infantry, 1,450 men in 36 landing craft. Two minutes behind the infantry were a Special Demolition Task Force, to clear and mark lanes through the obstacles before the tide rose up and covered them.
After these demolition men, a pause of half an hour was left in the planned landings, to allow them to finish their work. Then bigger waves of infantry were due to arrive, with the first artillery units beginning to come in at 8 o’clock.
The demolition men were really the crux of this plan. There were 270 of them; rather more than half of them were naval men. They would have a delicate and fiddling task in attaching explosive charges to the obstacles and connecting them with fuses and detonators, and they would be much too busy to protect themselves. For defence, and for conditions sufficiently quiet to allow them to work, they had to depend for the first half hour on the infantry and the tanks. But 1,450 men and 96 tanks were no match for the German defences, unless the bombardment had already largely destroyed them or stunned the men who manned them.
Not one of these plans was fulfilled. The air bombardment missed its targets. The naval shelling had little apparent effect on the defences. Most of the tanks were lost at sea or quickly destroyed on the beach, and the infantry were scattered and decimated. The demolition men lost nearly half their number almost at once, and the remainder struggled to carry out their orders under conditions which were all but impossible. The beach became a chaos; the programme of landing was abandoned. And the whole of this chain of disaster was started by the weather.
The conditions of cloud in the early morning varied from place to place, but there is no evidence that they were worse at Omaha than they were at Utah. The difference between the air bombing on the two beaches was a difference in policy and aircraft. At Utah, medium bombers, Marauders, carried out the last-minute bombardment; at Omaha, the job was done by heavy bombers, Liberators. These heavy bombers could either bomb visually or by instruments, which in those days was a much less accurate method. The decision was taken the night before, on the basis of the weather forecast, to use instruments, and this decision was endorsed by the Supreme Command.
The infantry men, who had hoped and expected to find the defences in ruins, knew nothing of this decision, or of its implications. Because of the inaccuracy of the instruments, there was thought to be a risk that the bombing would hit the landing craft. The aircrews were therefore ordered to delay their drop after crossing the coast, the length of the delay to vary inversely with the length of the time before H Hour until it reached as long as 50 seconds. This meant inevitably that the centre of the weight of bombs fell at first a few hundred yards inland, and crept farther away until just before H Hour, when it was three miles beyond the beach; and none of the bombs, except perhaps a few which were badly aimed, fell near enough to the beach defences to do them the slightest harm.
The results of the naval bombardment were also meagre, but this is not so simple to explain. The bombardment looked heavy on paper. There were two American battleships, Texas and Arkansas, three cruisers of which one was British and two were Free French, and eight destroyers. They were to fire 3,500 rounds of calibres from 5 to 14 inches. Army artillery was mounted on landing craft so that it could fire while it was waiting to go in, and was scheduled to fire 9,000 rounds in the 30 minutes before H Hour. Finally, nine rocket craft were each to fire a thousand high-explosive rockets. What happened to 21,500 projectiles? There are many answers, and none of them are certain. Only quite a small proportion of the volume of fire was real naval gunnery. The rockets were notoriously inaccurate at the best of times. The aiming of army guns in small landing craft could only have been uncertain, because the sea was rough. The morning was rather misty and the beach was soon covered like Utah with smoke and dust, which made spotting difficult for the larger ships. The Germans had taken care to make their emplacements difficult to see and almost impregnable by fire from seaward, and intelligence and reconnaissance had not detected them all. Part of the naval effort, especially of the battleship Arkansas, was directed against heavy German batteries far out on the flanks which threatened the sea approaches but did not affect the beach. A naval historian, summing it up, believes the bombardment was simply too light and too short: no more ships could be used, because there was no more room for them in the sea, and the navy needed more time to do the job thoroughly. It was the army, he implies, who restricted the length of the shooting to 35 minutes.
Nobody can be certain either exactly how much damage the shelling had done before H Hour, and the guesses vary. The only certain thing is that it did not do nearly enough, and that when the troops started to cross the beach the greater part of the German defences was still intact and went into action against them.
The weather which had rendered the aerial bombing useless and distracted the gunners’ aim caused its greatest havoc among the infantry landing craft and the amphibious tanks. The conditions of cloud at Utah and Omaha were much the same, but the conditions of sea were quite different. The wind was blowing at 10 to 18 knots from the north-west. At Utah, the wind was off-shore, and the closer one went to the beach, the calmer the sea became. At Omaha it was on-shore; and the waves were four feet high, and sometimes six feet. Neither the landing craft nor the amphibious tanks were designed to work in such a rough sea as that. The very first of the victims of the tragedy at Omaha were the crews of the tanks.
Amphibious tanks were a new invention then, and were used on all the beaches. Those for Omaha were carried across the Channel in 16 landing craft commanded by a reserve lieutenant named Dean L. Rockwell. It could truly be said that Rockwell was in the navy, and found himself in this curious command, and became the first man to put landing craft ashore on Omaha, simply because he had been a professional wrestler: so unpredictable are cause and effect in war. He came from Detroit. Before he joined the navy, he had never seen salt water except on his honeymoon in Florida; but many excellent naval men had had even less experience of the sea. In Detroit, he heard that Gene Tunney, the heavyweight boxer, was making a recruiting tour as a naval lieutenant-commander; and for admiration of Tunney, Rockwell hurried off and joined the navy as an instructor in physical education. But that was a disappointment. He did not approve of the way the navy ran its physical education, and his criticisms gave him a reputation as a bolshie. As a punishment, or as a fitting fate for bolshies, his senior officers managed to post him to landing craft, which they regarded as the navy’s suicide squad. But there Rockwell found his vocation. Men brought up with ships might think that landing craft were ugly, or unseamanlike, or unhandy; but Rockwell loved them, and because he loved them he became exceptionally clever at handling them and understanding their sometimes strange behaviour. He was only a petty officer then, but he was soon given a craft of his own to command. By the time he reached England, destined, he knew, to take a front seat in the invasion of Europe, he was an officer and commanded a flotilla, and was perfectly happy about it. And then in March he was summoned to the naval base at Dartmouth and told he had been chosen for a new job in co-operation with the army. He was disgusted at first, but he soon changed his mind. He was let into the secret that amphibious tanks existed. His job was to study the technique of launching them from landing craft at sea. In good time for the invasion, he had made himself expert at that as well; and in doing so he had developed the deepest respect for the men who manned the tanks.
The idea of a tank which would float and propel itself in water, and yet still remain an efficient tank on land, had interested and baffled engineers in every army, mainly because tanks had grown in size and weight between the wars until they were too heavy to cross rivers by most of the ordinary bridges. The solution of the problem, the invention of the D.D. tank, is attributed to a Hungarian-born engineer called Nicholas Straussler who was working in Britain. The Admiralty condemned his design as unseaworthy; but the War Office, caring less about standards of seaworthiness, saw the possibilities of the tank as a weapon of surprise in invasion. They took up the idea, and as soon as Eisenhower and Montgomery saw it demonstrated, orders were given for hundreds of Shermans to be converted.
Straussler’s basic idea had the simplicity of many great inventions. A kind of canvas screen was fastened round an ordinary tank. Tubes in the canvas could be blown up like an air mattress; and when that was done, the canvas stood up to make a primitive sort of open boat, of which the canvas formed the sides and the tank itself formed the bottom. The tank’s own engine was connected by extra clutches to two propellers. D.D. stood for Duplex Drive, and not, as many tank men surmised, for Donald Duck.
The beauty of this invention, from a tactician’s point of view, was that when the tank was swimming it was a small and insignificant target which looked like a boat and not like a tank at all; but at the very moment when it touched shore, the air could be let out of the tubes and the canvas collapsed, and within a couple of seconds the tank was in action. The sight of full-sized tanks rising out of the sea was expected, quite rightly, to surprise and alarm the opposition. A second advantage was that if tanks could swim ashore themselves, there would be no need to risk the large vulnerable tank landing craft in the first waves of landing. But beautiful as the D.D. tank appeared to tacticians, from the point of view of the men inside it, no more unpleasant means of going into battle could easily be imagined. Even the top of the tank was several feet below water level. The tank commander could stand on a platform behind the turret, and from there he could see out above the canvas gunwales; but the rest of the crew were down inside the tank. The driver had a periscope, but the others—the co-driver, radio operator and gunner—could neither see nor hear what was going on outside. They did know, however, that their 30-ton tank was suspended from a flimsy structure which would collapse if it was punctured or be swamped by a moderate wave, and that if that happened the tank would sink as quickly as a stone, with them inside it. They also knew, because they had tried it in training, that it was possible to get out of a sunken tank, using submarine escape apparatus; but that a good many people, in emergencies, had failed to do so. And they learned, from Rockwell’s experiments with his landing craft, that once they were in the water there was no going back. The tanks could go down the ramps of the landing craft, but they could not go up. Once launched, they had to reach land or founder.
When the experiments in launching these tanks were completed, Rockwell’s flotilla assembled in Portland Harbour in Dorset; and while they were waiting there for the day, an incident occurred which perhaps deserves a place in history. The King came to inspect them, escorted by Admiral Stark, the senior American naval officer in Europe, and a formidable array of brass. On one of the craft, the King asked the ensign in command if he was all ready for sea.
“No, sir,” the ensign replied, to everybody’s stupefaction.
The King asked him why not.
“Well, I’ve asked time and again for an extra fresh-water tank, but I’ve never got it and I know what’ll happen, it was the same in the Mediterranean, sir, the army drink you dry and you’re left out there for days——”
The King suggested to Admiral Stark that he might look into the matter. Admiral Stark told a vice-admiral to investigate. The vice-admiral told a commodore to see to it, and the commodore told a commander, and the commander told a supply officer, and the ensign, no doubt, thought his water tank was as good as installed. But he was wrong. Too much brass can be as bad as too little. They all forgot.
The crossing was hard for the landing craft crews; perhaps harder for the tank crews. After the false start on the previous day, they finally sailed from Portland at 9.15 in the morning with a voyage of 20 hours in front of them. The farther they went, the rougher the sea became. The tank landing craft were built in three sections, bolted together, with all their heavy machinery in the after end. Loaded with four tanks, they worked in the seaway and gave an ominous impression of being liable to buckle in the middle. The decks where the tanks were lashed were often awash. Even Rockwell had to admit that they were showing their worst behaviour. Steering a course was difficult, and keeping station in close convoy was worse. There were a good many collisions. None of them was serious, but every now and then a craft which was trying to avoid a crash would be caught by the sea, and yaw, and career off the course of the convoy all by itself, the helmsman wildly spinning its wheel.
Most of the tank crews and many of the naval men were sick all the way. Between their bouts of sickness, the tank men speculated endlessly about the prospect of the weather in the morning, wondering whether they would be able to launch their tanks at all, or whether all their amphibious training would be wasted.
This worry was on Rockwell’s mind as well. Everyone knew the tanks could not swim in rough water. It was so obvious that nobody had ever risked a tank and his life by trying it. Rockwell’s orders were that if the sea was too rough for the tanks to swim, the landing craft should take them right in to the beach and land them. The decision had been left to the men on board, but the orders about it were vague. The sixteen craft were to divide, before they reached the area for launching, into two groups of eight craft each. The senior naval officer and senior army officer in each group were to consult and make a joint decision whether to launch or not. It is unusual for any military decision to be left to two officers of equal authority, and nobody had told them what they were to do if they disagreed.
Nightfall on the stormy sea threw the convoy into even worse confusion, and offered no chance of rest to Rockwell and his skippers who had been on their bridges all day. At dawn, Rockwell was pleased and secretly rather surprised to find all his sixteen ships still afloat and still in sight. He led them through the lines of the infantry transports, anchored ten miles off shore, along the lane of buoys which had been laid by the minesweepers, and past the heavy ships which were waiting to open their bombardment. The groups divided, his own eight craft towards the western end of the beach, the others towards the east.
From the first moment when it was light enough to see the waves, Rockwell himself had no doubt in his mind that the tanks would never make it. It could not be anything more than a hunch, but he was sure he had never seen a tank launched in such a sea, and he did not believe it could be done. The senior army officer of his group was in another craft. Prepared to argue, Rockwell went down to one of the tanks and called him on the tank’s radio. He was thankful to hear him echo his own thoughts: “I don’t think we can make it. Will you take us right in?” Rockwell said he would. It meant that his eight large, un-armoured, vulnerable craft would be in exactly the position of danger which the D.D. tanks had been meant to obviate; but of course he had been prepared in his mind for that ever since he had handled a landing craft, and the prospect did not dismay him. The important thing was to get the tanks ashore; what happened to the landing craft was of minor consequence. At that moment, in the early dawn, his ships were steaming in line ahead to the eastward, waiting to launch. He signalled them to prepare to turn 90 degrees to starboard in line abreast and beach. At 5.30 he gave the executive signal, and saw them all turn together with perfect precision towards the shore, the van of the landing on Omaha. It seemed a proud sight to him.
The other group decided to launch. At the crucial moment, the extraordinary order that the army and navy should share the decision caused the confusion which might have been foreseen. The result was terrible. Each of the landing craft dropped its ramp, and on each of them the four tanks moved forward to enter the water from which they could not possibly return. Some of them went off the ramps successfully and travelled a hundred yards or so before they abruptly vanished below the waves. Some never floated at all. There was a certain gallantry, however unwise, in the way they went. Commanders of the second, third and fourth tanks in each craft could see the leaders founder; but the order had been given to launch, and they launched, one by one, each of them hoping perhaps for better luck; and once they had started, the navy could not stop them, but only watch each one till the moment when a wave broke over it, or the canvas collapsed, and the tank instantly disappeared and nothing was left on the sea but one man swimming, perhaps two, but seldom more. Within two or three minutes, twenty-seven of the thirty-two tanks were at the bottom of the Channel: one hundred and thirty-five men were drowned, or swimming for their lives. It was difficult, in the large tank landing craft, to rescue survivors, the best that most of the crews could do was to throw out extra lifebelts and leave the swimmers to wait for smaller craft.
On one of the landing craft, the fourth tank tore its canvas on a gun mounting as it moved along the deck. Its commander was a sergeant called Sertell. He stopped to see what damage had been done, and while he was stopped everybody on the landing craft, including him, watched the three tanks in front of him go under. The naval officer on the bridge advised him to stay on board, and told him that his orders had been that if the last tank was damaged he should land it later in the day. But Sertell insisted on going. He said he thought his bilge pump could keep down the water from the leak. He drove down the ramp and sank. Later in the day, the same landing craft was hailed by a small patrol-boat which handed over a body to be taken back to England, and the body was Sertell’s.
Two of the tanks reached the beach under their own power. Three more were saved by an accident. One craft launched its first tank and watched the tank commander and gunner desperately bracing their backs against the bulging canvas to try to stop it collapsing under the pressure of the waves. Their struggle only lasted half a minute. But the landing craft had lurched when the first tank went off it, and the second ran backwards into the third and fourth and all three of them tore their canvas so badly that they could not possibly have floated. The ensign commanding the landing craft decided on his own responsibility to make for the shore: and he fought his way in all alone, and landed the three last tanks.
The infantry on the eastern half of the beach thus had the support of five D.D. tanks, out of the thirty-two they had expected.
Rockwell did not see this tragic proof that his own decision had been right. His own eight craft were some distance to the westward, and he was intent on watching the beach ahead, and the clock, and the crowds of other craft all round him. The clock was important. If he was two minutes too early, he would run into the tail end of the bombardment. If he was two minutes too late, the infantry would not have the help of the tanks at the moment they needed it most. The time and position for launching had been decided to suit the speed of the tanks; but the landing craft were faster, so they had to waste time. It was a navigational problem which was elementary enough, but it needed concentration because so many things were happening. The battleships and cruisers behind him were shooting over his head. On each side of the aisle reserved for the landing craft, the destroyers and army artillery were banging away. Threaded through the racket of guns, there was a continuous noise of aircraft engines, although the bombers were hidden by clouds. And as he approached the shore, the rocket ships began to let loose their own particularly horrifying roar, and the tanks on his own craft started up their engines.
From far at sea, the shore had been dim in the early morning haze. Now, as he came nearer, it almost disappeared in smoke, and only the level top of the bluffs could be seen against the sky. For a time, Rockwell and his skippers lost sight of their landmarks. But a shift of wind rolled back the smoke for a minute from the mouth of one of the valleys and the group of villas underneath the bluffs, and Rockwell saw they were being set to the eastward by the tide. All of them changed course to starboard and increased their speed. At exactly the time when the barrage lifted, all of them were exactly opposite the points for their landings, ready to run the last six hundred yards to the water’s edge.
This was precisely the scene which Rockwell had always imagined, ever since he had been thrown out of physical education and steered his first landing craft. It was the moment for which a landing craft existed. But he had always expected, and been trained to expect, to land under heavy fire. So far, he had not been aware of any opposition. With all the noise and the smoke, he had not been certain whether German guns were firing at all. The only missiles anywhere near him were rockets falling short. Even when the close barrage stopped, there was plenty of noise; but it came from the revving engines of his own four tanks and the gun of the first which was firing over the ramp; and the wide beach, covered with obstacles, looked quiet. The villas were ruined, the bluffs deserted, smoke rising here and there from burning grass. Within his view, there was no human being alive or dead, and the whole desolate scene had the air of a place deserted in the face of disaster. In those last two minutes, from 6.27 to 6.29, while the tank landing craft approached the breakers, stopped engines and grazed the sand of Omaha, there was a fleeting hope that the bombardment had done its work and the defences had been destroyed.
The ramp of Rockwell’s craft went down, the first of the tanks lurched forward, dipped its nose to the slope, crawled into five feet of water and ahead through the breakers to the sands fifty yards away, the water washing over its back and pouring off again. In that same moment the Germans came to life. Perhaps they had waited on purpose: more probably, their gunners had just come up from their shell-proof shelters of which the strength had been so badly underestimated. Rockwell saw the muzzle flashes from casemates on the bluffs. For the first few seconds their shooting was ill-directed. His second tank got away. Then three of the landing craft on his right were hit in quick succession: an 88-mm. gun was enfilading the beach from an emplacement at that end. He watched his third tank go out, and waited with an interest which was almost detached for the German gun to raise its sights to him: for the landing craft, lying still and almost broadside to the gun, was a target which it could not possibly have missed. But the last of his tanks went into the water, and the moment it was clear the ramp was raised and the engines put astern.
The work of a landing craft was dangerous but short. Rockwell’s own job was finished on the stroke of H Hour. The tanks were ashore, and his only duty then was to get his craft away in safety, if he could. Seven of the eight backed out from the beach, two burning; one was left there wrecked. But the German fire which had concentrated on them for the first few seconds seemed now to be random. Many more guns on the bluffs had begun to shoot, but they had shifted their targets. Rockwell saw the first of his tanks start to pick its way between the obstacles on the beach. Before it had gone ten yards from the water, it burst into flames. And looking astern as his craft got under way, he saw the new targets which had drawn the German fire: the infantry landing craft, ploughing their way towards the breakers, running the gauntlet through the spray of shell-bursts.
The first of these landing craft should have been carrying infantry, with the Navy-Army Demolition Force close behind them; but on some parts of the beach they all arrived together, and on some the demolition men were in the lead. This letter was written by a demolition man.
“… We stood looking over the side at the beach we were to go in at soon. We were all happy and smiling, telling jokes and yelling. Six o’clock came and we went in. … There hadn’t been a shot fired from the enemy yet. But soon as we dropped our ramp, an 88-mm. came tearing in, killing almost half our men right there, the officer being the first one. We all thought him the best officer the navy ever had. … From then on things got hazy to me. I remember the Chief starting to take over, but then another one hit and that did it. I thought my body torn apart. When I woke I seen a big hole in the bulkhead between the sergeant and me. He was dead, it must have been instant. I was blood from head to foot but didn’t know it at the time. Later I found the shrapnel had got me in the left leg and arm. I looked round and seen no one else alive. The explosive was on fire and was burning fast, so I went overboard and headed for the beach. The surf was filled with soldiers trying to get ashore. But the bullets in the surf from the enemy were thick. They were getting killed fast. I reached the obstacles and got behind one to shelter. Just then the landing craft blew up, that got me, not caring whether I lived or not I started to run, through the fire up the beach. Which was plenty far to run, it probably seemed longer at that time. That’s when I found my leg and arm stiff. After a while the soldiers were pouring in thick. I did a little rifle firing with them. …”
A great many of the 1,450 men of the eight companies of infantry also suffered this kind of experience. One company, landing on the western end of the beach, a little to the right of Rockwell’s tanks, had one of its six craft sunk half a mile from shore; men were seen jumping overboard and being dragged down by their equipment, which was too heavy to allow them to swim. A second craft was blown to pieces by mortar fire. The other four grounded and the men scrambled out, but the beach had deep runnels there, and some men were out of their depth. Intense machine gun and mortar fire enveloped them. Many were wounded in the water, and fell down and were drowned. Those who struggled to land took refuge behind the German obstacles, or went back into the sea for cover. A few formed a firing line on the water’s edge; but soon all the officers of the company and most of the sergeants were killed or wounded, and the men, without leaders, gave up any hope of advancing across the beach. Within fifteen minutes, the company was out of action. Some of its survivors stayed in the water all the morning, and succeeded in reaching safety in the end by crawling up the beach as the tide came in.
This company had landed in the right place. The only other infantry who did so were a small company of Rangers, who had a special mission on the right hand end of the beach. All the rest of the eight companies were carried eastward by the same tidal stream that had upset the landing at Utah. It had not mattered at Utah; the infantry had landed at the wrong place but in good order, and the weakness of the opposition had given them time to organise. But here at Omaha, all order was lost before the soldiers reached the shore at all. Some craft were only two hundred yards to the east of the places where they should have been; some were a mile. One company, after two of its craft were swamped, approached the shore two miles away, and had to come back against the wind and tide, and landed ninety minutes late. All the others were mixed up together. Two stretches of the beach, both half a mile long, had no infantry at all; other parts had too many. Men found themselves pitched on to the shore in single boatloads, cut off from their officers, faced with defences which were not the ones they had studied in their briefing, under a terrible gunfire which they had never been warned to expect, and with nobody to tell them where they were or what they ought to do. Almost all the heavier weapons were lost in the struggle through the surf; and most of the men who succeeded in crossing the beach and reaching the temporary safety of the shingle were so shaken by the ordeal that, for the time being, no organised action was possible.
Not even the heaviest gunfire puts such a strain on a soldier’s morale as not being told what to do. In this respect, the demolition men were better off than the infantry. They had a specific job to do, and they could do it, or try to do it, wherever they landed. There were the obstacles in front of them; and each team of them, one officer and a dozen men, had to clear a fifty-yard gap right through to high water mark; and they had to do it quickly, because the tide was rising. To move and work on that beach would have seemed impossible if they had stopped to think; but none of them had time to stop or think.
The training of the demolition force, on the sandy shores near Barnstaple in Devon, had been hurried and incomplete. It was hurried because obstacles on Omaha Beach had only been seen in reconnaissance photographs for the first time in April, and then, under Rommel’s pressure, had multiplied very quickly. It was incomplete because nobody knew exactly what the obstacles were like. They could not tell from the photographs what the things were made of, or how they were put together, or whether they were mined. Perhaps the American demolition men were not well served by their liaison with the British; for British commandos had landed on different parts of the coast of France and inspected at least three kinds of obstacles—steel hedgehogs, and wooden ramps and stakes—and had taken measurements of them at their leisure. But only part of this information filtered through to the Americans, and their plans for getting rid of the obstacles had to include an element of guesswork.
Even the organisation of their teams was rather an improvisation. They had started as a naval force, divided into teams of one officer and seven enlisted men: sixteen teams, to blow sixteen gaps in the defences. But whenever new photographs were taken of Omaha Beach, the belt of obstacles was seen to have grown more complex; and not long before D-Day, the naval command concluded that a team of eight men was too small to blow a gap during the half hour which the plan allowed them. The navy had no more explosives men to spare, so the army lent them some. Five army men were added to each of the naval teams.
The commander of this peculiar composite force was a naval reserve officer called Joseph H. Gibbons, and in their six weeks of training, Gibbons had managed to make his men sure that nothing could stop them doing the job they had been assigned to do. He himself was prepared for the job to be tough, but a tough job suited him well; and indeed he had probably been chosen more for his character than for his knowledge of demolition, which was small. He was a powerfully built man of moderate height with a bulldog’s tenacity and a habit of saying exactly what he thought no matter who was listening: strict, outspoken, fair, a man to whom right was right and wrong was wrong, and no shades of rightness existed in between. He was very much aware of his responsibility to the navy and especially to his men, whom he treated like a very stern, old-fashioned and yet affectionate father. These qualities probably dated back to his upbringing in the woods and the blue grass country of Kentucky, and perhaps they owed something to his training at the Naval Academy at Annapolis; for he had graduated there in the twenties but then had left the service, which seemed a dead end to him, and taken a job in a telephone company. Whoever discovered Gibbons and appointed him to his command had made a clever choice. He was exactly the man to give his forces the moral impetus they needed to carry them through the ordeal on the beach.
Gibbons himself landed exactly in the middle of the beach. As he was in charge of all sixteen teams, the job he had planned for himself was simply to walk along the beach and see how they got on and help them when help was needed; and that is what he did. He was absorbed by his technical problems. The thought was certainly there in the back of his mind that something must have gone wrong and that conditions were very much worse than anyone had expected; but the gunfire tearing down the beach worried him first and foremost for the effect it might have on the job.
The first two of his men he met told him the whole of the rest of their team had been killed while they were landing. He told them to take cover behind the shingle bank till he found a job for them. Next he found a team which had landed intact and started already to fasten its charges to the obstacles. Each man had landed with a string of two-pound blocks of explosive round his waist, and each team had an extra supply in a rubber boat which it was supposed to haul ashore from its landing craft. Gibbons had always expected the best of his men: watching this team, he was very proud to see how well they justified his confidence. He saw them moving methodically from one obstacle to another, taping the charges on to the stakes and angle-irons quickly but not hastily. One of them was running out the instantaneous fuse which was to connect all the charges together. One had laid out the two buoys which were to mark the gap, and was going up the beach carrying posts with triangles on them which he had to set up as additional markers in line at the top of the beach. None of them was showing any visible sign of fear.
Gibbons moved on. Absorbed as he was, his walk had some incidents. Once, suddenly aware of shells bursting all round him, he dived into a hole in the sand. Another man, a moment later, dived in on top of him shouting furiously: “Get the hell out of my foxhole.” Gibbons got out, ashamed of himself, and did not go to ground again. Somewhere along the beach, another thing penetrated his consciousness: a scream, a long terrible dying scream which seemed to express not only fear and pain, but amazement, consternation, and disbelief.
He found other teams at work, and other teams decimated on the water’s edge; and he found a gap blown, and the bodies of the men who had blown it scattered among the wreckage of the obstacles. He watched the tide rising. At half tide, it rose a foot in eight minutes, and within the first few minutes of the landing it was among the outer obstacles, swirling into the runnels and advancing at an average of a yard a minute up the gentle slope of yellow sand.
On the beach, he only gained a rough impression of his men working against time under conditions which he vaguely knew were terrible. It was not till later in the day, when the tide put an end to their efforts, and their survivors took refuge at last behind the shingle, that he began to learn the extent of their successes, and heard of the accidents which had overwhelmed the teams which had failed.
Five gaps had been blown, and two partially blown, out of the sixteen which had been planned. Two or three teams had been lost before they landed, or been landed so late that the tide was up before they got to work. At least two had been slaughtered in landing. One had had its rubber boat hit by a shell while the whole team was gathered round it dragging it ashore. It blew most of them to pieces. One team had laid all its charges and connected them, and the men were still standing by them preparing to fire them when a shell hit the fuse and ignited it and set off all the charges prematurely and wounded or killed them all except the man with the markers. One team had everything ready when some tanks, arriving late, drove over the fuses and cut them to pieces so that the charges could not be fired at all.
The remaining teams were all delayed by a humanitarian consideration which nobody could possibly have thought of: the infantry, desperate for cover, who huddled in groups behind the slenderest obstacles. One of the warrant officers, his charges laid and ready at the cost of the lives of two of his own twelve men, ran round frenziedly kicking the soldiers to try to make them move so that he could fire the charges. Another team leader, when every persuasion had failed, lit his fuse and then ran round from one obstacle to another shouting to the men that it was burning and they had half a minute to get out. For some teams, the difficulty was worse, because wounded men had been dragged into the imaginary shelter of the obstacles, and they could not move. Some teams wasted so much time in trying to clear men off the beach that the tide rose and drowned their charges and their gaps were never blown. None of them could bring themselves to do what the logic of war demanded: blow the gap and kill their own countrymen.
In the face of all these difficulties, the blowing of five gaps was a wonderful achievement, although it was only a third of the number planned. Gibbons might say he had never been brave himself, but his unit action might well be judged the most gallant of all on D-Day. Of his 272 engineers, III were killed or wounded, almost all in the first half hour. Yet their gallantry was largely wasted, by hastiness in planning. The fault lay with the markers they had been given. Some of the buoys and posts they had brought to mark the gaps were lost or broken in the landing. The posts which they set up at the top of the beach were easily knocked down, and were not conspicuous enough to be seen through the smoke from seaward. The buoys, which they laid on each side of each gap, were ordinary metal dan buoys with a spar and a flag on top; but they could be punctured and sunk by a single rifle bullet, and instead of being port and starboard buoys they were all the same colour, so that when one was sunk, nobody could tell which side of the gap was marked by the one which remained.
So when the tide had risen and covered the obstacles, the gaps which had been made by such sacrifice were practically impossible to find. All the morning, landing craft skippers milled around off-shore looking for buoys and posts, and most of them, knowing that gaps had been planned, hesitated to trust to luck and charge the obstacles.
Two other cumulative disasters helped to deprive the stricken infantry of the support which they had the right to expect. A large proportion of the artillery intended to land in the first few hours had been loaded in the amphibious trucks called Dukws. This plan had simply not made enough allowance for the rough sea which can be found in the English Channel even in June. With guns, ammunition, sandbags and men on board, the Dukws were top-heavy and the great majority were swamped or rolled over in the sea.
Secondly, it was a long time before army engineers succeeded in making any gaps in the bank of shingle, which was too steep for vehicles or even tanks to cross; and so the tanks were not able to lead the infantry in any advance beyond the beach itself. The reasons for this delay again were losses of equipment. Explosives had been lost in the surf. Sixteen bulldozers had been provided, but only three survived, and one of those was unable to manæuvre because of the infantrymen who clung to its shelter. No gaps were made in the bank until ten o’clock. By then, high tide was approaching. The tanks which were still in action had been penned into a strip of beach which was only a few yards wide. Other kinds of vehicles, jeeps, trucks and halftracks, had started to land, and as the tide rolled up to the shingle all of them were caught in a dense jam of vehicles, men and wreckage, from which nothing could escape towards the gaps. This concentration of material was still under fire from German guns at close range; and an order had to be sent, by a naval radio which had been landed in working order, to suspend all landings of vehicles till something could be done to clear the beach.
Into this scene of confusion and death, just before the landings were halted, a landing craft disgorged a unit of anti-aircraft guns mounted on half-tracks, of which one section was commanded by a sergeant called Hyman Haas; and Haas’s experience was typical of that stage of the battle except for the very unusual fact that he brought his whole section and his guns and vehicles through it with hardly a scratch on the paint.
Hyman Haas’s job was making frames for ladies’ handbags. He was Jewish, and came from the Bronx, and was cheerful, friendly and efficient. This was his first combat.
Haas’s unit were principally trained as anti-aircraft, but they had also practised on surface targets; and that was just as well. Even while they were still out at sea, he knew they were out of a job as anti-aircraft gunners, because the sky was full of planes with black and white stripes of distemper, and there was never a single German to be seen. But the moment they hit the beach they found a job which was very much more important; to help to take the place of the artillery which had foundered in the Dukws.
Like everybody else, Haas was shocked and amazed at his first close sight of the beach; and like everybody else, he found that his orders were impossible to fulfil as they had been planned. He was supposed to drive his half-tracks straight across the beach and up one of the valleys to the village of St. Laurent at its head, and then set up his guns on the top of the bluffs. He was landed in the right place. The water was deep. It came up to his waist in the cab where he was sitting with his driver. But his waterproofing held, and the half-track wallowed through the water to the sand. There was the valley, just where he had expected it to be; but there also, only a few yards ahead of him, was the shingle bank, still intact and impassible, and between him and it were the debris, the wrecks of tanks, the corpses and the hundreds of crouching men. There was no room to go forward at all. To let the rest of his unit squeeze on to the beach behind him, he had to tell his driver to turn to the right and try to move out of the way between the wreckage and the water.
The sight of a 37-mm. gun coming ashore just behind them must have appeared as a godsend to the infantry, some of whom had been there for two hours without any artillery at all. An officer ran towards Haas before he had even stopped, shouting and pointing out a pillbox on the side of the bluff about three hundred yards away. Haas looked at it and saw it fire. His own gun was mounted so that it could not fire forward on low elevation. There was no room to turn round on the beach. He told his driver to turn to the right again, and drive back into the sea. That brought the half-track stern on to the bluffs; and there, half submerged in the surf again, Haas trained his gun and laid it on the pillbox. He fired ten rounds. So far as he could see, they all went through the aperture and exploded inside. Anyhow, the German gun was silent after that.
By then, the whole of the unit was ashore, and for a long time nobody showed Haas another target. There was nothing for him to do but to sit and wait, and hope that somebody somewhere would punch a hole in the shingle bank and let him move before his gun was destroyed.
Few people had the opportunity that morning to see the landing at Omaha as a whole; but to all who did, it seemed for several hours that the attack was going to fail. A German officer in the fortifications on the cliffs at the west end of the beach counted ten tanks and a great many other vehicles burning, and saw the American troops taking cover behind the shingle and the dead and wounded lying on the sand; and he reported that he believed the invasion had been halted on the shore. The German divisional commander, receiving this and similar reports, was so confident of the outcome that he sent a part of his reserves to counter-attack the British farther east. General Bradley, out on the cruiser Augusta, could do nothing at that stage to influence events; the battle, he wrote later, “had run beyond the reach of its admirals and generals.” All the morning, he was extremely anxious at the alarming and confused reports which came in by radio. About nine o’clock, he sent an observer close inshore in a fast patrol boat; but his first-hand report was no more reassuring. He had been able to see the shambles on the beach, and another staff officer who was very close in at the same time reported landing craft milling around “like a stampeded herd of cattle.” At noon, a further radio report told Bradley that the situation was still critical, and he began then to contemplate diverting his follow-up forces from Omaha to Utah and to the British beaches: a decision which would presumably have meant writing off the landing at Omaha as a failure, and abandoning most of the forces already ashore to be killed or captured. For the next hour and a half, this terrible prospect remained in the General’s mind: so near did Omaha come to defeat. And then, at 1.30, seven hours after the landing, he received the message: “Troops formerly pinned down … advancing up heights behind beaches.”
Something had tipped the balance which had been swinging towards defeat, and inclined it slightly at last towards victory.
It was partly the slow effect of the almost irresistible weight of American arms. The American forces could lose all the tanks and all the artillery in the first waves of their attack: there were still enormous quantities of tanks and artillery to follow in later waves. They could even lose their infantry: man-power was no problem, for tens of thousands more men were waiting and ready to go in. But the German defences, strong though they were, were limited and immobile. From time to time, a lucky shot like Haas’s wrote off a pillbox, and nothing could replace it. Time was bound to wear the static defences down.
This process was certainly quickened by the navy’s intervention. The naval bombardment had been scheduled to stop three minutes before the troops landed, for fear, of course, of hitting them while they advanced. But when it became obvious that the soldiers were not advancing at all, but were penned on the beach, and that the situation was desperate, destroyers were ordered in as close as they could go, to shell whatever targets they could see. Some of them went in till they scraped their keels on the sandy bottom.
So, by naval fire aided by the remnants of artillery on the beach, German guns were silenced one by one, and German fire against the beach must slowly have been slackening. But none of the men on the beach were aware of any slackening. It is nearly as bad to be shot at by ten guns as by twenty.
What really turned the balance was a final stubborn reserve of human courage. It came to the surface quite independently, at several different places on the beach. The shock of the landing had numbed the will-power of a great many men, not because their morale or their courage was particularly weak, but simply because the shock was too great for any ordinary man. The loss of leaders and lack of orders had created a feeling of hopelessness and lethargy. But here and there during the morning, officers and N.C.O.s of more than ordinary moral strength, recovering more quickly than others from the shock, began to take stock of the situation and to rally whatever men they happened to find around them.
It is impossible to say how many of these natural leaders were discovered by the very horror of the position on the beach: perhaps there were a score, perhaps a hundred. None of them had any example to follow, or knew that anyone else was even trying to break the deadlock, because in general nobody knew what was happening beyond the very limited distance he could see. Sometimes a single man’s action inspired others; sometimes men had to be bullied or persuaded; sometimes a single concise remark stuck in men’s minds long afterwards as the turning point, and was repeated in recollection after the battle was over, and so found its way into official records. On one bit of the beach, a lieutenant and a wounded sergeant quite suddenly stood up among the men who were lurking behind the shingle, and walked over the top of it: the very thing which nobody had dared to do. They looked at the wire entanglement just beyond the bank, and then the lieutenant came back and stood on top and looked down at the cowering men and said to nobody in particular: “Are you going to lay there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?” Nobody moved, so he and the sergeant found explosives and blew a hole in the wire; and then men began to stir. An infantry colonel, on another part of the beach in the same situation, expressed the same thought: “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
In the largest and most effective advance which was made from the beach that morning, it was actually a private soldier who was the first to go over the bank and set a Bangalore torpedo in the wire. Before he could fire it, he was killed. A lieutenant went over next, and fired it and blew a gap. The first man to try the gap was shot; but others made it, in twos and threes, and found shelter in some empty German trenches; and little by little the numbers increased till the remnants of a whole company were following.
In this way, several small groups of men, mostly ill-armed and mostly unsupported, began to creep inland behind a leader. The groups varied in size, from half-a-dozen men to a company, and each of them, so far as its members knew, was alone in trying to penetrate inland. Nobody will ever know how many groups started and failed. Roughly a dozen succeeded. None of those which succeeded were opposite the strongly defended valleys; they were all in between them. There, they began to find that there was really more cover beyond the beach than on it. There were ruins, and bushes, and small folds and hollows in the face of the bluffs. Once they were clear of the beach, they found the German fire less dangerous than the minefields. None of them had time to clear the mines, and few of them had the knowledge or apparatus. One engineer lieutenant, who was trained in mines but had no mine detector, led men through a minefield in the marsh below the bluffs by crawling on his stomach and probing with a hunting-knife. Most of these tentative advances were made in single file, each man treading in the footsteps of the man in front, stepping over the bodies of men whom the mines had killed. In some minefields, wounded men were left lying where they fell while a column walked over them, because the column could not be stopped and there was no room, on the narrow track which was proved to be safe, to carry them back to the beach. It was through these hesitant columns of shocked and weary men that the advance from Omaha began. The landing there, one-fourth of the whole invasion, had stood on the verge of failure; but a few brave men, mostly of junior rank, had refused to believe it had failed, and had begun to lead their companions to success.
But for the whole of the day, success remained uncertain. By noon, a few of the infantry were up the bluffs, and began to attack the defences from behind. But no tanks or artillery could follow them, because the valleys were still being strongly held. Sergeant Haas saw soldiers on the skyline of the bluffs above him but he still had to wait for a gap in the shingle through which he could drive his half-track, and until he could move he could not find any targets for his guns. Almost all the beach obstacles were still intact and were still a menace to the landing of reinforcements. Gibbons was still waiting impatiently for the tide to go down again so that he could renew his attack on them. Communications hardly existed at all. Most of the radios which had been landed were full of salt water, and it was long after nightfall before anyone had any use for the telephone wire which Henry Meyers, the mathematician from Brooklyn, had carried ashore and was waiting to lay inland. Through all these hours, a strong counter-attack could have pushed the whole of the American forces off Omaha Beach and back into the sea again.
But no counter-attack was made, and for this reprieve, as for so much else, the thanks of the troops on the ground were due to the air forces which had won complete supremacy in Western Europe. Allied aircraft that day were delaying the movement of German reserves far and wide over France; and before that day, they had already played their part in disrupting communications and in sowing confusion in the minds of the German commanders.
From the first moment when parachute landings had been reported, the German command had been reluctant to believe a real invasion was beginning, because of the weather. The Germans were far less well equipped than the British and Americans with weather stations in the North Atlantic area. This was partly, of course, a matter of geography, but partly also because their air force had been worn down to a point at which it could hardly risk long-range aircraft on weather reconnaissance. As a result, their meteorologists failed to forecast the temporary break in the weather which had been spotted by Eisenhower’s advisers. They predicted nothing but bad weather, and on the strength of a forecast which seemed to offer safety from invasion for several days, Field-Marshal Rommel had gone to Germany to spend a day at home and then to report to Hitler; and in the invasion area itself, all the divisional commanders had been summoned to a meeting in Brittany which was to take place on the morning of the sixth. Even when the landings had started, it seemed unlikely to the German High Command that the Allies would have launched a full-scale attack with such a forecast.
To this unwillingness to believe the truth, the Allied air forces had added uncertainty, by keeping German reconnaissance aircraft away and by successfully attacking German radar stations. German reconnaissance flights in the previous week had reached the Dover area and reported the dummy fleet which was lying there, but had not been able to penetrate to the English harbours farther west where the real fleet was waiting. The early warning radar stations along the coast of France were sufficient, in theory, to detect ships or aircraft over most of the English Channel; but in that same week, the stations had been bombed, and on the night of the landing those which remained were jammed. However, enough of them were deliberately left in working order in the eastern part of the Channel to ensure that the dummy fleets approaching the Calais area were detected.
To the High Command, a full-scale landing anywhere that morning therefore seemed unlikely; the information which reached von Rundstedt’s and Rommel’s headquarters was meagre; and what there was of it seemed on the whole to confirm von Rundstedt’s belief that the main attack would come in Calais, and to suggest that the action in Normandy was a mere diversion. At the crucial moment, they hesitated to throw in the whole weight of their reserves.
Their reaction was also delayed by the fact that their command was divided between the army and the Nazi party. The army had one armoured division close to the invasion shore. It was stationed near Caen, and was in action against the British early in the day. There were two more first-class armoured divisions between Normandy and Paris; but they were S.S. divisions, Nazi party units which were not under the army’s direct command, and von Runstedt had been forbidden by Hitler to commit them to battle without consulting him. Before dawn, von Runstedt’s chief of staff asked for Hitler’s permission to move them up; but Hitler, at home in Berchtesgaden, refused to let them move to the west, in case it should be true that the main attack was still to come in the east. Having made this decision, Hitler took a sleeping draught (according to Chester Wilmot) and went to bed, and his decision was not reversed till the afternoon. By then, it was much too late for the two divisions to play any part in opposing the first assault; and when they did begin to move, they found movement by daylight made almost impossible by Allied fighter-bombers which patrolled the roads and even hunted out tanks which tried to advance across country.
These armoured divisions were the nearest strategic reserves. The tactical reserves close to Omaha Beach had already been dissipated. There were two infantry brigades; but before the landing at Omaha had been reported, part of this force had been dispatched to the west to tackle the American airborne landing, and during the morning most of the rest of it was moved east, to a point where the British were quickly advancing inland. The Atlantic Wall at Omaha was tough, but it was thin.