29
Omaha: Big Red One
‘In civilian life you get dressed, eat breakfast, go to work, have lunch, work some more, go home, have dinner then relax and read, watch TV, listen to the radio, and finally go to bed. On D-Day, I put on underwear, wool trousers, shirt, combat boots, field jacket, raincoat, along with two canteens of water, my pistol belt with pistol and ammo clips, and also a first aid packet. Plus, a musette bag with cans of C-Rations, K-Rations, D-Rations, two changes of socks and underwear, cigarettes and candy bars, chewing gun, map case with maps, various types of documents, gas mask and steel helmet. After a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee, around 0400 hours I started my day. First I checked with the Battalion CO, and then I rode to work in a landing craft for a day on the beach, waded through a swamp, dodged enemy fire, climbed a hill, found a safe place to work and sleep. Then I rested in a foxhole behind a hedgerow trying to go to sleep. No one was there to ask if I’d had a good day. If they had, my reply would have been yes – I was alive.’
Captain ‘Hank’ Hangsterfer, 16th Infantry1
It was Harras, his German shepherd, who woke him first. Surfacing from a deep sleep, Major Werner Pluskat dimly heard his field telephone jangling. He fumbled for the receiver, wondering why his artillery commander should be calling him in the small hours. There were no pleasantries, he recalled, just a curt order: ‘Alert your men and get down to the coast right away – paratroopers reported in the [Cotentin] peninsula. This could be the invasion.’ About three miles inland from his coastal bunker, Pluskat was billeted in the comfortable sixteenth-century Ferme de la Marguerie in the hamlet of Étréham, with the commander of his 2nd Battery, Hauptmann Ludz Wilkening, and Leutnant Fritz Theen, his gunnery officer. Together with Harras, they drove to his observation post on the cliffs at Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes, to the east of, but overlooking, Omaha Beach.
Pluskat stayed for a while, scanning the coast, and at 0335 hours was about to leave when he first spotted the arriving Allied fleet. The dramatic moment is described at the midpoint of Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, and echoed in the 1962 movie, with Hans Christian Blech memorably playing the thirty-two-year-old Pluskat, frantically screaming that the invasion fleet was heading ‘Right for me!’
Although someone certainly saw the maritime threat around then, it may not have been the CO of the First Battalion of the 352nd Artillerie-Regiment. This is why the story of D-Day has become a fascinating, never-ending saga. New evidence suggests that Pluskat may have misled Ryan and had actually been absent from his command post at this crucial time. It is now thought that he was succumbing to the same temptations as Generalleutnant Feuchtinger of the 21st Panzer Division and Major Hans Schmidt, commanding the troops at Bénouville – and no doubt many other Wehrmacht officers – on this most inclement of June nights.2 Gefreiter Heinrich ‘Hein’ Severloh would later recount that his boss, Oberleutnant Frerking ‘hadn’t been able to reach the Major at his quarters at Étréham, at battalion HQ or his command post: Pluskat was simply not there’, whereupon Severloh joked that ‘he’s probably taking the girls of the Front-Theatre back to Paris right now’.3 The role of German officers’ French girlfriends in winning D-Day needs further examination.
Be that as it may, someone saw the new arrivals offshore, and ever since 0335 the defenders had been waiting for the assault. Crouching in his concrete shelter, Severloh first heard the ‘dull drone of aircraft motors coming from the sea. The noise got louder and louder, and the roar rose to a hellish thunder as a powerful, ghostly fleet of bombers came directly at us in the grey, cloudy sky.’4 Expecting bombs, Severloh, his fellow artillerymen and grenadiers cowered as the aircraft passed overhead and only then did their bomb loads come ‘howling, whistling and crashing down. The bombs fell like heavy rain, and the first hit barely fifty yards behind our strongpoint’, he recalled. ‘Everything started to shake, even our small, dug-in observation post vibrated from the detonations, and earth and chunks of the limestone cliff fell around close to us – but the bombers had missed.’5
In a neighbouring position, Gefreiter Franz Gockel ‘hid under the big wooden platform on which my machine-gun was mounted. The only thing I could do was pray,’ he recollected. ‘I said the short prayers I had said with my family while sheltering from air raids, getting myself into a trance.’ As he looked out to sea, Gockel noticed ‘black shadows looming on the horizon. First, we thought they were German motor boats, but the shadows grew, and pretty soon, they were so numerous that we could no longer hold on to our hope. We could make out the outline of smaller and larger boats in increasing numbers. Huge warships were lining up as if assembling for a parade. All of a sudden assault craft and special landing boats were rushing towards the beach.’6
Major General ‘Gee’ Gerow’s V Corps was split equally in effort along Omaha Beach. The first wave it would hurl at the German-occupied coast comprised 34,142 men and 3,306 vehicles sailing mainly from Weymouth, Portland and Poole. While they had consolidated the beachhead, a follow-on wave of 25,117 men with 4,429 vehicles, putting out of Plymouth, Falmouth and Fowey, intended to land from the early afternoon.7 Half of these numbers would be directed at the eastern sector of Omaha, running from Easy Red to Fox Red, and assaulted by methodical timetable.
The formation known as (and that continues to be called) the Big Red One was named after its distinctive shoulder badge, displayed prominently on every asset, flag, building and person associated with the formation. On uniforms, it – like the Blue and Gray insignia – was worn on the upper left shoulder. Although its individual regiments dated back to Civil War days, the 1st Infantry Division itself traced its heritage to the American Expeditionary Force deployed to France in 1917. Colonel George A. Taylor’s 16th Infantry was raised in 1861, and in the words of its Latin motto, Semper paratus (Always ready), had seen continuous service thereafter – Colonel George A. Smith’s 18th Infantry likewise. Colonel John ‘Jeff’ Seitz’s 26th had been formed by an Act of Congress in 1901.
Many of the division’s units, such as the 5th, 7th, 32nd and 33rd Field Artillery Battalions, were likewise pre-war military professionals. The latter would boast that ‘on 8 November 1942 at 0832 hours, Battery ‘B’ fired the first American artillery rounds in the European Theater’ – the first of a recorded 175,000 rounds the battalion would fire during 422 days of combat in the Second World War.8 It contained Brigadier General Roosevelt’s son, Quentin Roosevelt II (named after his uncle, an Air Corps pilot killed during the First World War). Both father and son had served together in the Big Red One in Tunisia and Sicily, both winning Silver Stars in separate engagements, and the pair would be in the spearhead on 6 June – Ted, as we have seen, on Utah, Quentin as a captain on Easy Red. Quentin’s mother Eleanor was probably the only individual with a husband and son landing in the first wave on D-Day.
Collectively, the 1st Division possessed the lion’s share of combat experience outside the Pacific, with the three battle streamers of Algeria–French Morocco, Tunisia and Sicily already to its name. A high proportion of its officers were thus not only career professionals, but hardened on the battlefields of the Mediterranean. A steady rock of the Big Red One was Brigadier General Clift Andrus, commanding its artillery. The son of a career officer, Andrus had once studied at Cornell University, was a graduate of Leavenworth and the War College, had also known battle in North Africa and Sicily – and would one day command the division.
Like many in the 1st Division, Colonel George Arthur Taylor, from Flat Rock, Illinois, was the product of the US Military Academy, West Point – in his case, Class of 1922. He understood amphibious operations better than most, had led his 16th Regiment well in the Sicilian campaign, and feared the neatness and tight schedule arranged for Omaha. Aboard USS Samuel Chase on 5 June, he had warned the warcos Don Whitehead, Robert Capa and Jack Thompson, ‘The first six hours will be the toughest. This is the period during which we will be the weakest. But we’ve got to open the door.’9 Taylor and Colonel George Smith had led their regiments through the Mediterranean; Seitz had not, but arrived with Pacific experience under his belt, notably as a battalion commander in Hawaii during 7 December 1941.
Like ‘Dutch’ Cota and Charles Canham in the Blue and Gray Division, Taylor was a soldier’s soldier who operated on instinct and gut feeling, far different in temperament to his boss, Clarence R. Huebner, known as a stickler for drill and detail. Huebner may have shared the roots of small-town Kansas life with Eisenhower but had joined the army as a private in 1909. He possessed no fancy college education, having earned himself a battlefield commission. He was self-made through and through, and serious, and had taken command over from the popular and irreverent duo of Allen and Roosevelt in August 1943, but was still viewed with a degree of suspicion by some of the division.
Although Huebner’s prior service shouted ‘Big Red One’, having worked his way up from private to colonel within the 1st Division – including First World War service, where he earned a Distinguished Service Cross – Huebner was fully aware that Overlord would be his first test in modern war. Before taking over the 1st, his previous appointments had been desk jobs in Washington DC, overseeing military training.10 His assistant divisional commander, Brigadier General Willard G. Wyman, was cast from the same mould, being the consummate staff officer. He had been Deputy Chief of Staff Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) in the Mediterranean before being parachuted in to replace Ted Roosevelt. Thus Andrus, Taylor and Smith had difficult paths to tread, having ‘sand in their shoes’ as successful commanders in the Mediterranean – Seitz, too, in the Pacific – in receipt of the widespread trust of their men, something their divisional commander and his deputy had yet to earn. However, as Huebner was not due to land until evening, when his formation was completely ashore, the weight of command would fall on the shoulders of Colonel George Taylor.
It is worth observing that collectively the 1st Infantry Division regarded themselves – and were seen as – the US Army’s premier field formation. Its officers tended to write more official reports, climb higher in the US military hierarchy and leave voluminous memoirs, unlike their contemporaries of the 29th, who have not deployed as a division since the Second World War.11 In more modern operations, the Big Red One still traces its traditions of leadership and combat skills back to the experience of Normandy.
Thus in terms of influence and sheer volume of paper, the Big Red One overshadows the Blue and Gray, but on Omaha Beach on 6 June 1944 they were equal. Whatever cocky pretensions to glory the 1st Infantry Division may have had were cut down to size. At the end of the day the origins of the two formations mattered not: both were full of draftees and both rose to overcome their challenges equally well. Whereas National Guardsmen had volunteered before the draft, and knew each other, those conscripted came from every state and were strangers to one another.
The story of draftee Hyam Haas, who had risen to the rank of sergeant in the 467th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion, is not untypical. A poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn, New York, he had ‘barely made it through the depression, when food was sometimes scarce. The only workouts I got was walking to wherever I had to go, as I didn’t have the fare for subways, trolleys, or buses’. For many like Haas, military service was a welcome release. The army sent him ‘travelling to places I never heard of, never dreaming I’d ever get to the land of the movies, California. Moreover I was hiking my way to the best physical shape I had ever been. I spent nearly five years in the Army: some of it was pure fun. So when I was inducted and got over my missing my widowed mother and my sisters, in spite of the regimentation, I began enjoying the relative freedom from the rigors of depression living.’12
This echoed the experience of many in the First World War, whose generation of soldiers had frequently emerged from nineteenth-century urban and agrarian squalor to enjoy three square meals a day for the first time in their lives, decent footwear, warm clothing and their own bed under a dry roof. It is often forgotten that mass conscription frequently benefited those who had least to lose, and set them up for a better life – if they survived. Haas found that he thrived. His buddies in Battery ‘A’ came from ‘Louisiana, mostly from New Orleans, or the mid-west – Denver, Colorado, and different areas of Kansas: it seemed to me they were all farmers. Here was I, a city kid just recently able to tolerate Army life, giving orders to big husky farm boys who could probably turn me inside out if they so desired.’13
Many of those afloat, such as Frederick E. Boyer of Baker County, Oregon, were similarly sucked into war by the draft, taking their lives in unexpected directions. Boyer grew up on the family ranch, homesteaded by his grandfather in 1882, eking out a meagre living through the Great Depression, attending school by horse, buggy and sleigh. He had entered the navy after graduating from Oregon State College in 1943, assigned as ensign to USS Dorothea L. Dix, where on D-Day he would find himself in charge of several landing craft.14 Brooklyn and Oregon to Normandy were just two of the strange voyages of self-discovery a whole generation of young Americans were making.
With the 29th busy capturing and opening the D-1 and D-3 draws, two more – E-1 leading to the eastern side of Saint-Laurent, and the prominent exit of E-3 which led uphill to Colleville – were assigned as 1st Division tasks. During the course of the day a fifth draw – the much smaller defended track winding up from the beach to Cabourg – would be captured and dubbed F-1. As we have seen, they were policed by Widerstandsnester, but not all these had been completed. Unlike the 29th Division’s half of the beach, the Big Red One’s eastern sector had shingle mound instead of a sea wall, no seaside villas – or their remains – and no roadway running parallel to the surf. Anti-tank walls and ditches, however, blocked all the exits, guarded by the inevitable pillboxes. As with the bunkers on the Pointe du Hoc, the Atlantikwall here was evolving on a daily basis. At the back of Eisenhower’s mind, when weighing up whether to postpone D-Day again, had been the knowledge that every week would see more mines laid, more obstacles and yards of barbed wire erected, and more concrete bunkers completed.
Sitting in those bunkers were Oberst Walter Korfes’ 726th Grenadier-Regiment. His First Battalion, headquartered in Maisons (south of Port-en-Bessin), covered Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes and Colleville, the eastern end of Omaha. The Third Battalion, based in Jucoville (north of La Cambe), had companies stationed in Grandcamp, Vierville and Saint-Laurent – the western half. Since mid-morning they had been helping to defend the Pointe du Hoc. The headquarters of his Russians – the 439th Ost-Bataillon – who also manned some coastal strongpoints, was located in Les Veys (west of Isigny).15 Having survived the initial aerial bombing, along the coast the defenders picked themselves up, amazed their positions were still intact. Few had been injured and their weapons remained undamaged.
Facing east, the photograph on this intelligence postcard illustrates the different nature of the beach looking towards the E-3 (Colleville) draw. There was no sea wall or road here, just a small mound of shingle thrown up over the years by the restless English Channel. The beach huts had been removed, replaced by a marshy area, strewn with barbed wire and mines. The Germans on the heights had a clear field of fire. Beyond lie the cliffs of Fox sector, where many sheltered. Just out of the picture, to the right, is the present-day American cemetery. (Author’s collection)
However, the grenadiers barely had time to come to their senses before another bombardment started, this time from the sea rather than the air. ‘Rockets and shells of the heaviest calibres thumped down continuously on our positions. The ground of the entire length of high coastal bluffs trembled under the head-on attack, and the very air vibrated,’ recollected Hein Severloh. ‘The sky was darkened by dense smoke and clouds of dirt. In between were the flashes of thundering explosions, and it seemed as though the whole world would sink down in a howling and crashing inferno of bursting shells. On the slope of our position, dry grass and gorse bushes began to burn.’ Yet this second attack, too, did little damage: the Germans had built well. Almost worse was the aftermath, observed Severloh: ‘thick, yellow, choking dust filled the air. It smelled like the remains of a fire and tasted bitter.’16
For soldiers unused to such a cannonade, this was a living hell, though many had experienced this on the Russian Front or under Allied bombs in their cities. It was enough to overawe Severloh’s NCO, Wachtmeister Fack, whom he found cowering at the entrance to his observation bunker, Luger pistol cast aside, face contorted with fear and eyes wild. ‘Then’, he remembered, ‘it was almost completely quiet, with not a single shot being fired. We had strict orders to wait until our foes were in knee-deep water.’ They had been expecting ‘Tommies’ to invade, but could clearly read in large white letters ‘U.S.’ on the sides of the vessels. So it was the Americans. Severloh and his buddies watched the GIs jumping ‘into the cold, chest-to-shoulder-high water. Many went under for a moment and, half-swimming, half wading, they began to move slowly toward the beach in front of our strongpoint.’17
As elsewhere, among the first ashore on the eastern sector of Omaha were the Navy Combat Demolition Units, comprising the army and navy obstacle-clearing engineers. Ensign Lawrence S. Karnowski, a civil engineering graduate of the University of Kansas, was leading Naval Combat Demolition Unit 45 onto Easy Red. Before departing Portland in an LCT, all the NCDU officers were briefed aboard USS Ancon by Rear Admiral Hall that ‘the pre-invasion naval bombardment would clear the beaches and overlooking bluffs. Not a living soul would be left upon the beach.’ They were sceptical. In the event, Karnowski led his team ashore just after 0630 hours, midway between the Saint-Laurent and Colleville draws, to the west of Severloh’s position. They began placing satchel charges on obstacles, successfully blowing a hundred-yard line of obstructions at 0650. The technique was to place all the charges then blow them simultaneously. As soon as the first detonation occurred German machine-guns and mortars opened up from the bluffs, and they started to take casualties.18
‘It took about five minutes for the Americans to reach shallow water; I moved the safety lock of my machine-gun to the off position,’ reminisced Severloh.
I could see the water spouts where my machine-gun bursts were hitting, and when the little fountains got close to the GIs, they threw themselves down. They all lay in the shallow water; many tried to get to the most forward beach obstacles to find some cover behind them. I fired some more at the many dark forms in the water. Oberleutnant Frerking appeared next to me and observed the Americans. ‘Poor swine,’ he said softly to himself and picked up the handset of the field telephone to send the coordinates and firing orders for our artillery.19
Undeterred, Karnowski’s men managed a second detonation at 0700 hours; army engineers triggered two more at 0710, which cleared almost the entire fifty-yard gap from the surf to the dunes. Earlier, another team had been under the impression that H-Hour was 0620 and had landed all alone – this hardly compromised the element of surprise, as the bombardment had awoken Severloh and all his colleagues in a fifty-mile radius. As the leading engineers struggled through the water, a shell hit their landing craft and detonated the explosives, killing most left on board.
A tension now arose (also encountered in the western sectors of Omaha): the infantry stumbling ashore were huddling among the obstacles, using them for cover, denying the engineers the chance to wire and destroy the obstructions. No amount of urging could move them; there was no beachmaster present yet, and thus the assault gapping effort failed in many places. Some engineers thereupon gave up their task, fixed their bayonets and took up firing positions with the infantry on the shingle. Where in a few cases obstacles were prepared for destruction, the Germans seemed to be precisely aware of the activity, for the ‘fusillade from the shore cut away fuses as rapidly as the engineers could rig them. One burst of fragments carried away a fuse-man’s carefully set mechanism – and all of his fingers.’ Most surviving NCDUs collapsed under cover of the shingle bank, ‘soaking wet, unable to move, and suffering from cramps. It was cold and there was no sun.’20
Unlike most other teams, Karnowski managed to open a passage and landing craft bearing the 16th Infantry started to beach. However, while sheltering in the dunes, his team took further casualties from mortar and artillery fire; Karnowski would be awarded a Navy Cross for his work, although just six of his thirteen-man NCDU-45 remained unwounded.21 Closely following the NCDUs were army engineer battalions, to which Beachmaster units and Underwater Demolition Teams were attached. With one of them in Company ‘C’ of the 299th Combat Engineer Battalion was Robert N. ‘Lefty’ Lowenstein, a former railroad worker from Tonawanda, New York State. ‘Our battalion had eight assault teams,’ he remembered. ‘We were to cut pathways through the obstacles, the tetrahedrons, the hedgehogs, the Belgian gates, the poles, that were all along the beach.’ Incredibly, Lowenstein survived unscathed, though he was hit ‘twice in the helmet, my gas mask was shot through, and my canteen also’.22
Landing at 0630 hours with the DD Shermans of the 741st Tank Battalion would be four companies from Colonel Taylor’s 16th Infantry along with the obstacle clearers and other engineers, and supported by artillery. The assault vessels carrying Taylor’s riflemen neatly reflected the make-up of the maritime component. His First Battalion would launch from the Coast Guard-manned attack transport Samuel Chase, the Second Battalion from the US Navy’s Henrico, while the Third Battalion would disembark from the Royal Navy’s Empire Anvil.
At H-Hour the Second Battalion would throw its Companies ‘E’ and ‘F’ against the centre sectors of Easy Red, to seize the E-1 draw. At the same moment, the Third Battalion was to despatch its Companies ‘I’ and ‘L’ at Fox Green, and take the E-3 exit. Thirty minutes later, the next wave would see Company ‘G’ leave the Henrico and Company ‘K’ the Anvil, to hit the same pair of beaches with the anti-aircraft half-tracks of the 397th AAA Battalion. After a lapse of only ten minutes, the third programmed wave of Taylor’s Companies ‘H’ and ‘M’ would land in the same area, where eight gaps through the obstacles should by then have been cleared by the engineers.
Subsequent waves would deposit more troops, tanks, the 81st Chemical Mortar Battalion, anti-aircraft and field artillery battalions, as well as the 6th Naval Beach Battalion. These would all comprise the 16th Regimental Combat Team. Taylor planned for his Second Battalion (Companies ‘E’ to ‘H’) to land and seize Colleville. The Third Battalion (Companies ‘I’, ‘K’, ‘L’ and ‘M’) was to swing round to the east, securing Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes. Meanwhile, the First Battalion (Companies ‘A’ through ‘D’) would advance through Colleville and take Formigny, to the south-west. They would be followed by the three battalions of Smith’s 18th Infantry – carried by the attack transports Anne Arundel, Dorothea L. Dix and Thurston – scheduled to begin landing from 0930 hours. The 18th were to eventually forge eastwards to link up with the British 50th Division advancing from Gold Beach. Seitz’s 26th Infantry Regiment would act as a reserve, prepared to beach on V Corps’ orders in the afternoon, and deploy wherever Gerow or Huebner thought best.
Armour accompanied the first-wave GIs. We have seen how the 743rd Tank Battalion decided to go all the way by LCT instead of swimming, to support the 29th Division on the western sands of Omaha. At 0530 hours, the same decision had to be made by their sister 741st Battalion, waiting 6,000 yards offshore, and preparing to swim ashore in support of the Big Red One. Knowing the scheduled launch could be overridden at the discretion of the tankers or the naval commander, the sight of four-foot-high waves – with the occasional six-foot breaker whipped up by eighteen-knot winds – caused Captain James Thornton, Jr, commanding Company ‘B’, to discuss the matter earnestly with his counterpart from Company ‘C’, Captain Charles Young, by radio. They knew the rubberised canvas of their DD rigging only provided three feet of freeboard above the sea. The pair concluded that although the waters were much rougher than any they had known during training, the need for armour on the beach justified the risk, and they decided to go.
It was a tragic error: within minutes the air-filled rubber struts were snapping and canvas screens buckling, as the waves overwhelmed tank after tank. The fully-laden Shermans plunged straight to the seabed. Company ‘B’ lost all but five – two somehow managing to swim ashore. Later, Ensign R. L. Harkey, skipper of LCT-602, would record, ‘I am not proud of the fact nor will I ever cease regretting that I did not take the tanks all the way to the beach.’23 Ironically, Staff Sergeant Turner G. Sheppard, commanding one of the surviving pair which arrived on Fox Green, thought it ‘was the smoothest landing the crew had ever managed’. To his left, he could see the other surviving DD Sherman commanded by Sergeant George R. Geddes on the sand; both reckoned they survived because they had sailed small boats in peacetime.24 The two intrepid Company ‘B’ sergeants would receive battlefield commissions as a result of their actions on D-Day. However, every single one of Company ‘C’s sixteen tanks sank like stones between 5,000 and 1,000 yards from the surf, losing on average one crew member per tank.
All the swimming tanks had been told to aim for the prominent steeple of Colleville church. Recent analysis by divers of the sunken tanks suggests they did exactly that. However, they had set out in line abreast and converged on their landmark like the spread of a fan: this caused them to broach – meeting the full fury of the waves sideways on, parallel to the shore. Those of Company ‘C’ were also head-to-wind and battling against the current – conditions challenging enough for a sailboat, never mind ‘thirty tons of metal in a canvas bucket’. The two Company ‘B’ survivors, using their seamanship, had managed to steer direct for the surf and remain at right angles to the coast.
Accusations of stupidity or ignorance levelled at the two company commanders thus appear to be misplaced, for it was the orders handed to them – to head for the spire – that directly caused the sinkings.25 Having rehearsed underwater escapes, the majority of the crews bobbed up to the surface, or waited in the small orange dinghies issued to each DD tank, to be scooped up by rescue launches and taken back to southern England. The other lucky survivors were three Company ‘B’ tanks which failed to launch: a wave had sunk Second Lieutenant Patrick J. O’Shaughnessy’s DD shortly after it exited, and lashed the landing craft so severely that the remaining three collided on deck, tearing their screens.
As the first crew scrambled back on board, Staff Sergeant Paul W. Ragan, the next senior tankman, demanded the skipper take the three remaining Shermans – the other two commanded by Sergeants Maddock and Kenneth V. Williams – to the beach. ‘When we drove off LCT-600, I couldn’t see much in front of me except smoke, but there was a clear spot in it, and through this I could see a pillbox. We fired at least forty rounds of 75mm at it,’ Ragan recalled. This meant there were precisely three tanks on Easy Red for the first half hour of the assault, and two on Fox.26
Apart from three Shermans sunk with their LCT by shelling, all of Captain Cecil Dallas Thomas’s non-swimming Company ‘A’ reached shore with the second wave at 0700 hours, astride the boundary between Easy Red and Fox Green. They had blazed away from their LCTs in the remote hope of hitting something – but from a pitching, rolling craft this was unlikely. Once ashore, with the command radio ruined by seawater, Thomas, a Virginia Polytechnic graduate from Rockingham County, had to move from tank to tank, directing fire and moving vehicles into cover. In doing so, both his technical sergeants and radio operator were wounded. Thus, instead of the planned forty-eight tanks on Easy Red and Fox Green that morning, only eighteen were present, driving up and down the beach, hemmed in by the rising tide and the target of every German gun.
Some escaped destruction by seeking cover in the drifting smoke and keeping mobile. However, they made the landings easier for successive waves by drawing fire onto themselves – not a traditional use of armour. We have already acknowledged the often undervalued contribution of naval gunfire support from the destroyers, but this began only between 0830 and 0900. In the timetable, warships had been ordered not to fire until communication was established with Navy Shore Fire Control Parties – many of whom were dead. This meant that on some areas of Easy Red and Fox Green, the only supporting fire for over two hours came from the few tanks on the shingle.27
Infantry companies ‘E’ and ‘F’ of Taylor’s RCT should have landed midway between the Saint-Laurent and Colleville draws, in a long line abreast, and were to open E-1. Behind them would follow Company ‘G’, then ‘H’, in further waves. As it was, the morning murk, sea spray, haze from burning brush on the clifftops (set alight by the rocket craft), wind and waves combined to push all but one of their boats east, towards the strongly defended E-3 exit to Colleville. A single boatload of thirty-two men actually grounded as planned, but slightly late, at 0645 hours, the rest of Companies ‘E’ and ‘F’ ending up in a huddle either side of the Colleville draw, under the noses of Hein Severloh and his colleagues in WN62. The 16th Infantry men on target were led by Second Lieutenant John M. Spalding of Owensboro, Kentucky, who would soon recognise their fortune in landing between the two draws. Spalding had noted on the run-in ‘several yellow rubber boats with personnel from the DD tanks which had foundered’ but exited their landing craft into water over their heads.28
They were puzzled to see not a single craft anywhere to the west, and eventually realised they were the extreme front right of their division. All reached the shoreline intact, but Spalding’s boat team could not race across the beach – instead tottering as fast as they could, their burdens doubled by the seawater in their clothes and equipment. Even so, occasional bursts of machine-gun fire raked the shingle, with random heavier shelling. Spalding later realised that to have got twenty out of thirty-two men across the beach was a good result. They had arrived at a weak point in the German defences, about halfway between the powerful WN62 to their left, which dominated the Colleville exit, and WN64 to their right, which overlooked the Saint-Laurent valley. Both these positions had much of their weaponry oriented to defend the exits, and at the moment Spalding landed that was where the defenders’ attention was focused also.
Spalding recounted in 1945, ‘To our left, we passed a pillbox from which machine-gun fire was mowing down Company ‘F’ people a few hundred yards to our left. There was nothing we could do to help them’ – this was certainly WN62. Rather than make for the right-hand Saint-Laurent draw as planned, it seemed to him and his sergeant, Philip Streczyk of East Brunswick, New Jersey, a more sensible course to forge directly ahead where they perceived little apparent opposition. Soon they had blown gaps in the concertina wire, followed a well-trodden path through a minefield at the foot of the bluffs, and were climbing the heights. At the top, they rushed a machine-gun nest, capturing its occupant. Fortune smiled as Streczyk, of Polish extraction, discovered their first prisoner was a fellow Pole, albeit in field grey, who was happy to divulge what he knew of the defensive layout.
Spalding soon found some of his own regiment’s Company ‘G’ had followed his path up the bluffs, though the unit, under their commander, Captain Joseph T. Dawson, peeled off left towards Colleville, further east. They would fight their own war; Dawson immediately overcame another machine-gun post with an extremely accurate grenade throw. Meanwhile, Spalding and Streczyk had led their motley crew westwards along the cliffs, mopping up positions as they went, and eventually attacked and overcame WN64 at around 1000 hours. During their advance, Spalding’s band killed forty Germans and captured a further twenty besides their Pole.29 Corporal Samuel M. Fuller, the Hollywood-screenwriter-turned-soldier whom we met roaming Henrico with Robert Capa in Weymouth, was soon ordered to relay news of Lieutenant Spalding’s success to the 16th Infantry’s commander, Colonel Taylor. Dashing across the beach, here and there, in full view of the Germans, he eventually tracked down his colonel by following the butts of the Havana cigars Taylor enjoyed chewing. Taylor was pleased with the news – and impressed with the corporal’s ingenuity: he presented Fuller with a box of the same Havana cigars for his arduous trek under fire and, later, a Silver Star.30
Opposite WN64, later waves of Canham’s Company ‘M’ had already landed west of the E-1 draw from around 0700 hours, and were protected from the worst of its fire by the shingle bank. However, without heavy weapons or tank support they were unable to make any impression on either WN64 or WN65 guarding its entrance. They slid to their right in an attempt to outflank the E-1 draw, and were instead drawn towards the fight for the D-3 (Les Moulins) draw. The beachmaster for this sector, Easy Red, was the twenty-three-year-old Lieutenant Commander Joseph Vaghi, Jr, who landed from LCI-88 at 0735 hours with his men of the 6th Naval Beach Battalion.
‘We were 333 men and forty officers, attached to the 5th Engineer Special Brigade, 16th Regimental Combat Team,’ he recollected. Their CO, Commander Eugene C. Carusi, ‘was thirty-eight or so, over six feet, slim, with light grey eyes and prematurely gray hair’. A Naval Academy graduate, Carusi had become a lawyer; now he was back in uniform. ‘He dubbed us Carusi’s 400 Thieves.’ On landing, Vaghi raced off his craft ‘as if I was running with a football under my arm. Using the obstacles as shelter, I moved forward over the tidal flat under full exposure to machine-gun fire until I finally reached the dune line.’ Vaghi recalled an apocryphal panorama of soot and flame, where ‘the stench of expended gunpowder filled the air. Purple smoke drifted from the base of the beach obstacles as our Underwater Demolition Teams went about their business with the obstacles.’31
His colleague Manuel R. Perez soon realised everything had gone wrong.
Nobody seemed to be where they should have been according to plan, and that included us. All up and down the beach tanks were sitting in the surf line knocked out, impotent and burning. Heavy smoke and mist covered everything; visual signals were absolutely no good – and worst of all, equipment of every conceivable sort was piling up in huge hills at the waterline. The time schedule, as well as the schedule of priority objectives, had jumped the track, the great ships lying offshore were pumping men and munitions toward the beaches with which they had no communication, and if ever disaster threatened the whole gigantic undertaking, it was at that moment.32
Vaghi somehow survived a nearby explosion which killed one of his men, and set his clothes alight – and a jeep full of gasoline and hand grenades. ‘They called us the traffic cops of the invasion,’ he recalled, ‘though most of my traffic got blown up before it went anyplace.’ He was one of the few meant to stay on the beach: ‘My job was to get everyone else off the shingle. If your helmet had a white rainbow on it you were a Beach Battalion or Engineer Brigade guy and could stay. Everyone else was meant to go. Of course that never happened. That day we had a hundred professions. One minute I was driving a stranded bulldozer out of the sea, the next I was seeing my men struck by bullets and having one die in my arms.33
Perez recalled another beachmaster, Lieutenant Vince Perrin, having to ‘use his arms in semaphore code to direct an LCT with two tanks aboard, to the edge of the beach. The LCT finally made it.’ Even as this was going on, Perez noticed a nearby LCVP with eight men of Navy Demolition Team-11 aboard. ‘Even as I looked, an eighty-eight shell burst in the air above them, detonating a load of Primacord they were carrying. That stuff has a bullet sensitivity of zero! The LCVP seemed to rise bodily out of the water, burst apart in a great mushroom of red-orange flame, and the next moment there were hardly even fragments visible to mark the spot. I learned later only one man survived.’34
Bernard Friedenberg was a medic in Headquarters Company, First Battalion of the 16th Infantry. When he volunteered for the army, the son of Atlantic City, New Jersey, was rejected by the infantry because of poor eyesight, but being Jewish was determined to fight. ‘Give me a weapon and take me where the Germans are. They want to kill Jews. I’m a Jew,’ he’d thought; ‘I want to be able to fight back.’ He had crossed to France aboard USS Samuel Chase, climbed down a rope cargo net and threw himself into a landing craft as it bobbed and crashed into the side of the ship. He worked his way to the front, observing that ‘machine-gun fire often caught the last bunch of men disembarking, so I made it a point to get off the craft quickly’. Immediately, Friedenberg was pulled down by the heavy load of medical supplies he was carrying.35
On the beach I raced from one wounded soldier to the next, administering morphine, sulphur powder, and talking to them. I lied; I’d say anything to put them at ease, keep their blood pressure down. I would claim their wound was not so bad even if it was. I’d reassure them: ‘You’re lucky, pal. You’ve got a million-dollar wound.’ I’m still haunted by this one kid who had a sucking hole in his chest and as he breathed, air would come out the hole. I tried to seal it with adhesive tape but there was so much blood the tape wouldn’t stick. Looked like a high school kid. Died under my hands. I never got over that.
Friedenberg would receive the first of two Silver Stars for carrying five wounded men on his back, one at a time, out of an Omaha minefield. ‘I also treated this badly wounded German; first thing that went through my head was, “Screw him” but I just couldn’t, so I sprinkled sulphur powder on his wounds and dressed them. He kept kissing my hand and thanking me, took out his wallet; showed me pictures of his sons. He spoke English and he said, “My boys will thank you; my wife will thank you.”’36
Serving in the US Coast Guard, James Carrie was on his fourth invasion aboard the Samuel Chase and responsible for getting many of the 16th Infantry ashore. ‘We knew this was going to be the Big One. We’d been through three’. Then ‘just a kid’ of twenty-three, he recalled of the morning, ‘The soldiers were all huddled together. There was a lot of nervous tension. You could feel it. You knew somebody was going to get it that day’. His vessel, named after a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, carried thirty-three Higgins boats [LCVPs] to Normandy. ‘Only nine returned, and they came carrying dead and wounded. The others were lost to the tides and damage from the German guns and mines. When they started bringing back the dead and the wounded, there were so many we were stacking the dead up five high’, Carrie remembered.37
At around 0900, Sergeant Hyam Haas, the poor Brooklyn kid thriving on army life, disembarked from LCT-244 just east of the E-1 draw with his section of two anti-aircraft half-tracks. These were Battery ‘A’ vehicles, one mounting four .50-calibre machine-guns, the other a 37mm autocannon with two machine-guns in an armoured turret. He remembered during the final run-in seeing the body of a GI floating by. ‘We could clearly hear the distinctive sound of German machine-guns – they had such a high rate of fire they sounded like a burrrrp and that’s how they got the name burp guns. Our LCT found a clear spot through the obstacles and made for shore and soon the ramp was down and we started our motors.’
The water was far deeper than Haas had expected, but they had thoroughly waterproofed the vehicle. ‘I found myself in the cab, in sea that went up to my chin, and held my weapon and that of the driver aloft out of the waves.’ From the shoreline he noticed ‘a bunker that looked to me to be built into the hills. At the same time I also spotted an American officer with a moustache and wearing shiny cavalry boots running towards me pointing at that bunker. Captain Napier, standing nearby said, “Go get it!”’38 The moustachioed officer may well have been Colonel Charles Canham, commanding the 116th Infantry, whose men had been pinned down in the area, and who had been striding around trying to energise the move off the beach.
‘I took up position behind the rangefinder and in an instant we opened fire,’ recalled Haas. ‘The first three shots from our 37mm autocannon missed; I made an adjustment and the next fifteen shots went right into the gun port of the bunker. I heard the .50 Brownings firing also. No doubt it was dead.’ This concrete blockhouse was part of WN65, and Sergeant Haas’s actions resulted in twenty Germans stumbling out of the position in surrender. The fall of shot places Haas and his vehicles to the east of E-1 draw, in the dead centre of Easy Red sector. To his right he saw ‘LCIs afire with exploding ammunition’ – this was Seth Shepherd’s LCI-92, with LCI-91 beyond, which had been struck hours earlier and would burn for the rest of the day. However, Haas had destroyed only a part of WN65, which comprised a second 50mm gun, a 37mm, two mortar posts and several machine-guns, each in a concrete bunker, and all connected by a honeycomb of zig-zag trenches, the ensemble surrounded by wire and mines. Nevertheless, his two half-tracks had taken out a significant portion of the position and the morale of its survivors must have begun to dip at this point.
The guys on the shingle needed a break. Manuel R. Perez with Carusi’s ‘400 Thieves’ naval beach battalion had found himself tending a casualty
leaning up against a disabled tank that was broadside to the enemy fire. His eyes were glassy. Both his legs were broken, and he held his guts in his two hands. He was dazed – I didn’t know whether he could feel the pain yet or not. His mouth hung open in a hideous grin. I crawled over to him, broke open a morphine syrette and jabbed it in his right leg. There was no need to cut his clothing; it was ripped off him. He was completely inert, giving no sign of life save for an occasional moving shadow in the depths of his shocked eyes.39
On top of all this chaos was the self-made problem of the timetable. Nobody offshore had a clear enough picture of the situation onshore to tinker with the scheduled waves – so more troops and many soft-skinned vehicles unloaded onto the beaches, providing a plethora of targets for the defenders. Inland artillery batteries had long since joined in, barely needing to correct their fire, safe in the knowledge that every round would damage something. Motivated as much by their inability to blow obstacles – which would send red-hot lumps of steel careering around their own troops and vehicles, as the German guns were doing – the demolition teams resorted to removing mines from the stakes, ramps, hedgehogs and Belgian gates by hand.
Once stripped of their mines, the navy discovered the obstacles were not as lethal as supposed. One of the keys to later waves of the 18th Infantry being able to cross the beach at the junction of Easy Red and Fox Green, with relatively light losses, were the performances of LCT-30 and LCI-544. Skippered by two young USNR lieutenants, Sidney W. Brinker and E. B. Koehler, at about 1030 hours, both craft steamed at full speed through the obstacles, guns blazing at WN62, the defenders of the Colleville draw. Hastily unloading her passengers, LCI-554 managed to escape, but after disembarking her GIs, LCT-30 was riddled by shellfire and peppered with holes, which knocked out all power and flooded the engine room. This forced her abandonment – but the intrepid captains had demonstrated that demined beach obstacles could be breached by ramming, under cover of destroyers peppering the shore positions with five-inch gunfire.40
At this time Colonel George Smith’s 18th Infantry had begun to arrive. They had been due at 0930, but had been directed to wait offshore for thirty minutes. With most of Taylor’s 16th Infantry focused on the fighting around E-3 (the Colleville draw), Brigadier General Wyman, the Big Red One’s assistant divisional commander, directed Smith to take over Taylor’s former task of opening E-1. It took time for Smith to collect his regiment, as their craft became dispersed, having to land where they could. Although they reached the shore with relatively few casualties, twenty-eight of the craft bearing them were destroyed by underwater obstacles.
Landing to the east of the E-1 draw was Dean Weissert of Eustis, Nebraska, a linesman with the Communications Platoon in Headquarters Company, First Battalion, 18th Infantry. Weissert remembered their ‘vile run-in’, the coxswain opening out the engine and the jar of grounding as they hit the sands. ‘We took off running, and got into water about chest deep; it didn’t take us long to get to the beach, and we made it across the sands with everything in our pack soaked.’41 Private Carlton Barretter, from Albany, New York, and with the same unit as Weissert – found himself under fire in neck-deep water, but this did not deter him from time after time rescuing floundering comrades and saving them from drowning. These efforts would bring him one of four Medals of Honor awarded on D-Day.
Beyond the beach lay wire which had already been breached and the marsh at the foot of the bluffs, as Weissert recollected: ‘We came up to a little swamp. Green, slimy looking water, and we had to cross it. And I thought, well, maybe this isn’t very deep. But the water just crept up on me, shoulder deep, so as I was still wearing a couple of life preservers, I inflated them, and crossed the water bobbing up and down, as I didn’t want to swallow any of that green, slimy muck.’42
Landing with Company ‘E’ in the Second Battalion of the 18th was Ernie Leh, the corporal who remembered the soldier being shot days earlier in Dorchester. Aboard his LCI he had been terribly seasick. ‘I threw up in my helmet. All through the night I lay in misery below deck, hardly caring whether I lived or died’, he recalled. Stepping into four feet of rough, icy water, Leh witnessed how close all of the Big Red One were to extinction. By the time he was making his way up the bluffs, he felt the call of nature. ‘I had to relieve myself. I stopped and went behind a rock about five or six feet high. Others passed me and went on ahead. I remember seeing a major and some enlisted men pass by. Just as they got over the next rise, a shell exploded right in their midst, getting all of them. That would have been me had I not stopped.’43
At around 1020 hours, Leh’s unit – the Second Battalion of the 18th – supported by the fire of a lone 741st Tank Battalion Sherman, started to force the E-1 draw. Initially they stalled, but summoned by radio, DESRON 18’s destroyers then sailed within a mile of the sands, and sometimes nearer – perilously close for an ocean-going vessel – and were able to pump endless rounds of five-inch shells accurately into the other concrete positions. The ship’s log of USS Frankford noted at 1036 hours firing on one of the pillboxes at E-1: ‘Commenced firing using direct fire, range about twelve hundred yards [two-thirds of a mile]. On the fifth salvo a direct hit was obtained, a large cloud of green smoke was noted and the battery ceased firing. Our troops then advanced and a number of Germans were seen to surrender.’44 Captain ‘Hank’ Hangsterfer with the First Battalion of the 16th witnessed the moment: ‘From our vantage point on the ridge we could see … countless dead and wounded, wrecked landing craft, blown up tanks, hostile fire of all types. A US destroyer came very close to shore and was firing directly at a pillbox; after a few salvos it was knocked out.’45 By 1130 hours the entire defence of E-1 had collapsed.
This well-known image captures the ‘vile run-in’ to Omaha that many remembered, soldiers jammed like sardines in their puny Higgins boat. A sailor wearing a life vest (front right) peers out cautiously. An officer (front left), sporting the badge of the Big Red One on his left sleeve, stands to observe their progress. His men are crouching to avoid incoming fire, clutching their weapons wrapped in waterproof plastic, their helmets drenched in spray. The smoking cliffs of Omaha are a smudge in the distance, perhaps another forty minute voyage in this LCVP. (NARA)
There were other German positions in depth further up the E-1 draw who could see what was happening. One of them rapidly relayed the penetration to Oberst Walter Korfes, commanding the 726th Grenadier-Regiment. He received the message at 1140 hours in the Château de Sully (now a fine hotel), and warned his counterpart Oberst Ernst Goth in his HQ in Formigny – that their front was now porous and in danger of disintegration. This was in complete contrast to the optimistic picture painted only two hours earlier – recorded by Oberstleutnant Fritz Ziegelmann, chief of staff to the 352nd, from the commander of WN74 – that the landings had ceased and the beach was littered with burning American equipment.
However, with most German troops tied to their bunkers, if any counter-attack was to be made, it would have to be with whatever reserves Generalleutnant Dietrich Kraiss of the 352nd Division – also covering this sector – could muster. Two hours in battle can make all the difference, and on 6 June in Normandy the earlier mist and low cloud had been replaced by midday with bright sunlight – good flying weather for the Allied tactical air forces, and spotter planes of the big guns floating offshore. Generalleutnant Wilhelm Richter, based in Caen – the other general covering the invasion coast – was completely overwhelmed, with his troops behind Gold, Juno and Sword under seaborne attack and no reserves readily available.
Dietrich Kraiss had many challenges that morning, but his most important was interpreting the battle picture. Initially, at 0310, he had ordered his infantry reserves – the divisional Fusilier battalion, and the two battalions of 915th Grenadier-Regiment, deployed as Kampfgruppe Meyer (so named after Oberstleutnant Karl Meyer, its commander) – from their location south-east of Bayeux to contain the parachute landings on his western flank. By 0550 hours, Kraiss was aware of the far greater threat assembling off the coast. He halted the Kampfgruppe, which then remained immobile for two hours until at 0735 hours Kraiss ordered Meyer’s Second Battalion of the 916th back east, to seal the American penetrations first reported to him between Sainte-Honorine and Colleville. This battalion – comprising bicycle troops with heavy equipment borne on commandeered French trucks – took the better part of the morning to reach their destination, harried by Allied fighters and pedalling furiously over scores of miles of Norman roads.
Sixteen-year-old Grenadier Wilhelm Gerstner, who had just been drafted into the 352nd Division, recollected of his bicycle journey: ‘It was terrifying; we were always scanning the skies for Jabos [Allied Jagdbombers – fighter-bombers]. We were on and off our saddles all morning cowering in ditches while they flew past. It was uncomfortable. I had no water; my bicycle had no brakes – there was a lack of rubber. In the night some partisans had spread tacks across the roads and there were many punctures – but I was fine because I rode on tyres full of stuffing because there were no inner tubes available. Several of us whose bicycles buckled or twisted in these manoeuvres got a lift on the French camions carrying our heavy guns and ammunition. Then you would ride clinging to the front right mudguard facing rearwards and shout a warning to the driver if you saw anything in the sky. We had to travel slowly because a higher speed meant dust, which we soon learned would attract aircraft like flies.’46
These cycle-men would arrive at midday to meet elements of the 16th and 18th Infantry Regiments occupying Vierville, Saint-Laurent and Colleville. Though the GIs were tired, they outnumbered the cyclists and had better weaponry, endless ammunition, and air and maritime support. The commitment of the main reserve at the right time in the right place is a signature in many famous battlefield victories. Influenced by the early reports of American defeat at Vierville, Kraiss made a major error in despatching the remaining two battalions of Kampfgruppe Meyer to the area of Gold Beach, where the 69th Brigade of the British 50th Northumbrian Division was steaming towards Bayeux.
To Meyer’s not-insignificant force was added some of the bicycle-borne 30th Schnelle-Brigade under Oberstleutnant Freiherr von und zu Aufsess. Based in Coutances, we will meet more of this unit behind Gold beach. Collectively, these grenadiers would be overwhelmed by a combination of aerial attack and finding themselves up against far superior numbers. Meyer himself, Rittmeister Gerth (the Fusilier battalion commander) and Hauptmann Lochner, leading the division’s assault gun detachment, were all reported killed or missing by 2300 hours.47 This is where the fog of war worked against Kraiss – his poor picture of the battlefield caused him to throw a handy reserve in a direction where it could make no impact.
However, the timely arrival of two grenadier battalions at Vierville, Saint-Laurent or Colleville could have swung the battle for Omaha Beach back in the Germans’ favour. Throughout the day the Allied fleet, guided by its spotter planes, harried every road move they could see, and Kraiss’s troops – whether infantry, assault guns and mobile artillery, or trucks bringing ammunition and food up to the forward troops – were pursued to the point of extinction. At no stage on D-Day were any of the Omaha troops aware of anything more than hasty, local counter-attacks by platoons or sections.
Moving through E-1 in the afternoon and mopping up the few depth positions remaining was Walter D. Ehlers, who had just been promoted to sergeant and transferred to Company ‘L’ of the 18th Infantry, so that he and his older brother Roland, a sergeant with Company ‘K’, would not be fighting in the same outfit. From Junction City, Kansas, Ehlers was leading a twelve-man squad with plenty of experience of playing music but none of shooting at Germans. ‘One was a banjo player, another was a violist and a third played the ukulele,’ he recalled. Although he had seen action in North Africa and Sicily, Ehlers’ men had no battle experience: ‘My guys wanted to dig in instead of advancing up the beach, but I told them that was a sure-fire way to die, so they followed me up a path.’
The route they took was that initially taken by Spalding and Company ‘G’, but by the time Sergeant Ehlers arrived, on either side were the bodies of soldiers blown apart by mines. ‘We made it through the minefield to the heights without a single casualty, eventually got into some trenches and took out a pillbox from behind. You didn’t dare run up in front because they’d mow you down.’ All the while he had no idea his brother had been killed when a mortar shell hit his landing craft – ‘I didn’t learn this until 14 July.’48
Three days later, Ehlers and his men would be surprised by a German patrol, which, while covering their withdrawal to safety, he almost single-handedly destroyed. For this and his leadership from D-Day onwards, Sergeant Ehlers would receive a Medal of Honor. After the ceremony in November 1944 in front of the press, General Clarence R. Huebner put his arm around him, and explained, ‘I’m making you a second lieutenant.’ Ehlers’ natural modesty came to the fore: ‘Well, sir, I don’t think I qualify,’ was his response. ‘You do,’ said the general. ‘I wasn’t going to argue with him,’ recounted the humble Ehlers in 1998. ‘That was General Huebner, himself a Kansas country boy – like General Eisenhower – and me.’49
To fully open the E-1 draw, specialists from the 37th and 149th Combat Engineer Battalions had arrived from 1030 and, working under fire, started to clear mines to the front, while two bulldozers filled in its anti-tank ditch, and other men blasted gaps through the wall, or put down steel matting for easier passage off the sand. However, shells, mortars and bullets didn’t discriminate between units or ranks. The 37th Engineers lost twenty-four men on D-Day, including their CO, but by 1500 hours, the E-1 draw was open, easing the overcrowding on the beach where units had been arriving faster than they could be moved inland. This would be the only exit open to the Big Red One until the Germans had been forced out of Colleville on 7 June, opening up E-3.
Hyam Haas with the rest of his unit later drove through a gap in a stretch of anti-tank wall the Germans had constructed. He recalled that ‘many of our GIs had taken cover by this wall and they died in groups or just been blown apart’.50 Shortly afterwards Haas and his buddies were obliged to leave their open-topped vehicles and shelter under them for a while, as mortar fire rained down, and next he recollected a landing craft violently exploding that ‘sent a large amount of burning oil over our heads putting the bluffs ahead of us on fire. It seemed to me that everything was on fire and that it wouldn’t be long before we would all be dead.’
Soon, Battery ‘A’ and Haas received word to drive up E-1 and ride to the top of the western bluffs. ‘On the way up the road we paused in front of the pillbox we had knocked out. Two wounded German soldiers were lying on the parapet: one of them was vomiting blood. As we waited to go on, Sergeant Baynaird M. McNeil – later to receive a battlefield commission – ran over to me and shouted “Hey that’s your bunker.”’51 It was indeed, and remains in situ today exactly as it was on 6 June, complete with its 50mm gun, still pointing east in enfilade along the beach. The facade is peppered with strike marks from Sergeant Haas’s two half-tracks, with an equal number of chips around the doorway on the opposite side. In the afternoon, Brigadier General Wyman took it over as his command post, and would have seen the remaining armour and vehicles of the 741st Tank Battalion drive up E-1 at around 1700 hours, followed two hours later by the arrival of his boss, General Huebner, who took over WN65 for his advanced HQ, renaming it ‘Danger Forward’.
The capture of the E-1 exit, the first draw opened on D-Day, was undoubtedly a team effort, achieved by Spalding’s capture of WN64, and the destruction of WN65 by Sergeant Haas, navy destroyers, some of the 18th Infantry and a single 741st Tank Battalion Sherman. Some five-inch rounds from the attack transport Henrico – which fired more than 380 rounds of ammunition from her pair of five-inch guns and nearly nine thousand rounds from her 40mm – may also have assisted.
This is the WN65 bunker (left) with its 50mm gun (top right), attacked by Sergeant Hyam Haas of the 467th AAA (Anti-Aircraft Artillery) Battalion. His M15 half-track (bottom right) mounted a 37mm autocannon with two .50-inch machine-guns. The suppression of this pillbox was a major factor in the surrender of the defenders at E-1, and the opening of the Le Ruquet draw. (top right, Author’s collection; others, NARA)
This reflects the true nature of combat on Omaha: most progress was made by small groups from different outfits, thrown together by fate, rather than by formed units. Nevertheless, at E-1, Spalding – a future member of the Kentucky House of Representatives – had been a major contributor, acting without any orders or direction. The route his group took was through what is now the American military cemetery to WH64, today invisible amongst the trees. Their endeavours resulted in the award of a Distinguished Service Cross for Spalding and Streczyk, along with three other members of his ad hoc team. A similar honour was accorded to Captain Joseph Dawson, who had acted similarly to Spalding, but turned left at the clifftops, when Spalding veered right.52
Their blockhouse – sometimes named Le Ruquet after the nearby meandering stream – remains one of the most photographed relics of D-Day, and fifty years later the 467th AAA Battalion adopted the structure and placed a plaque above its gun to commemorate their activities in the area. WN65 also formed the backdrop of one of the better-known images of Omaha Beach (pictured), in which a column of the 2nd Infantry Division climb the heights in front of it. They are identifiable by their distinctive Indianhead badge worn on the left shoulder. The follow-on division was pictured arriving on 7 June, and the second man in the file has just turned to look at the camera. This was Private Vincent M. Killen from Pennsylvania, destined to die in action with the 38th Infantry fifteen days later: a reminder that D-Day was the beginning of a long liberation campaign.53
The concrete structure in the middle right of this famous image is the rear of Sergeant Haas’s WN65 bunker. It is 7 June and already another formation is pouring ashore at the E-1 draw. These troops are from the 2nd (Indianhead) Infantry Division. The second man in the file, looking at the camera, is Private Vincent M. Killen from Pennsylvania. He would die in battle on 22 June. (US Army Signal Corps)