13
Omaha

‘SO LONG – good luck.’

‘See you on the beach!’¹

‘Watch out for those French girls!’

‘See you in Berlin!’²

The young men of A Company were in high spirits as they boarded their landing craft at 4.30 a.m. and prepared to head towards Omaha Beach. Each of the six boats contained thirty-one youths who were to be in the vanguard of the attack. They were a tightly knit band who had trained together for more than a year. Many had even closer ties: thirty of them came from the same home town of Bedford, in Virginia. They felt part of one big family.

In the murky half-light of dawn, Gilbert Murdock shouted across to his friend Robert Bruce, who was clambering into another boat. He then gave a cheery wave to young George Roach, a slight lad of eighteen who was in charge of one of the company’s flame-throwers. Roach was grinning broadly. Although the air was moist and chill, it did nothing to diminish the camaraderie of the men of A Company. Nor did the fact that they had been nicknamed the ‘suicide wave’ on account of being the first to land. One of them went so far as to say it was a badge of honour and ‘something that we felt with pride’. Most brushed off the idea of death with the casual abandon of carefree teenagers. ‘We all expected to come back.’³

The man entrusted with ferrying these young men to the shore was Jimmy Green, an English buccaneer with a thirst for adventure and a keen sense of maritime history. At twenty-three, he was older than many in A Company and his squinted eyes and salt-stiff hair were testimony to his storm-tossed months at sea. Green came from the seafaring port of Bristol, whence Sebastian Cabot had sailed to the New World, and was a keen student of the Anglo-French naval wars. He felt he was making maritime history in ferrying A Company to Omaha Beach and, with a nod and a wink to the pageantry of the occasion, instructed his landing craft to set off in two columns of three, ‘like Nelson at Trafalgar’.

Green had spent a year escorting convoys through the treacherous seas of the North Atlantic and a further year with Combined Operations, surviving the catastrophic commando raid on Dieppe. He had also worked alongside the American Rangers and had been most impressed by their cut-throat attitude to warfare: ‘a pretty tough group who looked as though they could take care of themselves’.⁴

He was somewhat aghast, therefore, when introduced to the men charged with storming Omaha Beach in the first wave. They were ‘a friendly but shy bunch of fresh-faced country lads who must have felt at home in Ivybridge’ – a little rural town in Devon – ‘where they had trained for the invasion’.⁵ He found them polite and kindly – a group of helpful young men who would run errands for the elderly in their home towns. But they were entirely lacking the warlike spirit of the Rangers.

Their leader was a clean-shaven young chap named Taylor Fellers, a construction foreman in his previous life, who was the sort of community mainstay that could be found in any number of towns in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. Nicknamed Tail-Feathers on account of his prowess in the high school sprint team, he was widely liked and much respected. ‘Industrious, competent and thoroughly reliable’⁶ was the opinion of one who knew him well.

Jimmy Green found him ‘a very serious, thoughtful officer who seemed a lot older than our sailors, who were in their late teens or early twenties’.⁷ Yet the more he got to know Fellers, the more he felt a nagging sense of anguish – not just for Fellers himself but also for the young men under his command. Their task was a formidable one. They had to capture one of the four ravines that cut a gully upwards through the steep bluffs behind Omaha Beach, a narrow track that provided the only vehicular access to the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. It would have been a tall order even for the finest troops, but far more so for a band of teenagers who, to Jimmy Green’s eyes, seemed, at best, ‘an inexperienced assault group’.⁸

Allied planners had divided Omaha Beach into seven sections, each with its own codename: Charlie, Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red, Easy Green, Easy Red and Fox Green. Each section was to be assaulted by a designated company, with Taylor Fellers’s men of A Company leading the vanguard on to Dog Green. What made their mission all the more difficult was the fact that Omaha Beach, like Utah, had been heavily fortified with pillboxes, reinforced bunkers and machine-gun posts. There were anti-tank positions, mounted guns and multiple-barrelled mortars, as well as rocket batteries and artillery positions. All were connected by a zigzagging maze of trenches manned by snipers.

The beach itself was waterlogged at high tide and resembled a mine-strewn medieval moat. Next came the twenty-five-foot-high concrete sea wall, built like an enceinte and topped with barbed wire. And then there were the bluffs and cliffs that reared to a height of sixty metres.

Jimmy Green noticed the atmosphere change dramatically as the young men boarded the landing craft and prepared for the run-in to the beach. The jokes and banter came to an abrupt end. ‘I think they were realizing that this was it.’ Those who did talk were ‘quiet and subdued’.

Green’s orders were to land the men on the beach at 6.36 a.m., which required his craft to push off from the Empire Javelin some two hours earlier. Taylor Fellers’s men were to be followed by many more waves of troops arriving at regular intervals after the initial landing.

The craft set off under the cover of darkness and were still five miles from the beach when they happened across a second little flotilla laden with tanks. ‘What the hell are these doing here?’ asked an incredulous Green. The tanks were meant to land on the shore in advance of the infantry and should, therefore, have been far closer to land.

Fellers was visibly shocked. ‘They’re supposed to be ahead of us,’ he said. This was a crucial part of the landing plan. Without tanks already on the beaches, the young men of A Company would have no artillery support.

‘They’re not going to make it,’ said Green, who checked his watch and realized they were woefully behind schedule. ‘They were really ploughing into the waves, going as fast as they could, but they were only doing, what, five knots to our eight, and they were shipping water.’ He turned to Fellers with a grim face. ‘We’ve got to go in and leave them behind. Is that all right?’

‘Yes,’ replied Fellers. ‘We’ve got to be there on time.’⁹ He tried to put a brave face on this unexpected mishap, yet he felt a sense of impending disaster. A fundamental part of the plan had gone seriously awry.

A second vital element had also gone wrong, as Green was quick to notice. When the rocket ships fired the first of their salvoes, ‘not one came anywhere near the shoreline’. Indeed, most of them splashed into the sea more than a quarter of a mile from the beach. Green was furious. ‘A terrific firework display, but absolutely useless and I shook my fist at them.’¹⁰ He had already experienced the poorly planned Dieppe raid. Now, he railed against the architects of D-Day.

He was not alone in his anger. One of the youngsters on Gilbert Murdock’s craft spoke for everyone when he gave a cynical shout. ‘Well, there go our holes on the beach.’¹¹ Several nodded grimly, aware that without craters they would have no cover. Many more were too sick to care, vomiting into their helmets on account of the pitching, tossing sea. One young soldier had swallowed so many seasickness tablets that he could scarcely keep himself awake.

Jimmy Green had been told that the American air force would have bombarded the beach, causing additional craters that would provide refuge for the infantry. But when he looked through his binoculars, he could see ‘no marks at all’. Indeed, it was ‘a virgin beach stretching for three hundred yards with not a sign of any place where the troops could shelter’. He felt depressed at the thought of sending the youths into a trap, a feeling that was accentuated by the drizzling rain and leaden sky. ‘It was a grim, depressing sort of morning and the cliffs looked very foreboding and sinister.’ As he drew his craft closer to the shoreline, he spotted the first of many pillboxes hidden among the dunes. He thought it would be ‘a pretty formidable beach for the troops to take’.¹²

It was almost 6.30 a.m. and they were fast approaching the shoreline. Gilbert Murdock was ‘thinking and shivering’.¹³ A fine spray had left him soaked and when he looked down at his sodden boots he was alarmed to see that the landing craft was awash. The coxswain had also noticed that the craft was shipping water and ordered the men to bail it out with their helmets.

It was now, as they neared the shore, that they experienced their first mishap. Jimmy Green had just ordered all the landing craft into line when LCA 911 keeled over and started to sink, probably after striking a mine. It was fortunate that the men were wearing life jackets, for most were able to pull themselves from the half-submerged craft.

Only a few hours earlier Green had been given explicit orders: ‘Don’t pick up anybody from the water. Get to the beach on time.’ Now, he shouted across to them: ‘I’ll be back to pick you up!’ He hated abandoning them, even temporarily. ‘It really did hurt to go on, but I had to do it.’¹⁴ All his thoughts were focused on reaching the beach.

‘Where exactly do you want me to land?’ He consulted with Taylor Fellers as the two of them studied the approaching shore. Fellers pointed to the deep ravine that led to the top of the bluffs and said he wanted to land on the right-hand side. ‘And I want the other group to land to the left of the pass.’

Jimmy Green nodded, cranked up the engines and began to draw away from the other craft. He was intending to hit the shore at full speed, dodging any obstacles as he thrust the craft forward. A handful of shells landed harmlessly in the water, but there was so little enemy fire that he wondered if the pillboxes and dug-outs were empty. The bluffs drew nearer, the water grew shallow and then there was a loud crunch as the landing craft ground to a halt in the belt of shingle that lay some twenty yards offshore. The ramp went down and Taylor Fellers waded through the breaking surf towards the beach, fording through waist-deep water while his comrades followed closely behind. Green watched them disembark ‘in very good order. They didn’t need to be ushered out and about. They knew what they had to do.’¹⁵

Still there was no gunfire. As Green surveyed the scene, he felt a strange sense of the unreal. It was clear that the bluffs and sand dunes were heavily fortified, yet not a single bullet rang out as Taylor Fellers crunched his way up the beach. Indeed nothing moved or stirred. Green had landed the thirty-one men into ‘an unearthly silence’.

He had been planning to cover the men with his machine guns. But there was no need, for they were now all ashore and crouched on a ridge of shingle. Unaware that the defence of this little stretch of Omaha was being carefully coordinated, Green prepared to head back to sea in order to rescue the survivors of the stricken LCA 911. But before he did so, he first ordered his radioman to send a message of reassurance to their mother ship, Empire Javelin. It was upbeat, truthful and just four words long: ‘Landed against light opposition.’¹⁶

Omaha’s defences had proved a walkover.

‘Feuer, Wegner, feuer!’

Lance-Corporal Lang was screaming at the teenage Karl Wegner, ordering him to let rip with his machine gun. It was now or never: the invading troops were landing on a beach that was almost totally exposed. They could be mown down with very little effort. But Wegner had temporarily frozen, partly out of panic and partly because he had realized the enormity of what he was about to do. ‘I saw all those men in olive brown uniforms splashing through the water towards the sand.’ They looked young and vulnerable, ‘so unprotected in the wide open space of the beach’.¹⁷ He felt deeply disturbed at the idea of cutting them down with his bullets.

Wegner was a nineteen-year-old from Hanover, a boyish young lad who cocked a snook at Nazi regulations by wearing his military beret at a list and posing bare-chested for photographs. Like his teenage compatriot, Franz Gockel, who was at the other end of Omaha Beach, Wegner was stationed in a strongpoint – WN72 – that lay just a few minutes’ walk from the town of Vierville-sur-Mer. He had spent the previous few hours cowering in his dug-out, praying that he would survive the ferocious naval bombardment.

When the shelling finally came to an end, he learned that the worst of the damage lay inland. His comrade, Peter Simeth, poked his head out of the bunker and could see ‘the black smoke belching out of the fiercely burning village of Trévières’.¹⁸ The beach itself was completely untouched by the Allied shells.

The stress of the bombardment had drained Wegner. In the calm that followed, he dozed for a moment while resting his head on his machine gun. He was woken by a vigorous shake from another of his comrades, Willi Schuster. Still groggy, he asked what was wrong. Schuster pointed towards the sea and Wegner found himself looking at ‘ships as far as one could see’. He could also see several lines of landing craft that looked to be stationary in the water. In reality, they were getting into formation. ‘Suddenly, they all turned and began to come straight in towards the beach.’ Wegner was flushed with fear. ‘The sweat rolled down my brow as I watched these boats come closer and closer. My stomach was in knots.’

As they approached, he lived through a hundred nightmares. This, then, was it. Soon, they would be storming towards him. His commanding officer, Lance-Corporal Lang, sensed his fear and took the butt of his pistol ‘and crashed it down on the top of my helmet’. This had the desired effect. ‘The metallic clang brought me to life and I pulled the trigger up tight.’ It was something he had practised on countless occasions, but never against living targets. Now, it had to be done. He watched the landing craft grind into the shore. He saw the first enemy troops begin their advance up the shingle. And then he yanked hard on the trigger. ‘The machine gun roared, sending hot lead into the men running along the beach.’

Some collapsed into the sand. ‘I knew I hit them.’ Others were desperately seeking cover, only to find there was no shelter on that exposed beach. ‘The bullets ripped up and down the sand.’ It was so easy to kill; it took so little energy. ‘My mind rationalized it: this was war. Even so, it left a sour taste in my mouth.’ Wegner was shooting down youngsters the same age as him. Yet he knew that they would kill him, if only they could reach his bunker. ‘Now was not the time to think of right or wrong, only of survival.’

He pulled on the trigger once again and sent another hail of bullets into the exposed young soldiers on the beach. ‘After the first few moments had passed, my mind became automated. I would fire as I had been trained to do, in short bursts 15 to 20cm above the ground.’ Each time the gun jammed, he would clear it as fast as possible, aware that every second counted. ‘Willi kept the ammunition clean, as dirt would jam the gun, ready to load.’ At one point, he paused and looked at the beach. ‘I saw Amis [Americans] lying everywhere. Some were dead and others quite alive.’¹⁹

If this was the long-awaited Allied invasion, it looked set to end in a massacre.

The second wave of troops to land on that stretch of beach were the young men of B Company, who had trained with their buddies in Taylor Fellers’s team and had become close friends. One of them, Howard ‘Hal’ Baumgarten, had originally been in A Company and had only been transferred at the last minute. He was looking forward to being reunited with his friends on the beach.

But he grew increasingly alarmed as his landing craft neared the shore. The wind was stiffening and pitching their craft into the breaking waves, swamping it with freezing water. They were ordered to bail it out with their helmets, an unpleasant task given that it was swirling with vomit. Baumgarten could hear machine-gun fire and the muffled crack of exploding mortars. When he glanced at the shore, he saw a sickening bank of reddish-orange flame billowing skywards. Smoke and dust were drifting across the beach in yellow clouds, casting a chemical pall over the deathly scene. The feeling of optimism had been draining fast: now, it vanished in an instant. ‘Suddenly there was silence and the mood of the men became very sombre.’²⁰ Baumgarten had the impression of being landed into the jaws of death.

He glanced at his Rima watch, a gift from his father. It was 6.15 a.m. The shore was getting closer. He could see the white steeple of the church at Vierville-sur-Mer.

From afar, the noise had sounded like distant thunder. But now, as his landing craft approached the shore, the entire coast was roaring in fury. And then – like a blow from a hammer – his head was spun inside out as an 88mm shell detonated in the adjacent landing craft. It happened in a blink. The wooden hull was shredded to splinters, inflicting catastrophic injuries on the men on board. Some were blown through the air, some torn to shreds. Baumgarten himself was ‘showered with wood, metal and body parts. And, of course, blood.’²¹ Blood was everywhere, in the air, in the sea, on his face.

He stared through the spray, praying for the hell to be over.

‘We can’t go in there. We can’t see the landmarks. We must pull off.’²² Panic and confusion mired their approach to the beach. They were almost there. Just a few seconds to go.

‘Drop the ramp!’

‘Come on, goddam it.’

‘Keep your heads down.’

‘Let’s go!’²³

Baumgarten jumped into the waist-deep water just as a German machine gun opened up on the ramp. Clarius Riggs was the first to be mown down, killed in a spray of bullets. A strapping six-footer from Pennsylvania, he crashed face-down into the water. Baumgarten saw the surf around him turn red. Next to fall was Robert Ditmar, who lurched forward for ten yards before collapsing on to the beach. He was screaming in shock and agony. ‘I’m hit, I’m hit.’²⁴ He slumped into a tank obstacle and his body made a complete turn. He ended up ‘sprawled on the damp sand with his head facing the Germans, his face looking skyward’.²⁵ He was still screaming, ‘Mother! Mom!’²⁶

‘Keep your heads down!’²⁷

‘My God!’

‘Try to make it in!’²⁸

Sergeant Barnes had just reached the beach when he was shot in front of Baumgarten. Four others were bleeding to death in the sand, their bodies twitching and convulsing. Sergeant ‘Pilgrim’ Robertson had a gaping wound on his forehead. He was stumbling crazily, without helmet, his blond hair streaked with blood. Baumgarten saw him fall to his knees. He reached for his rosary. ‘At this moment, the Germans cut him in half with their deadly cross-fire.’²⁹ Private Kafkalas keeled over as shells and mortars erupted simultaneously.

It was a tableau so macabre, so terrifying in intensity, that it seemed surreal. ‘Men with guts hanging out of their wounds and body parts lying along our path.’³⁰ All around Baumgarten, fountains of sand were being kicked up by exploding shells.

Baumgarten saw a gleam of light on a German helmet up on the bluff. He aimed and fired. ‘A miracle.’ He had hit the man. His expertise in sharp-shooting had paid off. But German snipers were now aiming at him. He had already been hit by two bullets, one passing clean through the top of his helmet and another hitting the receiver of his M-1 rifle. Now, a monster shell exploded some twenty yards from where he was lying in the sand. It happened in a flash. A cataclysmic bang and a wave of lethal fragments. Baumgarten felt as if he had been hit ‘with a baseball bat, only the results were much worse. My upper jaw was shattered, the left cheek was blown open. My upper lip was cut in half. The roof of my mouth was cut up and teeth and gums were laying all over my mouth.’³¹

As blood gushed from the wound, Baumgarten dragged himself back to the water and plunged his head into the freezing surf. He then looked up, blinking, still bleeding profusely. For as far as he could see, to the left and right, his friends and comrades were being cut down. All were trapped in a hellish massacre from which there was no escape. Of his buddies in A Company, there was not a sign. It was as if they had never landed.

The truth of the matter was altogether more sinister. The unearthly silence that had greeted the lads on Jimmy Green’s landing craft was carefully orchestrated by the Germans. Karl Wegner and his comrades in WN72 had held their fire until all the troops were ashore. Only then did they fire. As Wegner had let rip with his machine gun, Taylor Fellers and his men were struck by the violent staccato of a dozen machine guns. They were hit from the left, from the right, from above. The guns covered every inch of beach. They didn’t stand a chance.

The other landing craft belonging to A Company (the ones that came ashore to the left of the Vierville ravine) had been fired on by the adjacent stronghold, WN71. On Boat Two, Lieutenant Edward Tidrick was horrified to find himself landing on a pristine beach.

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘We’re coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!’³²

As he jumped from the ramp, he was shot through the throat. His friend, Leo Nash, could hear Tidrick trying to give orders, but the blood was foaming and gurgling in his voice box. ‘Advance with the wire cutters,’³³ he cried. Seconds later, he was cut down by machine-gun bullets that hit him in an almost perfect straight line, from the crown to the pelvis.

On another landing craft, Gilbert Murdock was watching his lieutenant run down the ramp in readiness for the fight ahead. ‘He was immediately cut down by machine-gun fire.’ His friend, Rodriguez, was cut in half by bullets. Another mate, Dominguez, crashed over the side into water stained brownish-red with blood. When Murdock himself leaped into the water he sank like lead. The landing craft had grounded on a runnel, not the shore, and the surrounding water was nine feet deep. He clutched his life jacket and ‘punched the CO2 tubes for buoyancy’. It forced him upwards. As he broke the surface, the landing craft smacked into him and swept him forward to the beach.

He reached the shingle amid a sickening clutter of limbs and corpses, but glimpsed a moment of hope as the first of the amphibious tanks roared out of the sea. Within seconds of coming ashore, it was whacked by a German 88 mortar and exploded into an incandescent ball of flame. A second tank also blew up on landing, incinerating its crew. Murdock glanced back to the sea but couldn’t see any others. Most of the promised tanks had foundered in the heavy waves.

He began crawling on his belly, tortoise-like, inching his way through the bloody slime. He passed his comrade, Charles McSkimming, who had been hit in the arm and was begging for morphine. Murdock gave him a shot from his first aid kit and then continued furrowing up the sand until he reached one of the sinister beach obstacles, a refuge of sorts from the exploding mortars. He found two others still alive, including his young buddy George Roach. He was trembling from the ferocity of the onslaught.

‘What happened?’ Murdock could hardly form the words in his state of blank incomprehension.

Roach had been watching the unfolding catastrophe from his position behind the tank obstacle and gave Murdock the news in two terse sentences. ‘All the officers were dead,’ he said. ‘All of the non-coms were dead.’ The surf was churned with the dead and wounded, some of whom were trying to float in with the tide. Among them was Charles McSkimming, who found the tide lapping around his head just moments after Murdock had given him morphine. Most of those with the strength to haul themselves up the beach were being picked off by German snipers. So were those trying to rescue them. Two hundred and five men had come ashore with A Company’s landing craft. Within seven minutes of landing, Murdock reckoned that only thirteen were still alive.

‘You’re hit,’ he muttered to one of those lying next to him.

‘You damn fool, so are you.’

Murdock looked down at his leg and saw two spent bullets lodged in his ankle.

The tide was surging in at such a pace that one of the burned-out tanks was already half submerged.

‘Look, I’m a good swimmer,’ said George Roach, ‘and you’re not that badly hurt. Let me swim you out to that knocked-out tank in the water out there.’

The two of them slipped into the incoming surf and managed to reach the tank without getting shot again. When they worked their way round to the rear of the vehicle, they found they were not alone. ‘We could see three heads bobbing up and down. It was three men from the tank crew with their faces all powder burnt.’ It was hard to tell if they were dead or alive.

More shocking was the sight of the tank commander sheltering behind the turret ‘with his left leg off at the knee and the bone in the water and the artery in the water’. He was muttering deliriously, saying that ‘his men were of no value to him and they wouldn’t do what he said.’ He somehow persuaded them to swim to the shore before the tank was completely swamped. Murdock watched their vain attempt to reach the beach. ‘The last I saw, they were kicking and trying to make the beach, but they didn’t.’³⁴ Murdock himself clung to a jerry-can and floated aimlessly for an eternity before eventually being rescued.

Jimmy Green was horrified when he learned that every lad from his landing craft had been killed. It would haunt him for the rest of his life. ‘I was in some way responsible for putting them there,’ he said many years later. ‘I can still see those fresh-faced boys getting out of the boat.’³⁵

The post-battle report would describe the first ten minutes of the Omaha landings with chilling simplicity: ‘A Company had ceased to be an assault company and had become a forlorn little rescue party bent on survival.’³⁶ This was true enough. There was no one to give orders and no sense of purpose. Taylor Fellers’s mission had ended in slaughter.

German defenders on Omaha Beach observed the approaching American landing craft from their near-impregnable bunkers. ‘Poor swine,’ muttered one as the first troops prepared to land.