British soldiers advance inland, dodging concealed German snipers. A key objective was the relief of John Howard’s beleaguered force at Bénouville Bridge.
CROUCHED INSIDE THE radio room of USS Shubrick, his headphones clamped to his ears, twenty-four-year-old Edward Duffy was sucking on a lemon drop and trying to make sense of the crackled reports of events taking place onshore. ‘The voices over my phones were now describing the scene of fire, smoke, explosions and destruction, and the dead American bodies floating by.’
Duffy felt at a strange remove from the action. His own horizon was limited to a few feet: he was squatting in a metal shoebox of a room crammed with gyro-compasses, sound-powered telephones and a primitive computer for controlling the gun batteries. On the desk in front of him were all the essentials: two packets of cigarettes, a Zippo lighter (a gift from his sister, Agnes) and a one-pound box of lemon drops. He also had a ‘D’ cell red flashlight to be used if the ship sank and he found himself in the water.
For several hours, Edward Duffy and his six radiomen had been casting anxious glances at each other as the deep boom of mortars grew louder and closer. ‘We could hear the projectiles exploding in the water around us. We were below the main deck at just about water level, so the sounds of the explosions reverberated within the steel hull.’1
At exactly 9.50 a.m., Duffy’s headphones crackled into life. An urgent message was being transmitted from USS Texas, the ship overseeing naval operations for the western half of Omaha Beach. The message was intended for all ships in the vicinity. ‘Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach and we can’t have any more of that! We must stop it!’2 The message came from Admiral Carleton Bryant, who had received enough reports from the shore to realize that the situation was precarious indeed. Although small numbers of men had reached the cliff-top, it was imperative for the naval vessels to join the fray since they alone had guns powerful enough to knock out the German strongpoints.
Within minutes of receiving Bryant’s message, all the captains stationed closest to Omaha swung into action, manoeuvring their ships into water so shallow that their keels could be felt to shudder as they scoured the muddy bottom. Lieutenant Commander Ralph ‘Rebel’ Ramey was one of the first commanders to open fire, training USS McCook’s guns on to the German batteries.
With his jug ears and lantern jaw, Ramey had the look of a stand-up comic. Genial and big-hearted, he ‘sprinkled his conversation with country aphorisms’3 and laboured good humour. The youths serving under him thought him a dead ringer for Will Rogers, the vaudeville comedian whose witty aphorisms had made him a household name in America. (‘I am not a member of an organized political party. I am a Democrat.’4) But on this particular morning, Ramey put his wit to one side and focused instead on destroying the enemy. He kept up such relentless fire on one German gun battery that he destroyed the entire strata of rock supporting its concrete foundations. As the cliff crumbled and collapsed, so the strongpoint plunged down the cliff in a chute of rock, dirt and men.
If all had gone to plan that morning, Ramey would have been in constant contact with the fire control shore parties. Their role was to use wireless communication to direct and coordinate the naval gunfire. But most had been killed on the beach and the few still alive found that their wirelesses no longer worked. The reliance on technology, so central to Supreme Headquarters’ battle plan, was dead in the water.
Now, in an attempt to increase the accuracy of his guns, Ramey nudged his destroyer perilously close to the shore and kept up constant fire from a position just 1,300 yards from the beach. His finest gunner that morning was Gerald Grove, an Iowa farmer who ‘had the best pair of eyes on the ship’.
‘Grove!’ yelled Ramey for the hundredth time. ‘Do you see anything?’5
Grove could indeed see something. A few flashes were coming from a stone house tucked into a gulch close to the beach. Range was established and McCook’s guns went into action, blasting the entire area. The resulting destruction was witnessed by the journalist Martin Sommers, who was covering D-Day for the Saturday Evening Post. ‘Finally, a direct hit – a gun tumbles stern over teakettle from the wreckage.’ Sommers was surprised that Grove displayed none of the elation of those around him. Blank-faced and aloof, he looked ‘as though he would feel much more at home milking cows back on the farm than spotting enemy guns in battle from the bridge of a pitching can’.6
At one point that morning, Captain Ramey achieved a quite remarkable feat. As he blasted the bluffs, a thin line of haggard Germans could be seen emerging from their strongpoint waving the white flag of surrender. For the next hour, the Germans attempted to contact the McCook using a flashing semaphore light. Ramey soon tired of trying to decipher their messages and resumed fire. This time, the Germans made themselves understood. ‘Ceize fire!’7 was the misspelled message they flashed. It was perhaps the first time in the history of warfare that infantrymen had surrendered to a battleship.
USS McCook was by no means the only ship to take the offensive. Still crouched inside the radio room of USS Shubrick, Edward Duffy had just received news that a German officer on shore was supplying his fellow gunners with the coordinates of Allied targets. Duffy calculated the range of the German officer’s location and let rip, as he put it, with ‘a four-gun salute’. He scored a direct hit ‘and the tension was relieved because we had gotten one of the bastards ourselves’. For the next hour or so, the Shubrick blasted away at the shore, engaged in what Duffy called ‘Dodge City shootouts’. Although the Germans were ‘good shootists’,8 they were not as good as him.
Along the entire stretch of Omaha Beach, from Pointe du Hoc in the west to Colleville in the east, Allied ships were hurling vast quantities of explosives at the exposed bluffs. USS Carmick, Thompson, Texas, Frankford, Emmons, Doyle, Harding and Baldwin – along with many others – kept up a sustained barrage of highly destructive five-inch shells. The Shubrick and McCook fired almost 1,500 shells that morning. Other vessels dispatched even more. Young Felix Podolak was helping to arm the guns on USS Butler when he realized they were getting dangerously overheated.
‘We had to hook up one-and-half-inch fire hoses to hydrants to spray water on our gun mount.’ Even this did little to reduce the temperature. They were firing so many shells that ‘the barrels were running red hot.’9
Karl Wegner, the teenage German soldier stationed in WN72, had the misfortune to be in the very area under attack from the Shubrick and McCook. He was also close to the bluffs that Norman Cota and Charles Canham had chosen for their dramatic assault.
The American destroyers soon began firing directly at WN72, pounding away at the concrete bunker. One burst exploded directly on to the embrasure. ‘A chunk of cement struck Lang in the face. He swung violently around and hit the floor.’ Wegner’s friend, Willi Schuster, rushed to his aid and swathed his face in bandages. As soon as he was patched up, Lang went back to the damaged viewing slit and held his battered field glasses to his eyes.
‘Another huge force of boats approaching.’
The atmosphere inside the bunker had become increasingly tense ever since the first sighting of the Allied fleet. Now, everyone’s nerves were dancing on a high-wire. A noise outside suggested that someone had reached the rear entrance of the bunker. The bandaged Lang raced over to the metal door and covered it with his loaded pistol. As he did so, he heard a shout.
‘Nicht Schiessen! Ich bin Deutscher! Don’t shoot! I’m German!’
Lang peered outside and saw a wounded German comrade, ‘bruised and bloody about the face, with a deep gash on his right leg’. Lang opened the door and pulled him in. He then bandaged the soldier’s wounds and asked why he was exposing himself to such gunfire. The young invalid, Helmuth, recounted an alarming story. He said that his bunker was manned by Volksdeutsche – Alsatians and Poles – whose loyalty to Hitler had long been in question. When the Americans made a concerted effort to capture the stronghold, these Volksdeutsche told their German leader of their intention to surrender. The leader ‘became infuriated and threatened to execute anyone who did not fight’, a threat that caused them to take matters into their own hands. A single bullet was all it required. Once the officer was dead they turned their fury on Helmuth, the only other German in the bunker. He was badly beaten before fleeing for his life and seeking refuge with Wegner, Lang and Schuster.
Lance Corporal Lang was disgusted with what he was told. He picked up the field telephone and tried to call the adjacent stronghold, but the wires had been cut. He therefore decided to take justice into his own hands, asking for covering fire so that he could have his revenge on these detested Volksdeutsche. He was going to pitch grenades through the embrasure of their bunker. Wegner watched Lang make a crazed dash towards the strongpoint and witnessed the explosion triggered by the grenades. But Lang’s mini-offensive was to have an equally violent ending. ‘Fate was not with him that time. Fire from one of the landing craft cut him in two.’ Wegner was horrified. ‘This was the first person we knew who had been killed – and right before our eyes.’
The three who still remained in the stronghold now found themselves in a desperate situation – isolated, vulnerable and low on ammunition. It was bad enough that the Americans were advancing off the beach. Even worse was the fact that Germans were now killing each other.
Wegner and Schuster peered out through the firing-slot. ‘We could see smoke belching from some of our strongpoints, while others had fallen silent. We had no way to contact those that still resisted or to get further orders, since our field telephone was out.’ They felt they were doomed.
‘I guess you’re in command now,’ said Schuster.
‘In command of what?’
Wegner was momentarily puzzled until he realized that he was the most senior of the three of them in the bunker. All three had lost the will to fight and fired their guns in desultory fashion, aiming only at soldiers coming directly towards them. ‘My thought was simple: do not shoot at me and I won’t shoot at you.’ All of them wanted to leave, but abandoning their bunker would place them at the mercy of the much feared Kettenhund, or Chained Dogs, the German military police who were under orders to shoot anyone who abandoned their post.
In the end, the matter was decided for them. Schuster was about to reload his machine gun when he noticed that the belt only had 50 rounds instead of the usual 200. When Wegner told him to fetch some more, he said there were none left. Wegner was staggered. ‘I looked at him in disbelief, then realized we were standing on a pile of empty ammunition cans, belts and spent shell casings.’ A 50-round belt was all that was left from 15,000 rounds.
No less alarming was the sound of fighting coming from the bluffs behind them. It suggested that some American troops had already broken through the Atlantic Wall. If so, they were in a most dangerous predicament.
Wegner now took his first important decision as commander: they would flee the bunker and try to join the troops stationed inland. They would take the MG42 and the remaining ammunition. It did not amount to much: sixty-two rounds and two grenades, which they intended to detonate as they left the stronghold to give them cover.
‘We all crowded in the entryway. I took a deep breath and nodded to them. Both grenades flew out at the same time, explosions followed.’ Wegner sprang out of the doorway, closely followed by Schuster and Helmuth. In leaving the bunker, the men now had not one enemy but two: the Americans and the German military police.
They came under heavy fire as soon as they were outside. They dived into a slit trench and tried to catch their breath. Wegner glanced grimly at his two friends. ‘Both looked as scared as I felt. I asked if they were unhurt. Out of breath they nodded.’ Schuster momentarily poked his head above the trench. ‘Abruptly a cascade of rifle fire landed around us. I saw Willi’s helmet fly off and his body snap back.’ It was a miracle that the bullet glanced off him, leaving him unharmed.
The men now found themselves in the unnerving position of following the Americans up the bluff. They managed to reach the top and took cover in a drainage ditch that ran alongside the country road to Vierville. They were unaware that their goal – the village – was the same as that of Cota and Canham. At one point, they came across a cluster of dead soldiers, shot from the air by an Allied plane. Soon after, they stumbled across more dead. ‘For a while it felt as if we were the only ones alive.’
They eventually came across a platoon leader who told Wegner they should join his group. But he added a word of caution. ‘He told me to be wary of the Chained Dogs, because they might accuse me of cowardice and desertion.’10
Wegner was in total despair. He had fought until he had run out of ammunition; he had seen his commanding officer cut down by gunfire. And now he was at risk of being shot for desertion.
These were the dangers of being on the losing side.
All along the western end of Omaha Beach, men were nearing the tops of the bluffs – exhausted and slicked with clay but just about alive. For many, it was a moment of sheer relief. They had survived against all the odds, thrusting through Hitler’s Atlantic Wall with a combination of brute force and dogged persistence.
Cota and Canham had landed with almost a dozen radio operators and these now proved invaluable. As one group inched their way up the Vierville draw that led to the cliff-top, they came under sniper fire from the church steeple in Vierville. Colonel Schneider sent a radio message to USS Harding (codename Blondi) asking for naval support. It was fortunate that the vessel had on board a master gunner named Walter Vollrath. He now gave a lesson in accurate firing. Among those watching the results was William Gentry. ‘Vollrath’s first shot took off the tip of the steeple, his second, the tower in the steeple; the third, the bottom of the tower and part of the church roof and the fourth and fifth shots completed the destruction of the entire church.’
‘Fine shooting, Blondi,’ was the message from the squadron commander. Gentry was no less impressed. ‘It really was a beautiful sight to see.’11 Vollrath alone had a momentary sense of guilt. ‘I felt like quite a heathen knocking down the church.’12
The men at the top of the cliffs hoped that their troubles would soon be at an end, but it was not to be. Carl Weast and his group were crossing a field when they came under intense bombardment. One of his comrades took a direct hit from a mortar shell. He was blown ‘all to hell’, a death shocking in its violence. He was reduced to ‘a pile of entrails and shredded GI clothing’. Curiosity got the better of Weast and he went over to have a closer look. ‘This guy was a mess. I mean, you couldn’t even recognize where the hell his head was.’13
The mortar explosions stopped the Rangers in their tracks. They were in real danger of being pushed back over the cliff. And this is where Norman Cota once again proved his worth. He rallied the men and personally led them on a charge across the field, ‘instructing them to fire at the hedgerows and houses as they advanced’. Leading from the front, he proved that nowhere was a no-go area just as long as you had enough fire-power. ‘The machine-gun fire stopped as soon as the troops started to move across the open fields towards them.’14 They soon found themselves on the country lane that led to Vierville-sur-Mer, where the snipers inside the church had just been knocked out by the guns of USS Harding.
Cota and Canham had a rendezvous at the crossroads outside Vierville and agreed on a new plan of action. Their leadership had enabled them to get the men off the beach. Now, they had to lead them into Vierville and beyond.
Squatting inside his beachside bunker at the eastern end of Omaha, young Franz Gockel was unaware that American troops were scaling the cliffs. He and his comrade, Siegfried Kusta, were completely isolated, with their worldview limited to what they could see through the embrasure of their concrete redoubt. It was a sight of pure devastation, with more and more craft heading in their direction.
The two of them had lost contact with their commanding officer, Bernhard Frerking, and his orderly, Hein Severloh. The latter was hiding out in a small foxhole, but he made frequent trips to the nearby observation post with its sweeping panorama of the beach. When Severloh looked through his field glasses, he was appalled by the scene of human butchery. A ‘ribbon of bloody slime’ stretched some 300 metres along the beach in front of WN62. ‘There were hundreds and hundreds of lifeless bodies of American soldiers – in places piled on top of each other.’ It was a sickening sight. ‘Wounded moved around in the bloody, watery slime, mostly creeping, trying to get to the upper beach to get some cover.’15
For several hours that morning, his comrades had held the upper hand. But as the sun started to burn off the morning cloud, Severloh sensed they were no longer immune to danger. American soldiers were starting to fight back.
First to be hit was one of the strongpoint’s technical sergeants. He approached Severloh through their trench system, his face drained of colour. ‘There was dark blood running from two holes in his throat.’16 Severloh was next to be hit – a blow that struck so violently it was like being smacked in the eye with a horsewhip. A well-placed bullet had hit the front sight of his machine gun, slamming it deep into his eye.
Closer to the beach, Gockel and Kusta were under such a sustained assault that they decided to retreat. Under covering fire from their comrades, they made a dash for the upper position, where Gockel devoured a half ration of bread and a mess-tin of milk. He was wondering what had happened to his friend, Heinrich Kriftwirth, when the young lad appeared from nowhere, ‘covered with dirt, creeping towards us with a torn uniform’. Kriftwirth explained how he had been caught in the shock wave of a naval shell that had ‘thrown him against the concrete wall, and he had remained unconscious in a corner for a long time’.
It was clear they were all in grave danger. When Gockel peered out through the rear entrance, he could see Americans scaling the bluffs. They were knocking out strongpoints one by one. They had captured ‘those positions to the west and east of us which had suffered heaviest damage and casualties through air attacks and naval gunfire’.17 This enabled them to advance more rapidly and it also placed Gockel and company in even greater danger. If they did not flee soon, they would find themselves surrounded.
Still in his foxhole, Hein Severloh had come to the same conclusion. He could see Americans pushing off the beach in ever greater numbers, ‘climbing the sloping heights in long columns’. When he looked back towards the observation post, he realized it was under attack. He ran over to see what had happened to his two comrades, Bernhard Frerking and Lieutenant Grass. The latter was seriously wounded and could only move if supported, while Frerking was trying to work out how long it would be until they were encircled. ‘It’s now time for all of us to get out and abandon our position up here,’ he shouted.
Severloh passed on his message to the two besieged radio operators, Herbert Schulz and Kurt Wernecke. ‘You jump out first and start out carefully to the rear. I’ll jump out next.’
Frerking displayed the same decency as commander as he had done in civilian life, ensuring that his men headed for safety before him.
‘You go next, Hein,’ he said to Severloh. ‘Take care.’ Severloh noticed he used the familiar ‘du‘ for the first time. He suddenly felt sad, as if he knew he would never see Frerking again. ‘A feeling of sympathy, warmth and attachment welled up again quickly in me and, simultaneously, a deep melancholy.’18 He took a final glance at his old friend then grabbed his machine gun and leaped from the trench.
Gockel was also planning his escape. Grenades were starting to hit his position, flinging shrapnel through the air. He was alarmed to see that a group of American soldiers ‘had entered our network of trenches and were suddenly only twenty metres from us’. He ducked. Another grenade exploded, injuring him in the hand. One of his comrades congratulated him on getting the perfect Heimatschuss – a ‘home-for-sure’ wound.
But if Gockel was ever to make it home to Germany, he first needed to escape from the beach. Crawling through the network of trenches and then scampering up the bluffs, he began to make his way towards Colleville-sur-Mer. He was unaware that the Americans were already there. He was also unaware that General Bradley, still pacing the bridge of USS Augusta, had just received a message that would finally calm his shattered nerves. ‘Troops formerly pinned down on beaches Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red advancing up heights behind beaches.’19
Omaha was almost won.
British soldiers advance inland, dodging concealed German snipers. A key objective was the relief of John Howard’s beleaguered force at Bénouville Bridge.