11
On Utah Beach

THE SKY WAS still dark when Al Corry, a young American bombardier, was shaken from his sleep and summoned to a pre-dawn briefing with his commanding officer.

‘Come on, get up, time to get up!’

Still groggy with sleep, he and his comrades threw on their flying gear and made their way to the briefing room. Corry noticed a marked difference to previous pre-dawn briefings. ‘Normally there was a lot of mumbling going on, guys talking on the way to the briefing room, just discussing various little things.’ Not on this particular morning. ‘It was real quiet still,’ he said. ‘Everybody sensed something.’

Corry had scarcely taken his seat when his commanding officer, Colonel Story, burst into the room. He was a pugnacious warlord, ‘a real hot jockey’ who looked as if he were ready to take on the entire German army. ‘He had his hat cocked back on his head and a short stubby cigar in his mouth.’ He greeted the assembled airmen with a smile. ‘Hey guys, good morning, good morning, good morning. Well, here we are. This is it.’

His words were met with silence and blank faces, a cue for him to continue. ‘This is the big day we’ve been waiting for. That’s what we all came here for.’

Still there was silence.

‘We’re going to France at six in the morning,’ he said, spelling it out in blunt language. ‘As air support for the Allied forces invading the Normandy coast of Europe. This is to be the invasion.’

His words were met with a roar of approval from the assembled company. Corry joined in. ‘Oh boy,’ he yelled. ‘Yea botz! Yea botz all right!’ He’d been looking forward to bombing the enemy’s shore defences ever since arriving in England. For pulse-inducing thrills, it was a lot more gratifying than attending lectures at Syracuse University.

A note of caution was sounded by one of the training officers. He produced a map of the Normandy coast, handed the men sheets of transparent paper and instructed them to draw a thin red line on their maps. ‘This side of the line would be all Allied troops,’ he told them, pointing to the shore, ‘and beyond that line would be enemy territory.’ It was essential that Allied soldiers were not accidentally hit as they made their way on to the beaches.

Corry and company got airborne well before dawn and headed southwards across the English Channel, one small component in the largest aerial armada in history. More than 1,000 RAF bombers were taking part in the raid, accompanied by 1,635 American planes – a mixed fleet of bombers that included twin-engined B-26 Marauders, B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators.

As Corry’s Marauder approached the coast, the low-lying cloud gave him his first twinge of disquiet. ‘We’re going to have to go down lower,’ he told the pilot. ‘I can’t see the target! I can’t bomb. I can’t identify that bomb line on the ground. The cloud’s too low.’

He was acutely aware of the dangers of descending beneath the cloud: their plane would be exposed to the highly accurate German flak batteries. But there was no alternative if they were to unleash their heavy bombs on the right side of the red line, so the pilot plunged to 3,000 feet.

‘Not low enough,’ said Corry. ‘We’ve got to break through this darn layer.’

The pilot continued his descent until they reached 1,250 feet, whereupon they emerged from the lowest layer of cloud. As Corry peered out of the gunner’s window he caught a brief glimpse of the shoreline below. He could see they were approaching their target – the bunkers and defences set just behind the beach.

He felt sorry for the infantry soon to land. ‘I could see what they were heading into and I prayed for all those brave young men about to come face to face with death.’ Given the choice of being in a plane or a landing craft, he would always choose the former. ‘I thought, Man, I’m up here looking down at this stuff and they’re out there waiting to get on that beach.’

There was no time for further reflection: they were right on target and it was time to bomb the coast. ‘I set my inter-valometer [time device] so that every two seconds a bomb would release.’ He also used a manual trip switch to pick off gun nests he could identify on the ground. Seconds later, he watched the bombs explode on the beach below. ‘I could see Germans on the far side, running, running away from the front, and a couple of trucks.’ As soon as the bomb bay was empty, Corry gave a shout to the pilot. ‘Break off and head west,’ he said. ‘Take a right-hand turn.’

As they veered over the Cotentin peninsula, he got a panorama of the landscape below. ‘It looked like a real old castle with a moat around it.’ It was made even more picturesque by the flashes of light bursting upwards from the ground. It took just a few seconds for him to realize that the flashes were actually 88mm flak guns aiming at their aircraft.

‘Here they come! Let’s get out of here!’ He was shouting to the pilot. ‘Bank off to the left. Keep going down.’

The panic could be heard in his voice.

‘Give it some speed and let’s get the hell out of here.’

The pilot tried to dodge the flak but it was no use.

‘They’re bracketing us,’ yelled Corry. The German gunners had them in their sights.

As the pilot took evasive measures, something smacked into the plane with such force that it was as if a heavy boot had kicked it sideways. There was a sickening rat-tat-tat as the fuselage was riddled with gunfire and then came a shriek of twisted metal as something slammed through the cone of the plane. For Corry, seated up front, it happened in a flash. ‘I felt that someone had slapped me in the chest with a sledgehammer.’ Was this the end? ‘My chest did not exactly hurt but it was sore. Putting my hand inside my jacket, it felt kind of wet. I pulled it out – my fingers and hand were covered with blood.’

He felt inside for a second time and was relieved to discover that it wasn’t coming from his chest. ‘It was coming from my little finger, which had a big slice cut off the end.’ A piece of shrapnel had severed it in two. He reached for the memo book he kept in the jacket pocket next to his heart. ‘I found a small jagged flak fragment stuck in the cover.’¹ That memo book had saved his life.

Corry’s Marauder had a lucky escape. Within minutes the plane was limping back across the English Channel, surviving the voyage and landing without incident, despite its dents and bruises. Corry was served tea and fresh doughnuts by the Red Cross girls who worked at the airfield.

Their pre-dawn mission had been a success, or so it seemed. In common with most of the Marauder pilots targeting Utah Beach, they had flown parallel to the shoreline – and at very low altitude – enabling them to hit their targets with commendable accuracy. Corry had seen with his own eyes the bombs exploding on the correct side of the red line. But the attack on Utah was the exception rather than the rule – the result of good judgement rather than good orders. Shortly before the bomber fleet got airborne, Eisenhower had agreed to a request from the Eighth Air Force that pilots be allowed to delay their bombardment for up to thirty seconds as they passed over the coast. This was to avoid hitting the shore-bound infantry below, but it had unfortunate consequences. The 329 B-24 bombers targeting Omaha Beach dropped 13,000 bombs in that pre-dawn period. Virtually all of them exploded in the cliff-top pastureland, killing cows and damaging farms but leaving the German coastal defences completely untouched. They didn’t scour a single crater into the beaches, as was intended, in order to provide cover for the infantry soon to land.

‘The Air Corps might just as well have stayed in bed,’² commented one American officer watching the bombing raid from a few hundred yards offshore. An English captain was equally damning. ‘That’s a fat lot of use,’ he said. ‘All it’s done is wake them up.’³

This was not entirely correct. On Utah Beach, the Germans were already awake.

The great Allied fleet assembling ten miles offshore from Utah had pulled off the most spectacular conjuring trick in history. Force U’s 865 vessels had got within striking distance of Rommel’s Atlantic Wall seemingly without raising any suspicions.

More astonishing to those on board was the fact that the Germans had aided their navigation by neglecting to extinguish the blinking beam of the lighthouse at Cape Barfleur. It was as if they never really believed the Allies would land from the sea.

The Force U flagship, USS Bayfield, had been first to arrive at the pre-agreed rendezvous, at 2.29 a.m. ‘Anchor holding, sir, in 17 fathoms.’⁴ Those were the words shouted up to Captain Lyndon Spencer on the bridge. The USS Nevada followed in her wake, another lumbering ghost of a ship that was visible as a pewter-grey silhouette washed with moonlight. To Ross Olsen, one of Nevada’s impressionable young lieutenants, it felt as if they ‘were sneaking up on the enemy’ as part of some high-stakes game of cat and mouse. He noted that everyone was talking ‘in whispers, thinking that we might be heard by the Germans on the beach’. This, of course, was ridiculous: they were still a long way from shore. But it was a sign of everyone’s edginess and even Olsen couldn’t help wincing when the captain cut loose the anchor, for ‘it made a tremendous noise as the anchor chain went through the hawsepipe.’⁵

USS Nevada was one of the eighteen ships that made up the bombardment group – battleships, cruisers and destroyers whose task was to unleash a storm of high-explosive shells on to Utah Beach in the hour before the landings. These ships had manoeuvred far closer to the shore than the USS Bayfield and were relying on smokescreens to remain hidden from the Germans.

Also hiding behind smokescreens were hundreds of other ships, all jockeying for space in the crowded seas. These were the minesweepers, support craft and Rhino ferries – huge barges lashed together and laden with jeeps, trucks and armoured bulldozers that would be needed to shunt debris from the beaches. The Rhinos had been towed from England by the larger landing ships, many of which were carrying smaller landing craft.

‘Now hear this! Stand by all troops!’

The cry could be heard through the darkness as amplified voices played through the loudspeakers of USS Bayfield. Within seconds, there was frenetic activity as hundreds of boat-hands sprang into action. Landing craft dangled on their crane-like davits, whistles screeched, boatswains blasted orders and the smaller landing craft began firing their engines in preparation for the long run-in to the coast.

‘Stand by all troops!’⁶

For one twenty-five-year-old American captain, this was the moment he had been awaiting for almost three years. Leonard Schroeder was in command of F Company of the 8th Infantry, with five landing craft that each contained thirty-two men. The boats were to land on the beach in a V formation, with Schroeder’s boat in the middle of the V. His men were in the vanguard of the invasion of occupied Europe: if all went to plan, they would be the first to splash through the surf and storm the vaunted Atlantic Wall.

Schroeder was a bulldozer of a man, with a thickset face and a pronounced nose. He was known as Moose, an appropriate moniker for someone as stock-solid as the giant animal of his native North America. He was also likeable – a no-nonsense team player with big hands and a big heart. He had pushed his men hard, leading them through mock landings and using live ammunition. In doing so, he had transformed them from teenage volunteers into a highly competent force. He compared them to a team of football players who would shout down their rivals in order ‘to pump themselves up before a match’. But in private, he saw them as blood brothers who had developed a ‘sincere and honest’⁷ bond. Each man had become dependent on the other, which was exactly what he intended.

Some had a feeling of dread as the fateful hour drew near, but they disguised it with fake camaraderie. Among those picked for the initial assault was twenty-five-year-old Malvin Pike, who felt the tensions increase as the hour for landing approached. Even on the eve of their departure from England, he had observed a strange hush in the mess canteen. ‘Nobody was talking. About all you could hear was the knives and forks hitting the side of the plate.’⁸ It was unsettling, as if they were condemned men eating their last supper.

Once aboard the Bayfield, they had listened attentively to the speech by Brigadier General Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, the only high-ranking general scheduled to land in the first wave on D-Day. He spoke touchingly, powerfully, before ending with a vow. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow morning, six-thirty, on the beach.’⁹ He meant it and his men were visibly moved.

Leonard Schroeder received a more succinct message from his battalion commander, Carlton McNeely. ‘Well, Moose, this is it. Give ’em hell.’¹⁰ But for all the fighting talk, the two men ‘choked up’ as emotion got the better of them. They each knew they might well be killed. Schroeder wrote a long letter to his wife, telling her how much he loved her.

He and his men were among the first to board their landing craft, at around 2.30 a.m. They had spent a relatively tranquil night aboard USS Bayfield, but now they faced a rough ride through choppy seas during the four-hour run-in to the beach.

Boarding was difficult. In near-darkness, the men had a dizzying clamber down rope netting that was strung like a web over the sides of their transport ships. They were burdened with everything they would need for the next few days – backpack, rations, grenades, Bangalore torpedoes and mortars, as well as trenching tools, portable stoves and radio transmitters. The boats bucked and pitched in the rolling swell and Schroeder was aghast to learn that several soldiers had plunged from the netting and been crushed to death.

As the first landing craft picked their passage through the fleet and moved into formation, they were greeted by a sharp blast from a ship’s loudspeaker. ‘Good luck, fourth division.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ hissed one of Malvin Pike’s comrades. ‘I don’t know why in the hell they want to make that darn racket.’

‘Well, I can’t believe the Germans don’t know we’re here,’¹¹ said another. It was a sobering thought. It was possible that even now, the enemy were spying upon them.

It was crucially important that the men landed at the correct point on Utah Beach. The task of guiding them to shore fell to Howard Vander Beek, whose little craft, LCC 60, had been tossed violently across the Channel for the second time in forty-eight hours. His fourteen-strong crew wore the haggard expressions of men at the limits of their endurance. They had snatched just four hours’ sleep since their first abortive crossing and Vander Beek ‘had a feeling of being led to oblivion’, even though it was him doing the leading. His job was to ensure that the troops, tanks and armoured vehicles landed at the correct place. If he got it wrong, the entire assault would be in jeopardy.

Vander Beek had been warned of his responsibilities by Roosevelt himself. ‘Well, my boy,’ he said, ‘my life is now in your hands.’ So were the lives of the 620 men scheduled to land in the opening minutes of the invasion.

LCC 60 pushed off into the damp night in the company of a little patrol craft. When Vander Beek looked to his rear, he could just about make out the grey shadows of the ten landing craft packed with the men of E Company and F Company. Further away were another ten craft with the men of B Company and C Company. Even more distant, and lost to the darkness, were the larger landing craft carrying the amphibious tanks. These were to be released into the sea at 5,000 yards from shore and would travel to the beach under their own steam.

Vander Beek’s flotilla was just the first wave. It would be followed by hundreds of other vessels laden with jeeps, tanks and armoured vehicles, as well as 21,000 troops of the 4th Infantry Division.

The control craft’s wireless suddenly crackled into life and brought the first unpleasant surprise of the morning. ‘A Germanized-English voice from the beach came in on our radio frequency.’ The speaker was posing as a British Red Cross worker asking to be rescued from the beach, but it was obviously a bluff. Vander Beek felt ‘the first icy chill of confrontation with the enemy’.

For what seemed like an eternity, the flotilla pushed through the night until the first glimmer of day streaked the sky. By 4.30 a.m., Vander Beek could see ‘a faint silhouette of the Nazi-held territory before us’.¹² It was a pale, low-lying and wind-blown coastline almost entirely devoid of features. Finding the designated landing zone would not be easy.

The LCC 60’s navigator, Sims Gauthier, had spent much of his time below deck, relaying messages to the Bayfield as he sought to keep track of their exact position. Shortly before 5.30 a.m., he clambered up the metal ladder in order to confer with Vander Beek. Both men were admiring the flotilla fanned out behind them when their accompanying patrol boat flipped on to her side – quite without warning – and began to sink. She had almost certainly struck an underwater mine.

Vander Beek watched in shock as the crew scrambled out of the upturned vessel, only to lose their grip on the hull of the boat and slip into the freezing water. Gauthier felt sickened by the sight of the men ‘screaming, hollering and asking for help’. But there was nothing they could do: they were under strict orders not to stop.

Just twelve minutes after the patrol craft was lost, disaster struck one of the tank-carrying landing craft, LCT 597. Gauthier had returned to his navigation table below deck when he felt the force of a tremendous explosion. ‘Our little craft was lifted up out of the water and we came down again and there was a shock wave that came through that vessel.’ He rushed back on deck in time to see what had happened. The tank craft ‘had just been blown sky-high and everything just disappeared in a matter of seconds’.¹³

It was terrible to observe. Sam Grundfast, the ship’s commanding officer, was one of only three dazed survivors: the detonation had flung him through the air with the force of a giant catapult, so fast and violently that he had no idea what had happened. One moment he was on deck, the next he was underwater. He opened his eyes ‘and saw the surface of water somewhere above my head’.¹⁴

‘Skipper! Skipper!’ He could half hear the watery voice of his comrade, Richard Abernathy, who had managed to haul himself on to a chunk of floating wreckage, along with one other crew member. Everything else – ship, tanks and men – had plunged to the bottom. Like so many others that morning, these three marooned survivors would have to endure a long time in the frigid water before anyone came to their rescue.

Vander Beek was still trying to make sense of the unfolding disaster when there was a ‘deafening, thunderous roar’¹⁵ as wave after wave of bombers cut through the sky. As they crossed the coastline, they dumped their high explosives on to the German bunkers and machine-gun nests.

Shortly afterwards, USS Nevada led the long-range saturation bombardment of the shoreline, pitching thousands of tons of sand and debris into the dawn sky. The fireworks display was so spectacular that the crew on the Bayfield, anchored ten miles offshore, were left speechless. The ship’s stores officer, Cyrus Aydlett, had never seen anything quite like it. ‘The heavens seemed to open, spilling a million stars on the coastline before us, each one spattering luminous tentacle-like branches of flame in every direction.’

But this was just the opening act. Next came ‘mammoth streaks of fire, expelled by rocket launchers’¹⁶ designed to cause maximum damage to the shore defences. They skimmed the water at such a low level that the men instinctively ducked. At close range, it was terrifying to observe the destructive power of these rockets. Vander Beek watched in awe as ‘violent explosions and spectacular blazes transformed the scene’.

The sun had just risen, at 5.58 a.m., but it was a gloomy, half-hearted sort of dawn that was struggling to shrug off the night. ‘Low-lying clouds and billowing smoke and dust blocked out the colours [the dawn] might have painted the dull French coast.’¹⁷ Visibility was so reduced that it was hard to make out the shoreline. Sims Gauthier was trying to work out exactly where the men should land, but ‘the airborne debris, spreading smoke, dust and fog, curtained much from view.’ Worse still, he and his men were soaked to the skin, for ‘the raw Channel wind wafted salt spray upon our faces [and] waves often doused us with sea water.’¹⁸

The original battle plan had called for the amphibious tanks to be launched at 5,000 yards from the coast. They would then chug their way to the beach, half submerged and invisible to the soldiers manning the German shore defences. But Vander Beek was alarmed by the heavy swell: the wind was blasting off the land at twenty knots and the waves were more than five feet high. He took the decision to launch the tanks much closer to the shore, at 3,000 yards, where the land offered some protection.

To his eyes, these amphibious vehicles looked like ‘odd-shaped sea monsters, depending upon huge, doughnut-like balloons for flotation, wallowing through the heavy waves and struggling to keep in formation’. These sea monsters were in fact thirty-three-ton Sherman tanks that would go into action as soon as they hit the beach.

Vander Beek guided the giant flotilla to within 500 yards of the coast. Even here, so close to shore, the low sea wall and tufted sand dunes were scarcely visible through the salt-haze and spray. As they came within spitting distance of the beach, the LCC 60’s crew bade a noisy farewell to the troops about to land, with ‘shouted cheers, gestured support and encouragement, but only a few on each boat returned acknowledgement’. They felt desperately sorry for the men. ‘Some were too busy using helmets to bail out seawater seeping over their low-set craft.’ Others, suffering from acute seasickness, were vomiting over the sides. ‘Most, however, stood pressed together, motionless, salt-water soaked and chilled by fear and cold.’¹⁹

This sickly band of men was in the vanguard of the Allied army. In less than three minutes, it would find itself pitched against the Nazi war machine.

Robert Beeman had a grandstand view of the unfolding events, for he was standing on the windswept bridge of USS Corry. He was less interested in the landing craft than in the German coastal batteries, whose guns were pointed towards the Corry. He had been observing the batteries through his naval binoculars and had counted no fewer than seventy-five big guns within range. USS Corry’s position just 3,500 yards offshore made her a sitting duck.

Beeman was also troubled by the damage done to the ship’s mechanical system two days earlier, on their initial crossing of the English Channel. Captain George Hoffman’s attack on a non-existent submarine had left the vessel with guns that could only be fired manually. This would put them at a serious disadvantage if it came to a duel with the huge guns on the foreshore.

As Beeman fretted over their predicament, it seemed as if a miracle might be on its way. Two Allied planes could be seen approaching from the north and as they passed over USS Corry’s accompanying vessels, USS Fitch and USS Hobson, they laid a thick smokescreen by spraying a chemical mixture into the air. This made them invisible to the German gunners.

Beeman was expecting them to do the same for his own vessel, but to his dismay the planes headed back out towards the Channel. USS Corry was left ‘in plain view of the Germans’. When this news reached the men below decks, a terrible doom fell over the ship. The chief radio technician, Francis McKernon, turned to the radar man, Pete McHugh. ‘Without smoke cover, we can’t last much longer.’ Just three days earlier, in a moment of black humour, McKernon had played devil’s advocate by betting ten dollars that the Corry would get hit. Now, he regretted such flippancy, especially when he learned that the sea temperature was just 13 degrees centigrade. ‘Man alive,’ he said, ‘someone’s gonna have a cold swim.’²⁰

The big German guns opened fire a few minutes later. Beeman was still on the bridge and he studied their trajectory with mounting alarm. ‘Suddenly, several large splashes appeared in the water off the port beam, about 250 yards distant.’ He counted four separate explosions, five or ten yards apart, in a perfectly straight line. He could scarcely believe the ‘ability of the gunners to place their shells in so tight and precise a pattern’.

The men running the ship’s systems equipment were below decks and dependent on receiving regular updates from the bridge.

‘They’re firing at us!’ shouted Beeman down the wire. As he said this, he saw ‘a row of flashes on the high ground behind the beach’.²¹ Exactly fifteen seconds later, a row of waterspouts erupted in the sea just 150 yards from USS Corry. The aim of the Germans was getting increasingly accurate and it was clear they would hit the ship unless she shifted position.

‘Right full rudder,’ commanded Captain Hoffman. ‘Twenty-five knots.’²² It was a manoeuvre fraught with danger, for the vessel was operating in a mine-swept channel just 750 yards wide. Her turning circle was only a fraction less than the channel.

Deep below in the engine room, Grant Gullickson and his team were awash with sweat as they toiled to keep the boilers pumping at full blast. Over the noise of belching pipes and gurgling pumps, Gullickson could hear the big guns roaring into action.

The ship was still in a sharp turn when a German mortar slammed into her with full force. She gave a deep shudder as 1,500 tons of steel were lifted from the water. It was as if she had been shoved sideways by a giant fist, causing chaos in the quarters below deck, as well as on the bridge above. Robert Beeman was flung ten feet through the air. As he crashed to the deck, he was showered with debris and shrapnel.

Francis McKernon was also hurled from his seat. He was winded and only semi-conscious. There were lifeless bodies all around him. ‘They’re all dead,’ he thought. ‘I’m the only one alive.’ He turned his gaze to the young lad seated behind the 20mm anti-aircraft gun. He was still strapped into his seat, but ‘slumped backwards with his eyes closed and his arms hanging limp’.²³

The situation was worse below decks. Benny Glisson, the radioman, was shunted violently from his chair and tossed upside down. ‘Everything seemed to explode at once and I felt like I’d fallen into a concrete mixer.’²⁴ Grant Gullickson was in the forward engine room when the turbines were split open by the explosion. Steam erupted from the cracks and the pipes burst in two, with devastating effect. One of the boiler-men, ‘Big Ski’ Ravinski, took the full force of the blast and was left horrifically scalded.

Three direct hits had punctured a hole in the ship’s boiler room and seawater was now gushing in. Benny Glisson had smashed his leg in the explosion and had a deep gash on his head. ‘Everything was literally a mass of wreckage, debris and twisted steel.’ He looked round to see ‘a hole there big enough to drive a truck through’.

One of his comrades had 95 per cent burns – so bad, indeed, that when medics later gave him a transfusion, ‘the only place to stick a needle was the inner side of his big toe’. Another lad had ‘a gaping wound about eight inches long just above his knee’ while three more ‘were covered with oil and so badly burned that they were unrecognizable’. One young crew member had been trapped against a bulkhead and ‘live steam was spewing at him from a broken pipe’.²⁵ He was only saved when the cold-water tank above him burst.

A torrent of seawater ripped through the partition and Grant Gullickson found himself up to his waist. He ‘grappled to open the hatch’²⁶ in order to make his escape. His friend Ernie McKay was also trying to get out. The floor plates beneath him were torn apart and he saw water surging towards him. He was ‘completely disorientated, having been spun round’²⁷ and tipped into the bilge.

Emil Vestuti heard a voice crying for help.

‘Vestuti, Vestuti, help. I can’t see.’

Vestuti reached out to help, but it was no use. ‘When I went to grab his arm, the skin came off.’²⁸

McKernon was still semi-conscious when Captain Hoffman seized him by the shoulders and shook him hard. Hoffman knew that his ship was seriously damaged, but had no idea of the catastrophic situation below the waterline.

‘We’ve lost control of the steering,’ he said. ‘But we’re still moving! If you’re okay, I want you to go aft, steer north and get us out of here.’

McKernon rushed back to the bridge, still dazed, only to discover that steam was belching from a massive crack that ran across the main deck. It spanned more than a foot and was widening fast. The ship had broken her back.

‘Steer north!’ McKernon yelled to the men in the steering hatch. He still hoped they might sail out of danger. ‘Get us out of here.’ But when Big Joyich tried to move the rudder, it was completely jammed.

McKernon glanced amidships and saw a flood of water rushing towards him.

‘Everybody out!’²⁹ he shouted down the steering hatch into the blackness below.

Mort Rubin was still below decks when the ship lost all power. There was a sudden ‘black silence’ that felt like the end of everything. ‘In the quietest times, noises permeated the ship – fans, motors and assorted equipment.’ But now there was nothing. ‘This was death.’³⁰ Terrified of getting trapped, Rubin hoisted himself up to the deck.

He found a hellish sight. Men were panicking, screaming for help, begging for morphine. Those not wounded were trying to unlash the boats and life-rafts. Others were searching for the life jackets that would keep them afloat. McKernon helped the chief gunner’s mate hurl five-inch gunpowder canisters into the sea. Three feet long and unsinkable, they would be invaluable floats.

It was clear to everyone that the ship was doomed. Water was sluicing over the ruptured deck and in places it was already two feet deep. Lieutenant Commander Hoffman gave the order that every captain dreads. ‘Abandon ship! Abandon ship!’³¹

The water was up to the rail by the time Mort Rubin ditched his boots, belt and pistol and slipped into the water. It was shockingly cold. As he inflated his lifebelt, a splash of shrapnel broke the water around him.

Some of the wounded had been helped into the boats and rafts; they now tried to put some distance between them and the stricken vessel to avoid being dragged under when she sank. There was not enough room for everyone and many, like Mort Rubin, found themselves in the freezing water.

McKernon jumped in and plunged deep below the surface. He had to claw his way back up, spluttering and coughing as he clutched at the air. He found himself close to Hoffman and several others. ‘Looking back at the jack-knifed Corry, we saw the stern and bow slanted upward at right angles above the water.’³² The upper bridge and smokestacks were still visible. The rest was already submerged.

The German shellfire now began targeting the men in the water. Robert Beeman was struggling through icy three-foot waves when a shell exploded near one of the life-rafts, causing shocking injuries. One of his comrades, Norman Bensman, was hit ‘and the upper half of his head was sliced off by shrapnel.’ Another comrade ‘was blown to bits’.³³

Beeman clutched at a gunpowder canister and fought his way through a thick slick of engine oil. Some men inadvertently swallowed it, causing them to vomit. Several were half smothered by it.

There was worse to come. Francis McKernon and others were trapped in a corrosive cloud of chemical vapour released when the generators blew up. Those closest to the cloud began to gag in the water. A few were blinded and thrashed around helpless in the oily waves.

With the invasion now in full swing, the men knew they faced hours in the water before being rescued. The survivors would eventually be picked up by USS Corry’s companion destroyers, Fitch and Hobson. By that time, Gullickson was so cold that he was unable to grasp the line dropped down into the water.

‘Buddy, it’s great to see you,’ said the voice of the man who pulled him out. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’³⁴ Gullickson nodded weakly, aware that he was one of the lucky ones. When he went to see his friend Charlie Brewer, lying on a bunk below decks, he saw that he had been killed by shrapnel in his brain.

In the bleak haze of dawn, the first wave of landing craft approached the shore in V-formation, exactly as planned. As the beach became visible through the dampness, the two men standing at the rear of each craft let rip with their 30-calibre machine guns, flinging a hail of bullets on to the beach. Malvin Pike was crouched in the waterlogged bottom of his craft, along with his comrades. When he glanced backward, all he could see ‘was two hands on the wheel and a hand on each machine gun’. The bullets were zipping through the air just inches above his head.

The landing craft juddered to a halt, still a long way from the shore. It was stuck on a sandbar. ‘I can’t go any further,’ yelled the coxswain. ‘Ya’ll are going to have to get out.’

Lieutenant John Rebarchek shouted the man down. ‘You ain’t going to drown these men out here.’

The coxswain reversed the engine and managed to get off the bar. He then pushed the craft nearer to shore.

‘This is it. I can’t make it.’

Rebarchek nodded. ‘Pull the pin, drop the ramp!’ The men tried but the ramp was stuck and refused to budge.

‘To hell with this!’³⁵ Pike and his comrades leaped over the side into waist-deep water and began pushing through the surf. It was sixty yards to the beach. Bullets were spitting through the air.

Leonard Schroeder’s landing craft had fared somewhat better. Leading from the front of the V, it had made it all the way to the shore. The underside of the craft scoured the shingle then crunched to an abrupt halt.

‘For God’s sake, get off!’³⁶

The ramp was shoved downwards and Schroeder jumped into waist-deep water. He was followed by his men, who surged through the waves, dodging mines and barbed wire. Schroeder was in the lead. There was small arms fire. His sights were fixed on the low sea wall. Built out of concrete by the Germans, it was designed to stop tanks from leaving the beach. But to Schroeder’s eyes, it offered some sort of shelter.

The water grew shallower, the sand underfoot firmer. A few more paces and Schroeder hit the beach. He had just made history. He was the first Allied soldier to land from the sea.

The beach was gouged with deep craters from the aerial and naval bombardments: it looked as if some giant had stomped through the sand.

‘Goddam, we’re on French soil!’³⁷

The air was filled with grit.

‘Bombs, shells … rockets whooshing overhead, ack-ack from the German positions … an awesome display.’³⁸

Schroeder and company were raked with fire that skimmed their heads and splashed into the sea. On Bruce Bradley’s craft, a shell smacked into the side. ‘The coxswain was gone. The ramp was down. The boat was sinking.’³⁹

Schroeder led his lads in a spirited dash across 400 yards of sand. It was not easy, for their clothes were sodden and their waterlogged baggage acted like a dragnet. They eventually reached the low sea wall, where they had a refuge of sorts. In just a couple of minutes, Schroeder’s 150 men of F Company were ashore with only a few men down.

Schroeder now took stock of his situation. He had been expecting to be supported by thirty-two amphibious tanks, but they were nowhere to be seen. The planners of the Utah landing had made a disastrous miscalculation of the time it would take them to plough through heavy seas. They were still wallowing through the swell, inching towards land at an agonizingly slow pace.

Off to the right, Schroeder could just make out the men of E Company storming ashore under the leadership of Howard Lees. Among them was Teddy Roosevelt, panting heavily and feeling every one of his fifty-eight years. He had perhaps wanted to emulate his father, the former president, who had led the charge of the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill in Cuba. But he was struggling for breath as he ‘splashed and floundered through some hundred yards of water while the German salvos fell’. Roosevelt was alarmed to see that E Company was starting to take casualties. ‘Men dropped, some silent, some screaming.’⁴⁰

Further along the beach came C Company, many of whom had shaved their heads like Mohawks. ‘They yelled like Indians as they ran up the beach.’⁴¹ It felt better arriving in a blaze of noise. As men reached the sea wall they flung themselves into the sand and grasped at the dirt-filled air. Thankful to be still alive, they then poked their heads over the tufted dunes. All were looking for the landmarks they had studied back in England.

It didn’t take long to realize that something was seriously wrong. According to the maps and sand-tables used in training, there should have been a windmill and earthen structure known as Mud Fort. But here, there were no landmarks at all. Leonard Schroeder was puzzled, as was Captain Robert Crisson of C Company.

‘Dammit, captain,’ said one of Crisson’s officers, ‘there’s no Mud Fort down there.’⁴²

Roosevelt took a quick scout around the dunes and found ‘a house by the seawall where none should have been’.⁴³ He then crawled on to a higher dune and saw a windmill in the far distance. Only now did the terrible truth sink in: the ferocious swell had pushed them a mile to the south of their intended landing.

This presented a potentially disastrous setback. In their months of training, they had focused all their energies on learning how to capture causeway three, one of the four raised tracks that traversed the flooded meadows behind the dunes. But they had actually landed at causeway two, a mile to the south. This meant that none of their planned objectives could be undertaken. It also meant that all the successive waves, along with the tanks, bulldozers and jeeps, would also land in the wrong place unless they could be urgently alerted to the problem.

Adaptability is everything in warfare; such was the mantra of Colonel James van Fleet, Leonard Schroeder’s commanding officer. He landed shortly after Schroeder and was immediately informed that they were in the wrong place. He now had to decide what to do. ‘Should we try to shift our entire landing force more than a mile down the beach and follow our original plan? Or should we proceed across the causeways immediately where we had landed?’⁴⁴

The former option carried a clear danger: it would cause chaos for all the follow-up landings. But the latter was also far from ideal, for it would push junior commanders to the limits of their abilities. Their original objectives would be irrelevant and the terrain and targets would be different. In short, they would have to rely on their hard-learned skills to identify and destroy new targets that included bunkers, pillboxes and machine-gun nests.

Van Fleet had played a key role in training his men; now, he took a key role in leading them. ‘Go straight inland,’ he shouted over the noise of exploding shells. ‘We’ve caught the enemy at a weak point, so let’s take advantage of it.’⁴⁵ It was a typically pragmatic order from a man who had fought his way through the bloodiest offensives of the First World War. Although General Roosevelt may well have uttered his oft-quoted phrase, ‘We’ll start the war from here,’⁴⁶ it was van Fleet who gave the battlefield command.

The enemy’s defensive positions were clearly visible from the top of the dunes. There were five principal strongpoints in Schroeder’s zone of beach, three of them behind the dunes and the other two about 700 yards inland. Each consisted of a pillbox surrounded by minefields and barbed wire – easy to defend but extremely dangerous to attack.

Schroeder took the initiative, leading his men on an agonizing belly-crawl through the thick grass that tufted the dunes. This was no-man’s-land and progress was slow, for the sand was tangled with barbed wire that had to be blown with Bangalore torpedoes. As Schroeder reached the last of the dunes, he cast a glance back to the beach. He was astonished to see Roosevelt strolling around and ‘directing men like the conductor of an orchestra waving his baton’.

Schroeder’s target was a German stronghold inside the farm named La Dune. As soon as his men were within range, they let rip with everything they had. To their amazement, the resistance crumpled in seconds. Most of the defenders were still clutching their heads from the pounding of naval shells. They surrendered to Schroeder, ‘their hands up, looking terrified’.⁴⁷ They were even more terrified when they looked towards the beach, for the sight was little short of astounding. More than sixty landing craft had beached in the five minutes since H-Hour – the moment when the first troops were set ashore – along with tanks, armoured vehicles and specially adapted bulldozers. The tide was out, exposing a watery expanse of sand that was already jammed with military hardware. And this was just the first wave. In its wake came hundreds more tanks and jeeps, along with the Naval Combat Demolition Units and Engineer Battalions – 500 specialists whose task was to destroy the beach obstacles while the tide was still low and then shove the wreckage out of the way. This would enable even greater numbers of landing craft to reach the shore.

While the Germans stared at the beach, Schroeder stared at them. ‘They were the first we had ever seen.’ He seized their weapons and then took out his trench knife ‘and proceeded to cut all their web equipment from their bodies’ in order to deprive them of their cartridge and pistol belts. One of the prisoners thought he was going to be stabbed and ‘hit the panic button’, making a crazed dash towards the beach. Schroeder’s men were quick to respond. ‘I suppose half the company put bullets into him, thinking he was trying to get away.’⁴⁸ Schroeder was surprised to find that many who surrendered were not German, but Czechs and Poles serving under German officers.

He now pushed on inland, killing two Germans who stood in his way. At one point, a shard of flying shrapnel hit his pistol and broke it in two. The gunfire increased in intensity as he pushed through a minefield and he was hit in the arm by two bullets from a machine gun. He felt no pain, for he was numbed by shock. ‘The blood was flowing’ – it was a serious wound – ‘but I continued to lead my men through the minefield towards the village.’⁴⁹ One of Schroeder’s young lieutenants, Lawrence Hubbard, shouted to those behind him, warning them about some partially concealed mines. As he did so, he stepped on one himself and ‘crumpled under the explosion’.⁵⁰

Others were also falling victim to the mines. Captain George Mabry was yelling to a group of seven men when one of them triggered a series of explosions. In seconds, three were killed and four badly injured. Mabry himself had a lucky escape when he inadvertently trod on a mine. ‘The explosion slammed me against the ground with a tremendous thud.’⁵¹ He was badly shaken but suffered no injuries.

Howard Lees and his men from E Company had landed at the same time as Leonard Schroeder. After picking their way through the minefield, they saw a glittering prize. Just a few yards further inland was the beginning of causeway one, the raised track that ran like an arrow across the flooded meadows towards Pouppeville. Creeping forward with extreme caution, they advanced on to the causeway. Malvin Pike noticed movement on each side and whispered to the men behind him that ‘the Germans were in the water, hiding in the weeds and brush.’⁵² They now did the same, shooting at the enemy as they inched through the water.

As they came to the end of the causeway, the Pouppeville church tower was clearly visible. Captain George Mabry was in the lead, unsure as to whether the American airborne troops had already captured the village. He shouted a warning to his men. ‘Let’s not shoot our own paratroopers.’⁵³

He sent Malvin Pike forward towards a low bridge. ‘As I approached the undergrowth, I saw a helmet, but as it went down I couldn’t tell if it was American or German.’⁵⁴ Pike reported back to Captain Mabry on what he had seen. The captain knew exactly what to do. All American troops had been issued with little orange flags to be used to identify themselves. He now put a flag on to a stick and held it over his head. ‘An orange flag waved back and forth from a spot on the other side of the bridge.’⁵⁵ Soon after, two paratroopers stood up and greeted Pike.

‘Fourth Division?’

‘Yes.’

They smiled, shook hands and expressed wonder at Pike’s newly issued combat gear that looked alarmingly similar to the enemy kit. ‘Where in the hell did you get those jackets? We thought you were German paratroopers when we saw you coming across the causeway.’⁵⁶

A few minutes later, they were joined by a third paratrooper, Eugene Brierre. He brought news that the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Major-General Maxwell Taylor, was in a nearby hedgerow. Brierre told Pike that the general ‘would surely be glad’⁵⁷ to meet with Captain Mabry.

The captain now went forward and gave the general a crisp salute before warmly shaking his hand. He then motioned to the rest of his men to come forward. Maxwell Taylor was almost overcome with emotion. ‘Very soon, the advance guard of the Eighth Infantry appeared, to the cheers of our paratroopers.’⁵⁸ It was a historic moment, as everyone knew. Here on the windswept shores of the Cotentin peninsula, the seaborne and airborne assault teams had succeeded in linking up, seizing one of the four causeways so crucial to the day.

Leonard Schroeder was among those aware of the symbolism of the moment. But he was also in considerable pain from the machine-gun bullets that had passed through his arm. Within minutes of the link-up, he fainted from loss of blood and then slipped into unconsciousness. He wouldn’t wake up for several hours. When he did come round, he found himself in another world – a tidy canvas medical tent surrounded by doctors.

British commandos head for Sword Beach. Among those aboard Landing Craft 503 (above right) was Cliff Morris. ‘We felt so bad that we began to wish we were dead.’