The Allies’ powerful naval guns transformed the battle for the beaches. USS Nevada fires deadly salvoes at Utah Beach.
BERCHTESGADEN WAS ENJOYING a glorious June morning, one perfectly poised between spring and summer. The air smelled fresh as it swept off the high slopes of the Obersalzberg and the twirls of alpine ragwort were nodding in the sunshine. In the mountain valley, the twin spires of St Peter and Johannes cast truncated shadows across the cobblestones below.
Hitler awoke late: the exact time is contested. His loyal adjutant, Otto Günsche, said that he saw the Führer enter the great hall of the Berghof as early as 8 a.m. He even claimed to have heard Hitler say to two of his generals: ‘Gentlemen, this is the invasion. I have said all along that this is where it would come.’1 But Karl von Puttkamer insisted that the Berghof’s clocks had already struck nine when General Rudolf Schmundt went to wake the Führer. He added that Hitler had been fast asleep and emerged from his bedroom in his dressing gown: only then did he order his key generals to make their way up to the Berghof from the village below. While he awaited their arrival, he got dressed in his customary black trousers, field grey tunic, white shirt and brown tie. The Iron Cross, First Class, was pinned to his left breast.
Puttkamer found the Führer ‘quiet and composed’, as were all the Berghof staff that morning. Unlike Otto Günsche, Puttkamer said that Hitler was telling everyone ‘that this was not the main invasion’. Yet it was a sign of his anxiety, perhaps, that he ‘kept repeating this over and over again’. None of the assembled company agreed. ‘He was rather isolated in this opinion,’2 said Puttkamer with his customary tact.
It so happened that the Führer had arranged to meet the new Hungarian premier, Döme Sztojay, at noon that day. The meeting was to take place in Schloss Klessheim, a baroque wedding cake of a palace in Salzburg, just twelve miles or so from the Berghof. Hitler often used this castle for state dignitaries, for it was a jewel-box of Italianate luxury, from its crystal-drop chandeliers to its Venetian Old Masters. Having made the short journey to the schloss, he paused momentarily in one of the ante-rooms in order to receive the latest update from Normandy. General Warlimont was surprised to find the Führer so upbeat. ‘He was brimming over with confidence and in his usual manner he gave the impression of a man who hadn’t a worry in the world, neither for himself nor for Germany.’
‘Well, it has begun,’3 he snapped with glee, before bursting into the adjacent conference room to greet Sztojay, eschewing the normal protocol. Earlier he had told Goebbels that he was ‘absolutely certain’ the Allied troops would be repulsed. ‘If we repel the invasion,’ he said, ‘then the scene in the war will be completely transformed.’4
Others were not so sure. Puttkamer was gravely concerned by the news from Normandy and ‘had the distinct feeling that things would not work out this time unless the Allies were thrown back into the sea immediately’. General Warlimont agreed. When he studied the latest reports from Normandy, he felt ‘the situation seemed to be quite grave.’5 He assumed that Hitler had already released the two panzer divisions stationed near Paris and that they were even now heading towards the landing beaches. But this was not the case: it was only when his meeting with the Hungarian delegation was concluded that Hitler gave the necessary orders.
Among the other dignitaries assembled at Schloss Klessheim was Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall of the Luftwaffe. As Hitler unrolled a map of Normandy and spread it across the marble table, he turned to Göring with a look of triumph. ‘They’re landing here and here,’ he said, stabbing his finger at the map. ‘Just where we expected.’6 But if the landings were indeed taking place where Hitler expected (which is open to question), the manner in which they were unfolding was to prove alarmingly unpredictable – and nowhere more so than in the shallow waters off Omaha Beach.
General Omar Bradley was pacing the spray-soaked bridge of USS Augusta, anchored some ten miles off Omaha Beach. He had squeezed a wedge of cotton wool into each ear in a vain attempt to muffle the thunderous roar of the ship’s big guns; he also had a swathe of bandage on his nose. It was covering a huge boil that the ship’s doctors had lanced just a few hours earlier.
Bradley was General Eisenhower’s principal American commander on D-Day – a salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner who took blows and punches squarely on the chin. There were some who whispered that he had been over-promoted, while others noted that he lacked the folksy charm of his friend Eisenhower. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had gathered his officers and delivered a pre-battle address that was decidedly misplaced. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told his audience, ‘this is going to be the greatest show on earth. You are honoured by having grandstand seats.’ One of those assembled officers had the temerity to correct him, albeit in jovial fashion. ‘Hell goddamn! We’re not in the grandstand! We’re down on the gridiron.’7
General Bradley was one of the few to find himself in the grandstand that morning and it was so unnerving that he was close to breaking point. His anxiety was due in large part to the total absence of news from Omaha Beach. Not a single wireless report had been picked up on the ship’s radio and whenever Bradley turned his binoculars to the distant shoreline, he saw nothing but scuds of yellow smoke.
The role of the senior commander can be a lonely one. Stuck on the bridge of the Augusta, at a far remove from the action, Bradley confessed to being consumed by ‘grave personal anxiety and frustration’. When he began to receive the first fragmentary reports from the beach, they only served to increase that anxiety. ‘We could piece together only an incoherent account of sinkings, swampings, heavy enemy fire and chaos on the beach.’8 He sensed that things were going badly, ‘that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe’ and that ‘there was little hope we could force the beach.’9
This was not so far from the truth. As Bradley blinked into his binoculars for the umpteenth time that morning, young Wally Blanchard was getting a rather closer view of the unfolding massacre. Blanchard was the Cockney frogman who had done such sterling work in clearing the underwater mines on Gold Beach. No sooner had he completed that perilous task than he was ordered to lend a hand on neighbouring Omaha.
He was quick to realize that he was entering a twilight zone of carnage and chaos. As his little craft approached the shoreline he was caught in such a deluge of fire that he had no option but to fling himself overboard, not in search of mines but safety. ‘Practically the first thing I became aware of was a lot of objects in the water and the peculiar colour of the water and the froth.’ The sea was foaming with blood.
Over the din of battle, Blanchard was appalled by ‘the cries and the screams, and an awful lot of young men, bodies, nudging you in the water’. On several occasions he had to plunge deep below the surface as gunfire clipped around his head, ‘pinging and clanging like rain’. When he surfaced and looked to the shore, he saw corpses and body parts being sluiced in with the tide, along with a churning mass of detritus: deflated life jackets, abandoned wireless sets and sodden ration packs. The surf was so thick with diesel oil that it slapped noisily at the shingle, sluicing everything with a sticky film.
For the survivors of Omaha Beach, this apocalyptic vision was to acquire a searing intensity that time would never diminish. Years would pass, decades, yet a part of Wally Blanchard would be for ever on Omaha. ‘People scream, they shout. They call out for mothers and Lord knows what.’10
For some, the tableau of slaughter would haunt them to the grave. Even sleep brought no respite. William Marshall was a young American engineer fighting to stay alive as he clawed his way up the beach. ‘As I came around the end of a stalled tank, I found myself staring horrified into the chest cavity of a mutilated corpse. It was cut diagonally in two, from the left armpit to the bottom of the right ribcage.’
Marshall would try to forget, try to move on, yet still the images would remain, and always in vivid Technicolor. ‘The upper part, along with the viscera, was nowhere to be seen; the lower part was lying prone before me, naked except for the brown GI shoes that identified it as being recently part of a US soldier.’11
In such extreme situations the passage of time that D-Day morning became a flexible thread, one that stretched and slackened according to the intensity of events happening all around. As Cliff Morris and his commandos fought their way towards Bénouville Bridge, they felt the morning flash by on the wing of an arrow. But for others – especially those on Omaha – every second was counted out in screams of pain.
The sickly morning sun had yet to break through the cloud when General Bradley started to receive concrete news of the unfolding disaster on the shoreline. It came from ashen-faced coxswains who had survived the run-in to the shore. They brought a sharpened focus to the blur that Bradley had seen through his binoculars, recounting tales of six-foot breakers that pounded their landing craft and a tidal rip that had driven them far from their appointed zones. On the eastern sector of beach, the Channel waters had proved particularly merciless, swallowing twenty-seven of the twenty-nine amphibious tanks launched at sea.
‘A nightmare.’ That was Bradley’s overriding thought as he watched hundreds of landing craft circling in the distant shallows, unable to land because the beach was so choked with junk. What was to be done? What orders should he give? If ever there was time for leadership, it was now.
‘Privately, I considered evacuating the beach-head and directing the follow-up troops to Utah Beach or the British beaches.’ But he knew that evacuation was logistically impossible and that a diversion of troops would wreck the entire invasion plan. It would also condemn those already on the beach to certain death. ‘I agonized over the withdrawal decision, praying that our men could hang on.’12
It was in this moment of desperation that Bradley chose to deploy two of the most formidable weapons in his arsenal, both of which came equipped with high-explosive charges. Norman Cota and Charles Canham were to be dispatched to Omaha Beach with the unenviable task of saving the landing from catastrophe. Cota was a brigadier general, Canham a colonel, but their ranks were only partly relevant to everything that was to follow. More crucially, both were tried and tested leaders accustomed to getting their way.
Colonel Canham was the more unusual of the two. He had the pinched facial features of a physician and a look so sinister as to be almost contrived. His steel-rimmed glasses accentuated the narrowness of his eyes (he looked uncannily like Himmler) and magnified his uncompromising gaze. Those caught in that gaze were left with the uncomfortable feeling that they’d been trapped, like a rabbit caught in headlamps. Canham’s most remarkable feature was his clipped moustache – more angular than Hitler’s yet no less striking. His men were frankly terrified of him. ‘A fiery old guy who spat fire and brimstone,’ thought Felix Branham, who added that he was ‘so tough that we used to call ourselves Colonel Canham’s Concentration Camp’.13 Another of his recruits, Robert Slaughter, thought him ‘a tough son of a bitch: tall and lanky, he had a thin little moustache like the villain in a movie’.14 A third said he resembled the cowboy actor Andy Clyde – ‘one hell of a man’15 in almost every respect – except that he lacked Clyde’s charm and humour. If anyone could break the deadlock at Omaha, it would be him.
The second in this duo, Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota, was cut from very different cloth. Fifty-one years of age and with thinning hair and leaden jowls, he was an old man leading a young man’s game. There was something of the outlaw about Cota: he champed on an unlit cigar even when under fire, and had perfected the art of swinging a pistol on his index finger. He was contemptuous of the Germans, even their snipers, and openly flaunted his disdain. He ‘walked upright, unflinchingly, daring the enemy to bring him down’.16 In this respect, he was not unlike Lord Lovat. And Cota shared an additional trait with his lordship, one that was wholly absent from Colonel Canham’s toolbox of tricks. This was the ability to bond with the men serving under him, to chat convivially, to inspire them. He was ‘a bona-fide friend of the common soldier and familiar to virtually all members of the division’.17 He drove them hard, trained them to the hilt. And then he led from the front. Cota’s men were known as the Bastard Brigade. He was the Bastard-in-Chief.
Cota’s participation in the Allied invasions of North Africa and Sicily had been rewarded with a role in planning the assault on Omaha Beach. It had also led him into confrontation with Supreme Headquarters. Cota had argued that the Omaha landing was so fraught with danger that it should be carried out at night. Darkness would give his troops ‘the advantage of surprise and concealment inherent in a night operation’.18 He was overruled. Supreme Headquarters assured him there would be very little opposition from the German gun batteries due to the aerial and naval bombardments.
Cota remained unconvinced and warned his men to be prepared for anything and everything. ‘You’re going to find confusion. The landing craft aren’t going in on schedule or people aren’t going to be landed in the right place. Some won’t be landed at all. We must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads.’19 How prescient were those words to prove. As confusion spiralled into catastrophe, improvisation alone could save the day.
Norman Cota and Charles Canham rode to the beach in the same landing craft, accompanied by ten officers and fourteen others. The majority of them were carrying the heavy backpack wirelesses so necessary for directing naval gunfire at German strongpoints. There was a moment of high tension as the craft scraped a mined obstacle. ‘Kiss everything goodbye,’20 yelled one of the men in panic. Inexplicably, the mine failed to explode.
Cota was taking a huge gamble in placing all his officers in the same craft. A single German shell could have brought a swift end to the hope of breaking the Omaha deadlock. The craft did indeed come under sustained fire that killed three of Cota’s men. But Colonel Canham seemed undaunted by danger, charging up the shingle like some fiery Chicago gangster, with a .45 pistol in one hand and an automatic rifle in the other. ‘Get your ass out of there!’ he screamed at the men lying paralysed on the shingle. ‘What are you doing there, laying there like that? Get up! Get across the rest of this goddamn beach!’
At one point, Canham’s rifle was shot clean out of his hand: unfazed, he continued his advance up the beach, firing with the pistol. ‘The bravest guy,’ thought one of those running in his shadow. Others thought he was completely crazy. One officer had taken cover in an abandoned German pillbox right at the edge of the beach. From his position of safety, he yelled a warning at Canham. ‘Colonel, if you don’t take cover, you’re going to get killed!’
‘Colonel,’ Canham screamed back, ‘get your goddamn ass out of that goddamn pillbox and get these men off this goddamn beach!’
His words proved an inspiration to the men following in his wake. ‘Goldarn,’ thought Robert Slaughter, ‘if that guy can do that, then, hell, I can too.’21
Norman Cota joined Canham at the sea wall just a minute or so after his dash up the beach and made a rapid assessment of the chaotic situation. This immediate stretch of beach – Dog White – was divided into self-contained sections, each separated by wooden groynes. Some eighty or so men lay in each section, crouched in the lee of the five-foot sea wall. Inert and dazed, they were overcome by such paralysis that not even shellfire caused them to move.
‘Hopelessly jumbled,’ noted Jack Shea, Cota’s aide-de-camp. ‘Crowded against the sea wall, sprawled there seeking protection from enemy rifle and machine gun fire.’22 It was a deeply worrying sight.
Corpses lay all around, intermingled with mutilated body parts, and the tide-narrowed beach was cluttered with the jetsam of war: crippled trucks, jeeps and half-tracks along with burned-out landing craft still belching noxious fumes.
Cota and Canham conferred. The Germans were starting to target the sea wall with mortar fire, placing the haggard survivors of the first and second waves in even greater danger. It was imperative to get the men off the beach and up the bluffs, even though this meant wading through the mined marshland that lay between the beach and the cliffs.
‘We’ve got to get them off the beach,’ insisted Cota. ‘We’ve got to get them moving.’23
Canham was shot through the left wrist in these first few minutes on the beach, but refused point-blank Cota’s suggestion of evacuation. He was intending to lead his men up the heights. Cota was also rallying the men around him, personally supervising the firing of a tubed Bangalore torpedo that blasted a gap through the barbed-wire defences. The first man through was cut down by a ripple of German machine-gun fire.
‘Medic,’ he howled. ‘Medic, I’m hit. Help me!’ Jack Shea watched the man succumb to his wounds. ‘He moaned, cried for a few minutes, finally he died after sobbing “Mama” several times.’
Cota knew that soldiers can easily be demoralized by witnessing such distraught scenes, so he ensured that he was next through the wire. His first action was to install an automatic rifle close to the sea wall so as to provide covering fire for the fighting advance up the bluff. A dense cloud of toxic smoke was rolling in from the beach, providing the attackers with a battlefield advantage. ‘It seemed to be hindering enemy observation,’ noted Shea, ‘and there was a chance that we could break through off the beach and reach the base of the bluff.’
As the smoke turned the sky to darkness, an oil-filled incendiary shell struck a flame-thrower that was strapped to the back of a young American soldier who had yet to land. The explosion that followed packed a volcanic punch. Jack Shea saw him ‘burst into a huge wave of flames’ as the flame-thrower erupted. ‘His body stiffened with such convulsive reaction that he was catapulted clear off the deck, completely clearing the starboard bulkhead and plunging into the water.’24 The entire landing craft was engulfed in acrid smoke, giving Cota’s men further cover as they picked their way towards the bluffs.
Cota seemed completely fearless as he returned to the beach and jostled through enemy gunfire, chewing on his unlit cigar and exhorting the men to advance. Alone among them, he walked upright, yelling, gesticulating wildly and bawling orders to the shattered survivors of the first wave.
A few hundred yards along the beach, a young Ranger named John Raaen was astonished to see this rambunctious, seemingly imperturbable figure. Realizing he was someone with authority, he made his way towards him accompanied by a band of fellow Rangers. As he approached Cota, he defied the enemy gunfire and clipped a salute.
‘Captain Raaen, Fifth Ranger Infantry Battalion, sir!’
‘Raaen – you must be Jack Raaen’s son. I’m General Cota. What’s the situation here?’
Raaen told him that the Rangers had landed almost intact, along with their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Max Schneider, who was further along the beach.
‘You men are Rangers!’ exclaimed Cota with evident glee. ‘I know you won’t let me down!’ He then bounded off to greet Schneider in person.
‘Are you Colonel Schneider of the Rangers?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Colonel, you are going to have to lead the way. We are bogged down. We’ve got to get these men off this goddamned beach.’ He then turned to the men around him and shouted four words of such resonance that they would later be adopted as the motto of these fighting heroes: ‘Rangers! Lead the way!’25
Within seconds, John Raaen and his comrades blew more gaps in the barbed wire and began advancing towards the bluffs. One of their number, Victor Fast, lost his helmet in the process. ‘I crawled around to find a helmet from a dead buddy, only to find it half full of head.’26 Somewhat queasily, he scouted around for another.
Colonel Canham was also leading from the front, despite his battle injuries. His arm was in a makeshift splint and tied to his neck with a sling and his battledress was smeared with blood. Worse still, shrapnel had gone through both his cheeks. ‘He spouted blood as he talked,’ said one, ‘but he didn’t seem to mind it.’27 He had by now advanced to the foot of the bluff where he established a temporary command post. Shellfire continued to burst all around him, flinging high-velocity shrapnel in all directions. These shards were lethal, as Jack Shea was to witness. ‘One of the fragments striking a man in the small of the back, almost completely severed the upper portion of his body from his trunk.’28
A mortar shell landed just short of Cota, killing the two men next to him and seriously injuring his radio operator. Two other men were flung through the air. One landed twenty feet up the bluff, the other seventy-five feet below. Yet Cota himself emerged completely unscathed.
The Rangers had taken Cota at his word and were already beginning to scramble up the crumbling bluffs, knocking out trenches and machine-gun nests as they advanced. Individual bravery counted for everything that morning. Harry Parley had landed in the first wave of infantry and was in a bad state, ‘soaking wet, shivering, but trying like hell to keep control’. He had seen half his friends blown to shreds and ‘could feel the cold fingers of fear grip me’. Yet he was to perform one of those countless unsung actions that swung the balance on Omaha that morning. A burst of machine-gun fire alerted him to the presence of two concealed bunkers. ‘I crawled forward, circled wide and came down between the bunkers and destroyed both with grenades in the gun-slots.’29 In the process, his metal canteen was dented by six bullets, saving him from certain death.
John Raaen was now in the vanguard, pushing through the dry brush that had been set alight during the bombardment. ‘The smoke was so bad that we found ourselves gasping for breath but gulping in smoke.’30 It was indeed so thick that they had to strap on their gas masks.
As the Rangers advanced, bedraggled Germans began to emerge from foxholes with their hands up. It was the first sign that Hitler’s Atlantic Wall was starting to crumble. Once disarmed, they were handed over to Victor Fast (now with a helmet), whose principal role was as German translator and interpreter. Fast picked the youngest prisoner and demanded information on minefields and machine-gun posts. But first, he issued a warning as to what would happen if any of his information were to be proved incorrect. ‘I’ll turn you over to my Jewish buddy here standing next to me, Herb Epstein, and he’ll take you behind that bush over there – you get what I mean?’
The German youngster was shivering with fear, and not without reason. Epstein looked like a prize thug, with a bulbous neck and fists like pork knuckle. ‘He had not shaved for a day, he was big and burly.’ He was also armed to the hilt, with ‘a 45 on his hips and a Ranger knife in his boot and an automatic Thompson machine gun’. Even Fast was slightly in awe of him. ‘He looked mean enough to scare the living daylight out of anybody.’31
Capitulating German soldiers faced not just Herb Epstein’s fists, but the additional hazard of being targeted by their own side. Jack Shea watched one of his comrades leading five prisoners down to the shoreline. As they neared the promenade, ‘the two leading prisoners crumbled under a burst of machine gun fire that was obviously of German origin.’ Three others fell to their knees as if pleading with the next machine-gun operator not to shoot them. It was to no avail. ‘The next burst caught the first kneeling German full in the chest and as he crumbled, the remaining two took to the cover of the sea wall with their American captors.’32
The American Rangers took no chances as they advanced up the bluffs. One company commander, George Whittington, stumbled across a German machine-gun position and surprised its three occupants. Carl Weast was witness to what happened next. ‘When one of the three Germans turned and saw Whit[tington], a fierce looking fellow, he repeated the words bitte, bitte, bitte. Whit shot the three of them, turned and asked, “I wonder what bitte means.” ‘33
Inch by terrifying inch they scaled the mud-sluiced heights, taking horrific casualties as they advanced. The leadership of Canham and Cota had broken the stalemate on the beach and small parties were starting to make it to the cliff-top. Yet the assault was hopelessly behind schedule. It was now almost 9 a.m. and according to the battle plan, the four vehicular tracks – known to the military planners as ‘draws’ – should soon be open to Allied tanks and jeeps. But none of them had yet been captured and the beach was a logjam of charred wreckage and burned-out tanks. Two and a half hours after the first wave landed, the battle for Omaha still hung in the balance.
The Allies’ powerful naval guns transformed the battle for the beaches. USS Nevada fires deadly salvoes at Utah Beach.