RISING, surging sea carried the invasion fleet uneasily into the night. To the men whose destiny lay beyond the black horizon, the voyage seemed lonely and interminable. Cold, stinging spray swept the decks, but it was better there than it was below, where the pitching and throbbing of the ships was magnified and the humid air reeked of sickness. Nausea accentuated the natural anxiety of expectation. They did not imagine that the enemy was ignorant of their approach and his failure to respond seemed to many not only surprising but sinister. The sense of anti-climax added to their qualms, and they were slow to draw reassurance from the German inactivity.
Because the voyage was uneventful, it took on an air of unreality, which still prevailed at 2 a.m. when Naval Force ‘U’ (Rear-Admiral D. P. Moon, U.S.N.) began assembling undisturbed in its transport area off the Cotentin, 12 miles north-east of UTAH sector. Aboard its ships, nearly a thousand all told, were 30,000 men and 3,500 vehicles due to be landed that day on this beach alone.
Good fortune smoothed their way. The E-boats, which had been ordered out from Cherbourg to patrol the Bay of the Seine, turned back “on account of the bad weather” without making contact. The twin islands of St. Marcouf, lying athwart the line of approach, were found to be undefended. The coastal batteries were silent, for their radar was being jammed. Moreover, during the night they had been severely hammered by R.A.F. Lancasters and at first light they came under fresh onslaught from air and sea. At 5.20 a.m. 300 medium bombers of the Ninth U.S. Air Force flew in below the clouds to strike at these guns again and at strongpoints on UTAH beach, which was already shuddering under shellfire from two battleships, two cruisers and a dozen destroyers. The accuracy of this double bombardment was evident as the assault craft, carrying two battalions of the 4th U.S. Infantry Division, drove in-shore leaving great white wakes on the dark-green sea. Even then there was little response from the coastal artillery and the beach defences were subdued by drenching fire from the ‘mosquito fleet,’ which moved in behind and on the flanks of the assault craft to rake the shore with rockets, flak-guns and howitzers.
In the vanguard of the invasion were two squadrons of DD tanks. These were to have been launched four miles off-shore, but because they were delayed by the weather, the LCTs carried them more than two miles closer before setting them to swim. By then they were under the lee of the Peninsula, which gave them considerable protection from the wind that was lashing the beaches farther east, and 28 out of 32 ‘DDs’ got safely ashore. At least a dozen of them touched down with the first wave of infantry at 6.30 a.m. and began firing from the shallows as the men leapt from their landing-craft.{196}
With the tide still well out, most of the craft came to rest short of the belt of obstacles set up for their destruction and the troops had nearly 500 yards to run before they reached the long, low line of dunes. From these there came not the expected torrent of fire, but fitful and erratic spurts, for the defenders were numbed by the bombardment which still rang in their ears. They were slow to realise that it had switched to targets on the flanks and those Germans who did come up to man their weapons found their fire answered at once by tanks on the water’s edge.
Although Rommel had given warning that the Allies would employ “water-proofed and submersible tanks,” his troops do not seem to have taken his admonition seriously, for the appearance of the ‘DDs’ unquestionably came as a shock to them. They had thought that they would turn their guns against soft human targets advancing unprotected over open beach, but now the Americans were covered by fire from armour which had come up out of the sea. Nothing in war is more unnerving than the unexpected. Surprise gave the DD tanks an influence far beyond their fire-power, striking terror in the hearts of the Germans and adding confidence to the resolution with which the Americans swept ashore. By 9 a.m. the leading regiment and the tanks had broken the crust of the Atlantic Wall on a two-mile front between the sea and the coastal lagoon.
In this they were aided by a mistake which proved no misfortune. Owing to the early swamping of two control vessels, a slight error was made in navigation, with the result that the assault battalions were landed nearly a mile south of the prescribed beach. This brought them to a sector where a single battalion of doubtful quality was manning defences less formidable than those the Americans would have encountered farther north. The Germans had presumed that the double belt of inundations in this extreme corner of the Peninsula would effectively discourage any attempt at landing or at least render nugatory whatever foothold might be gained there.
In the wake of the assault waves came naval demolition units and special squads of army engineers to blow and bulldoze clear lanes through the beach obstacles, thus preparing the way for the rapid and early landing of the rest of the 4th Division. This clearing operation was doubly hazardous, for most of the obstacles were mined and the foreshore came under increasingly heavy shellfire from long-range guns now able to operate without the aid of radar. Nevertheless, adequate gaps were cleared by the time the main body of the follow-up regiment began landing at 10 a.m. The infantry moved quickly through the shellfire and swung north along the dunes to attack the sector where the landing should have been made. There they encountered determined opposition, and they were not able to reach the guns, which continued their harassing fire in spite of counter-battery bombardment by the Navy.
This enemy shelling did not seriously delay the landing and unloading, and a stream of men, tanks, guns and vehicles came in to consolidate the division’s hold on the coastal strip and to strengthen its westward advance. In the middle of the morning the infantry set out across the causeways with amphibious tanks moving through the water in close support. A few enemy positions on the far shore of the lagoon were still active, but the tanks subdued them and by 1 p.m. the seaborne and airborne forces had met. Already the parachutists had seized the exits from four causeways, while a fifth was found to be undefended and unmined even though it linked the beach with the main road leading straight through to the Merderet Valley.
No junction had yet been made between the 101st and the 82nd Divisions, but it was clear that a strong grip had been established on the Peninsula. Shortly before midday, Moon signalled to Kirk, commanding the Western Task Force, “Initial waves made landings on exact beaches after accurate air and naval bombardment. Fifteen waves landed by 0945B.{197} Succeeding waves continue to land. Both beaches cleared of obstacles. Roads under construction and vehicles proceeding inland. Little opposition. Coastal batteries under control.”
This signal idealised the situation beyond the facts, for no one who was on the beach that morning would have reported in such glowing terms. But the general impression it conveyed—that the battle was developing according to plan—was justified and it brought profound relief to Omar Bradley, the Army Commander, who was in Kirk’s flagship, the U.S. cruiser Augusta. There throughout the morning Bradley had been receiving reports of a very different character from the other American sector, OMAHA, where Gerow’s V Corps was still fighting for a foothold against what proved to be the fiercest and most sustained resistance of the day.
OMAHA was a concave beach four miles long and dominated at either end by cliffs which rose almost sheer for more than 100 feet. Between these two bluffs the gently curving strand sloped up to a cultivated plateau which reached a height of 150 feet half a mile inland and commanded the whole foreshore. The escarpment of this plateau was indented at four points where small watercourses had cut their way to the sea and these narrow valleys provided the only exits for vehicles. On the beach itself the tidal flat, some 300 yards deep, was firm sand, but it ended in a bank of heavy, smooth shingle which sloped up rather sharply.
On the western third of OMAHA this shingle ran up to a sea-wall and a paved road, beyond which the escarpment soon rose at a steep angle. On the rest of the beach the shingle bank was backed by sand dunes which were impassable by vehicles, as was the shingle in many places. On the far side of this line of dunes was a broad stretch of sand which was marshy and tufted with coarse grass at the entrances to the valleys. Here the rough slope was less steep, but it could not be negotiated even by tracked vehicles except in a few places. Apart from the paved road under the lee of the western bluff, the routes running inland were little more than cart tracks and all led through thickly-wooded cuttings into the stout stone villages of Vierville, St. Laurent and Colleville, which thus commanded every exit.
The inherent strength of this sector had been well exploited by the Germans in designing their defences. On the tidal flat there were three belts of obstacles; the beach above the shingle, and parts of the slope, were mined and wired; all the natural exits were blocked by mines and by either concrete obstructions or anti-tank ditches. The main strong-points, consisting of entrenchments, pillboxes and bunkers equipped with machine-guns, anti-tank guns and light artillery, were concentrated on the bluffs at either end of the beach and at the mouths of the four valleys. There the fire positions were terraced up the slopes on either side and were echeloned inland, so that they were almost impregnable against head-on assault. From these the Germans could cover most of the beach with direct and -flanking fire.
Between the exit valleys, however, the defences were less formidable. There were trenches and weapon pits along the crest of the escarpment and some minefields on the plateau, but the Germans relied on their reserves in the string of coastal villages to cut short any penetration between the main strongholds. These villages formed a second defensive chain and three miles inland the flooded valley of the River Aure provided a further barrier which the Americans would have to force in order to avoid being contained in the narrow coastal belt.
This stretch of beach, thus fortified, was hardly inviting, but it was the only part of the entire 20 miles between the mouth of the Vire and Arromanches, north-east of Bayeux, where a landing could be made in strength. Elsewhere in this zone sheer cliffs or outcrops of rock off-shore provided natural protection and allowed the Germans to concentrate on the defence of OMAHA.
When the American plan was made it was thought that this four-mile sector was manned by little more than a battalion of the 716th Division, which was then holding 45 miles of coastline from the Orne to the Vire. This was an indifferent formation, containing many foreign conscripts and equipped only for a static role, but a mobile division of good quality, the 352nd, was known to be in close reserve around St. Lô. In May British Intelligence had come to suspect that this division had moved up to strengthen the coastal crust by taking over the western half of the Orne-Vire sector, but the evidence of that move was slender and the Americans were disinclined to accept it. When some confirmation was received early in June, it was too late to pass the warning on to the assault troops who were already embarking. Consequently, they went into action believing that though OMAHA was strongly fortified it was not particularly heavily garrisoned.
The plan provided for the 1st U.S. Division (Major-General C. R. Huebner) to assault with two Regimental Combat Teams, each of three battalions, supported by two battalions of DD tanks and two special brigades of engineers. On the right the 116th Regiment (attached from the 29th Division) was to land between Vierville and St. Laurent, and on the left the 16th Regiment, between St. Laurent and Colleville. For the assault both these regiments were to be under Huebner’s command, but once a foothold had been gained, the 29th Division (Major-General C. H. Gehrhardt) was to take over the western sector and clear the area between the coast and the Aure as far as Isigny. Meantime, the 1st Division would swing east to link up with Second British Army at Port-en-Bessin and drive south to secure a bridgehead over the Aure, east of Trévières. It was hoped—a little ambitiously perhaps—that by nightfall V U.S. Corps might have a beachhead 16 miles wide and five to six miles deep, but it was realised that whether or not this ‘phase-line’ could be reached depended primarily on the whereabouts of the 352nd Division.
Soon after 3 a.m. Naval Force ‘O’ (Rear-Admiral J. L. Hall, Jr., U.S.N.) began lowering the assault-craft from their ‘mother-ships’ into a rough and unfriendly sea twelve miles off-shore. Several craft were swamped within a few minutes of touching the water; others were kept afloat only by strenuous baling by troops who used their steel helmets as buckets. None but the most hardened stomachs were unmoved by the pitching and tossing and men became weak from sickness long before they began the run-in. Perhaps the most unpleasant experience was that suffered by a boatload of the 116th Infantry. “Major Dallas’s command party,” says the regimental account, “made their start under inauspicious circumstances. In lowering the boats from the davits of H.M.S. Empire Javelin, the command boat became stuck for 30 minutes directly under the outlet of the ship’s ‘heads’ and could go neither up nor down. During this half-hour the ship’s company made the most of an opportunity that Englishmen have sought since 1776.”
The rough seas had more serious consequences in the case of the DD tanks. One battalion decided not to attempt any launchings; the other put 29 tanks into the water, but some sank like stones as soon as they left the LCTs, others were swamped on the run-in and only two reached the shore. The weather was the primary factor in this disaster, but the casualties might not have been so severe if the tanks had not been launched so far out (they were set to swim nearly four miles) and if the training and maintenance had been more thorough. But whatever the reason, the plan to land the DD tanks ahead of the infantry miscarried, and the men themselves approached the shore under the gravest disadvantages. As one report says, “Men who had been chilled by their wetting, cramped by immobility in the small and fully-loaded craft and weakened by sea-sickness were not in the best condition for strenuous action on landing.”{198}
While the assault battalions were heading for the shore, warships and aircraft began the bombardment of the coast defences. Owing to low cloud, visibility was poor when the shelling began and after a few minutes the dust and smoke made it almost impossible to pinpoint targets on shore. The task of the bombers thus became extremely difficult and, fearful of hitting their own troops, they left a good safety margin. This was unquestionably wise, but it meant that most of the bombs fell behind, not upon, the beach defences. In addition, many rocket-firing craft, confused by the smoke and over-anxious about the coastal guns, loosed their salvos well out of range and the in-coming troops had the mortification of seeing most of the projectiles burst in the water short of the beach.
Batteries and strong points were still active when the bombardment lifted, and the assault craft came under heavy shelling and mortaring over the last half-mile before they touched down on a beach almost unscarred by friendly bomb or shell. The severest fire came from the bluff which commanded the western end of the beach and from the Vierville exit, directly in front of which the 1st Battalion of the 116th Regiment was due to land in column of companies.
At 6.30 a.m., as the leading company approached this beach, known by the code-name Dog Green,{199} one of its six craft foundered and another was sunk by a direct hit, but the rest went on till they ran aground on a sandbar several hundred yards short of the sea wall. The ramps went down and the men leapt into water which was waist to shoulder deep. Then, says the battalion’s own story:{200}
As if this were the signal for which the enemy had waited, all boats came under criss-cross machine-gun fire....As the first men jumped, they crumpled and flopped into the water. Then order was lost. It seemed to the men that the only way to get ashore was to dive head first in and swim clear of the fire that was striking the boats. But, as they hit the water, their heavy equipment dragged them down and soon they were struggling to keep afloat. Some were hit in the water and wounded. Some drowned then and there....But some moved safely through the bullet-fire to the sand and then, finding they could not hold there, went back into the water and used it as cover, only their heads sticking out. Those who survived kept moving forward with the tide, sheltering at times behind under-water obstacles and in this way they finally made their landings.
Within ten minutes of the ramps being lowered, A Company had become inert, leaderless and almost incapable of action. Every officer and sergeant had been killed or wounded....It had become a struggle for survival and rescue. The men in the water pushed wounded men ashore ahead of them, and those who had reached the sands crawled back into the water pulling others to land to save them from drowning, in many cases only to see the rescued men wounded again or to be hit themselves. Within 20 minutes of striking the beach A Company had ceased to be an assault company and had become a forlorn little rescue party bent upon survival and the saving of lives.
The vanguard of the assault on this flank of OMAHA was still at the water’s edge when the next company came in 25 minutes after H-Hour. Several boatloads, which landed on Dog Green, the same sector as the first wave, were riddled on the water’s edge, but the others, carried farther east and farther inshore by the tide, touched down on a less heavily defended stretch of beach which was enveloped in smoke. This shielded them as they dashed for cover of the sea-wall and from there two groups, each less than twenty strong, struggled through the wire and minefields and up the ridge to Vierville, 700 yards inland, not stopping to deal with the fortifications but infiltrating between them as best they could.
Because of the drag of the wind and tide, all six boats of the following company came in east of the Dog Green death-trap, and moved across the foreshore and up the slope with less than a dozen casualties, for they found an unmined gap between the strongpoints which guarded the natural exits. Before 10 a.m. this company and part of 5th Ranger Battalion, which landed behind it, had joined the two earlier groups in Vierville, just in time to beat off a sharp counter-attack. There some 200 men stopped a thrust which would have carried through to the beach, where the remnants of the 1st Battalion lay almost helpless in their foxholes, lacking the support of armour or heavy weapons.
A mile to the east, the other two battalions of the 116th Regiment, landing in succession on either side of the Les Moulins exit, met less opposition on the beach, because the Germans were blinded by smoke from grass and buildings on the crest set afire by the naval bombardment. This unintentional smoke screen saved many lives, but it caused great confusion. Most companies came in farther east than had been planned and “officers, knowing they were to the left of their landing areas, were uncertain as to their course of action, and this hesitation prevented any chance of immediate assault action.”{201} They were slow in rallying, slower still in advancing up the slope, since they tended to move in single file through the minefields, and those who did reach the crest soon lost cohesion and direction, for there the smoke was so thick that the troops had to put on their gas-masks.
There was little progress until someone discovered, east of Les Moulins, a sector where the minefields had been detonated by the bombardment, opening the way for elements of both battalions to infiltrate towards St. Laurent before the enemy closed the gap with shellfire. This accentuated the congestion on the beach, for supporting weapons and transport had begun to land before the engineers had cleared any exits and before the infantry had subdued the strongpoints which raked the foreshore with fire. Wrecked landing-craft, burning vehicles, exploding ammunition and intermittent shelling added to the confusion, making it extremely difficult for commanders to organise the scattered and bewildered groups who had taken shelter under the sea-wall or the shingle bank, and impossible for the follow-up regiment to come in as planned at 9:30 a.m.
Meantime, the counterpart of this battle had developed along the eastern half of OMAHA, where two battalions of the 16th Regiment had landed at half-past six. Here, too, the bombardment had missed the beach defences and the assault craft were dragged by the run of the wind and tide half a mile and more to the east of their appointed stations. The whole assault side-slipped with most unfortunate results. On Easy Red, where the enemy fire at first was relatively light, barely 100 men were set down during the first half-hour, but the best part of three companies made their landfall on Fox Green directly beneath the unscathed guns of formidable strong points which covered the exit leading to Colleville. The terrible story of Dog Green was repeated.
On Easy Red, where the 2nd Battalion should have landed, the first meagre assault forces were pinned to the beach until “a lieutenant and a wounded sergeant of divisional engineers stood up under fire and walked over to inspect the wire obstacles just beyond the embankment. The lieutenant came back and, hands on hips, looked down disgustedly at the men lying behind the shingle bank. ‘Are you going to lay there and get killed, or get up and do something about it?’ Nobody stirred, so the sergeant and the officer got the materials and blew the wire.”{202} This courageous gesture rallied the men and the lieutenant led them to the top of the ridge in single file along a narrow pathway which was under fire and sown with anti-personnel mines. By that route this platoon, followed by another company, got within striking distance of the strongpoints which had turned this sector into a slaughter-ground. One by one these were silenced but the hazard of the minefields remained. One false step and a man lost a foot or a leg, if not his life. The wounded lay where they fell, afraid to move lest they might set off another mine, and the men in the shuffling line stepped over them. Shells dropped close but none dared to go to ground, for every yard was lethal. When the reserve battalion tried to find its own pathway, the minefield claimed 47 victims in the leading company, but some 300 men finally got through and headed for Colleville. The gap thus opened became a funnel for movement off Easy Red during the rest of the morning, but that movement was slow and perilous.
On the extreme left, however, the 16th’s other assault battalion was able to make reasonable progress, in spite of early mishaps which might have proved disastrous. Rough sea and bad navigation delayed the landing. Several craft were swamped, or sunk by direct hits, one assault company was an hour and a half late and the other came in half a mile too far to the east. This, in fact, proved an advantage, since the men were able to organise under the lee of the cliffs and, instead of trying, as intended, to force the strongly-guarded exit from Fox Green, they found their way up a steep but ill-defended gully farther east. The rest of the battalion followed and opened a clear breach in the defences with the aid of fire from destroyers and small craft operating close in on the flank. Here by 9.30 a.m. the Americans were moving slowly but steadily east along the cliff-top towards Port-en-Bessin, where they were due to link up with the British.
Elsewhere on OMAHA, however, the situation was still extremely grave. By half-past nine, according to the After-Action Report of V U.S. Corps, the assault units “were disorganised, had suffered heavy casualties and were handicapped by losses of valuable equipment....They were pinned down along the beach by intense enemy fire....Personnel and equipment were being piled ashore on Easy Red, Easy Green and Dog Red sectors where congested groups afforded good targets for the enemy. The engineers had not been able to clear sufficiently large gaps through the minefields with the result that companies attempting to move through them off the beach suffered considerable casualties....Action in this early period was that of small, often isolated groups—a squad, a section or a platoon without much co-ordination. Attempts were made to organise units but...the beaches were too confused to permit it.”
In this confusion the forces already ashore were powerless to break the deadlock, and the men, tanks and guns which were so urgently required could not be landed because the engineers had not been able to clear the underwater obstacles or the general wreckage on the foreshore. Even those tanks and vehicles which had been landed were still immobilised on the narrow strip of sand between the rising tide and the shingle bank through which as yet no gaps had been cleared. The assault regiments were clinging to barely a hundred yards of beach. A few small parties, which were to reach Vierville, St. Laurent and Colleville, had made minor penetrations, but these had been partially closed behind them by enemy fire. The Atlantic Wall was holding firm, and the Americans now knew that the OMAHA sector was held by units of both the 352nd and the 716th Divisions.
In May, during the general strengthening of Normandy following Hitler’s intuitive inspiration and Rommel’s policy of strengthening the coastal crust, the 352nd Division had moved up to garrison the Bayeux-Isigny sector. There it took under command the regiment of the 716th which was holding this extensive front, and proceeded to nose in three of its own six battalions to defend OMAHA and another likely beach at Arromanches on the British front. This left three battalions of the 352nd in close reserve behind OMAHA and by chance one of these was carrying out an exercise on that stretch pf coast on June 5th-6th.
There were thus eight battalions in the area between Bayeux and Isigny, where the Americans had expected to find four, and the defences had some depth, provided moreover by troops of fair quality, equipped for something more than a static role. This meant that when the bombardment miscarried and the amphibious armour failed to arrive, the Americans entered an unequal struggle with every advantage of weather, position and armament against them. The presence of the 352nd Division in and close behind the beach made it a matter of the most vital consequence to break through the coastal defences before they could be further reinforced.
This was the prospect at 9.50 a.m. when a signal from the troops ashore told Huebner, “There are too many vehicles on the beach; send combat troops. 30 LCTs waiting off-shore; cannot come in because of shelling. Troops dug in on beaches, still under heavy fire.”
Huebner acted promptly. He called on the Navy to engage German batteries and strongpoints regardless of the danger of hitting his own troops, and he ordered the 18th Regiment to land at once on Easy Red. Of that regiment, however, only one battalion was loaded in craft which could make what amounted to an assault landing. The others had to be transhipped from their LCIs into small craft, and it was early afternoon before they were ready to go ashore.
By that time, the situation had been improved by the landing of one battalion on Easy Red and another on Easy Green. Both battalions found the beaches still under fire, but they curbed it by capturing several pillboxes. In the attack upon these they were supported by DD tanks, which had been landed dry-shod, and by sustained and accurate shelling from destroyers standing only a thousand yards off-shore.
At noon a report from Easy Green said, “Fire support excellent. Germans leaving positions and surrendering.” A few minutes later came another report, from Easy Red, “Troops previously pinned down on Easy and Fox now advancing inland.”
Even more important, by this time the last enemy strongpoints at the main exit from Easy Red had been reduced and engineers had begun clearing the minefields. Thus after a six-hour battle the defences began to crumble and the foreshore was gradually freed of small arms fire, but the shelling of the beach continued, in spite of counter-battery bombardment by warships and fighter-bombers. There were still no exits for vehicles; most of the passages through the minefields were little more than single-file tracks; and the enemy was opposing most strenuously any attempt to deepen the penetration. The first crisis had passed, but the battle was by no means won.
In the early afternoon movement off the beach was limited and sluggish and the enemy had time to re-form his front roughly along the line of the road that ran through Colleville and St. Laurent. Within an hour and a half of landing part of the 18th Regiment, by a very remarkable effort, reached the northern edge of Colleville, a mile inland, where several weakened companies of the 16th Regiment were waging a house-to-house battle. But the enemy, too, had been reinforced and throughout the afternoon the Americans could do no more than hold on and hope that additional support in men and weapons would get through from the beach.
Unfortunately, movement inland was delayed, primarily because of the psychological supremacy of German mines over the American engineers and infantrymen. Even when the minefields were no longer under direct fire, the engineers were tardy in tackling them and the infantry were so ill-schooled in the art of ‘de-lousing’ mines that they preferred to pick a dangerous passage through them rather than set boldly about the task of clearance. In mid-afternoon, for instance, one battalion was led slowly and painfully in single file up the ridge, stepping over the wounded who lay on the mined path. By resolute action the way could have been cleared in half the time it took to pass the battalion man by man along it. Yet no one would grasp the nettle.
It was 2 p.m. before the engineers succeeded in clearing any exit track. Another two hours elapsed before tanks and vehicles began moving off the beach, and then full use could not be made of the exit because of shelling. Late in the afternoon this became so severe that Huebner’s third regiment did not finish landing until after seven o’clock and two battalions of artillery were even further delayed. Thus the infantry who had battled inland were left without adequate supporting fire until some time after 7 p.m., when a few tanks and tank-destroyers came to their aid as the fight for the coastal villages hung in the balance.
Even the possibilities of direct air support could not be fully exploited, mainly because so many of the leading companies and battalions had lost their radio sets in struggling ashore. No one in the H.Q. ships knew where the front line was, the troops on the ground were far too busy to put out visual signals, and the smoke and dust which overhung the beachhead made accurate identification of targets impossible. This obscurity also handicapped the warships, but their bombardment was the most effective aid the infantry received.
It was only at the end of the long day that the Americans forced the line of the coastal road, and this success was principally due to the unquenchable spirit and drive of the 1st Division. On the right the units of the 29th Division, fighting their first battle, made little progress after taking Vierville and reaching St. Laurent in the morning. In the face of aggressive German probing, it was all Gerhardt’s troops could do to hold a beachhead 1,200 yards deep, for only two of his infantry regiments and one artillery battalion were landed during the day, and that battalion lost all but one of its 12 guns. At dark the situation was still confused and St. Laurent was not completely clear. The American grip on this stretch of OMAHA was by 110 means secure, and there was considerable anxiety about the% danger of a counter-attack against the tired and weakened battalions during the night. The opportunity was there and the Germans could exploit it—if they were to commit their reserves in the right place.
For eight hours after the airborne assault began, the H.Q. of the German 84th Corps (Marcks) was handicapped by lack of reliable information. Reports of the main paratroop and glider landings were reasonably prompt and accurate, but the jamming of coastal radar prevented the enemy from gaining any indication of the strength and dispositions of the forces at sea until after daylight, and by that time the coast defences were under fire from aircraft and warships. Although this bombardment did not cause serious damage to the defences on OMAHA, it did disrupt communications, especially in the Cotentin area. The start of the naval shelling was duly reported by 84th Corps to Seventh Army at 6 a.m., but Marcks received no word of the seaborne landings until two hours later, and it was nearly 11 o’clock before he learned that troops were landing from the sea on the Cotentin. This news, which came only from the German Navy, could not be confirmed, and at 11.45 a.m. 84th Corps signalled, “Regarding East coast [of Cotentin] no reports available since at the moment communications are severed.”{203}
In the meantime, the news from the OMAHA sector, though scanty, was encouraging. At 9.25 a.m. Marcks’s H.Q. reported, “The forward positions in the area of 352nd Division have been penetrated but the situation is not so critical as in the area of 716th Division,” i.e. between Bayeux and Caen, and it was for this sector that he requested immediate counter-action by panzer divisions. This policy seemed justified when at 1.35 p.m. it was stated by the Chief of Staff of the 352nd that “the Division has thrown the invaders back into the sea; only near Colleville is there, in his opinion, a counter-attack still in progress.” On the strength of this news Seventh Army informed Rommel’s H.Q. that “the situation in the area of 352nd Division is now restored.” There was no contrary report from this division until 6 p.m. and in the meantime all armoured reserves had been directed against the British with the object of preventing the fall of Caen. None were sent to the area west of Bayeux.
In any case the reinforcements which Marcks could have thrown into the OMAHA battle were not as great as Allied Intelligence had feared they might be. Around St. Lô there was only a mobile brigade, and its mobility was limited to the skill of its members as cyclists, for it had no motorised troop transport. Nevertheless, if it had intervened at OMAHA during the afternoon the consequences might have been serious, but at midday it was ordered to counter-attack the British east of Bayeux. Thus the only reserves which could be employed against OMAHA that day were three battalions of the 352nd, deployed in close reserve between Bayeux and Isigny. Before dawn in response to the airborne landings on the Cotentin two of these battalions were ordered to move west “to establish and maintain the link through Carentan.” One had started moving before Marcks learned of the OMAHA assault and the other, which had been stationed around Bayeux, was drawn into battle with the British. This left only a single battalion in position to reinforce the OMAHA defences, and it was pitted against the American right flank at Vierville and St. Laurent. It was here that the Germans should have made their counter-stroke during the night with the battalion which had started for Carentan and been recalled, but they made the fatal mistake of looking over their shoulders at a landing which was not and could not have been any real threat.
Soon after seven o’clock that morning three companies of Rangers (the American counterpart of British Commandos) had landed three miles west of OMAHA at the base of Pointe du Hoe, an almost sheer cliff 100 feet high. Their primary task was to silence a powerful coastal battery capable of firing upon both UTAH and OMAHA beaches. The cliffs appeared to be unassailable, but the Rangers shot grappling hooks and rope ladders to the top with rocket charges and scaled the heights under covering fire from two destroyers. This fire drove the Germans into their dug-outs and the Rangers met little opposition as they moved to the battery position. They found it so cratered by bombs and shells that it looked like the face of the moon; the casemates were wrecked, and the guns had gone.
Patrols were sent inland and after going half a mile two men found the missing battery, camouflaged and intact. There were stacks of ammunition on the ground, the guns were ready to fire on UTAH, but there was no sign of the crews or of any recent firing. The battery was put out of action with explosive charges, but the mystery of the silent and deserted guns on Pointe du Hoe remains unsolved. Whatever the reason, the most dangerous battery in the American assault area was never used and was exposed to destruction by a two-man patrol!
As the day wore on the small Ranger force, numbering 130 men, drew increasing attention from the enemy. There were two counterattacks in the afternoon and three more after dark, when the Germans pitted against the Rangers the reserves which should have been used for an attack against the western and most vulnerable sector of the OMAHA beachhead.
There was no such diversion to aid the 1st Division in the slogging battle which carried it across the Colleville-St. Laurent road in the last few hours before dark. The recovery Huebner’s men had made since the middle of the morning was extraordinary. It had seemed then that the leading regiment was broken and beaten, but at the critical moment its survivors had responded to the intrepid leadership of its commander, Colonel G. A. Taylor, who became famous that morning for the rallying cry, “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die—now let’s get the hell out of here.”
In that spirit the first small parties had made the break and the follow-up regiment had exploited this slender advantage with a thrust to Colleville and beyond, which ended by cracking the second German position. This village was the keystone of the defence once the coastal fortifications had begun to yield. At dark some Germans were still holding out in Colleville, but they were so hard pressed by infantry and tanks that the village had lost its tactical significance. Maintaining the pressure south and east so long as the light lasted, the 1st Division’s own regiments extended their beachhead to an average depth of a mile to a mile and a half on a four-mile front by the end of the day. It was a slender enough footing, but it was held by men who had been ashore before in North Africa and in Sicily, and who could not be dismayed even by the most desperate situation. Had this sector of OMAHA been assigned to troops less experienced, less resolute or less ably commanded, the assault might never have penetrated beyond the beaches.
The near-disaster which befell the Americans at OMAHA was in some degree due to the weather, which led to the miscarriage of the preliminary bombardment and the mislanding of the assault units, but the sea off OMAHA was hardly, if at all, more hostile than it was on the more exposed British beaches farther east. In so far as they suffered more severely from the rough sea, this was chiefly due to the fact that the U.S. Navy, concerned about the fire of coastal batteries, insisted upon lowering the assault craft as much as twelve miles off-shore, whereas the British ‘lowering areas’ were less than eight miles out. The longer passage not only added to the strain upon the assault infantry but greatly increased the danger of swamping and of faulty navigation. The leading assault craft had to start their run-in while it was still dark, and were excessively and unwarrantably exposed to the vagaries of wind and tide. On the other beaches very few mislandings were made on D-Day, but on OMAHA less than half the companies in the assault battalions were landed within 800 yards of their appointed sectors. The U.S. Navy’s unwillingness to take advice from Ramsay was the start of the trouble.{204}
So far as operations, on shore are concerned, it is suggested by the War Department’s historians that “the principal cause of the difficulties of V Corps on D-Day was the unexpected strength of the enemy on the assault beaches.”{205} This is only a partial explanation, for there were grave defects inherent in the American plan. The first of these was the fruit of the American predilection for direct assault. The plan for OMAHA was a tactical application of the head-on strategy which Marshall had so consistently advocated in pressing the case for cross-Channel invasion. The Americans knew that the main enemy fortifications covered the natural exits, and yet they deliberately planned to make their heaviest landings directly in front of these strongpoints with the object of taking them by storm. They scorned the lessons of earlier amphibious operations, which had shown the wisdom of landing between the beach strongpoints, not opposite them, infiltrating and assaulting them from the flank and rear. The plan for Dog sector was typical. Dog Green and Dog Red were each known to be covered by powerful ‘exit’ strongpoints. Between those Dog White was comparatively weakly defended. The American intention, however, was to land four companies in succession on each of the former during the first hour and only two companies on the latter where prospects of success were greatest. The results might have been anticipated. Two companies of the 2nd Rangers landed according to plan opposite the Vierville exit on Dog Green; only 62 men out of 130 reached the sea-wall. But 450 men of the 5th Rangers landing at the same time on Dog White between the strongpoints “got across the beach and up the sea-wall with the loss of only 5 or 6 men.”{206}
There might have been some justification for the policy of direct assault if the Americans had accepted Montgomery’s plan for landing armour en masse at the start of the attack, and for using the specialised equipment of Hobart’s 79th Armoured Division to deal with the fortifications and the underwater obstacles. When Montgomery first saw this equipment he ordered Hobart to make one-third of it available to the Americans, and set himself to interest Eisenhower and Bradley in its revolutionary employment. Hobart’s account of the reaction of the three generals is illuminating.{207}
“Montgomery,” he says, “was most inquisitive. After thorough tests and searching questions he said in effect: ‘I’ll have this and this and this; but I don’t want that or that.’ Eisenhower was equally enthusiastic but not so discriminating. His response was, ‘We’ll take everything you can give us.’ Bradley appeared to be interested but, when asked what he wanted, replied, ‘I’ll have to consult my staff.’”
Bradley and his staff eventually accepted the ‘DDs’ but did not take up the offer of ‘Crabs,’ ‘Crocodiles,’ ‘AVREs’ and the rest of Hobart’s menagerie.{208} Their official reason was that there was no time to train American crews to handle the Churchill tanks in which most of the special British equipment was installed, but their fundamental scepticism about its value was shown when they rejected even the ‘Crabs’ which offered few training difficulties, since the ‘flail’ device was fitted to the standard American Sherman tank.
The terrible consequences of this short-sightedness were only too apparent on OMAHA on D-Day. The failure of the bombardment and the non-appearance of the DD tanks left the infantry at the mercy of the strongpoints which they were required to take by storm. Where tanks were available, landed direct from LCTs, they proved invaluable, but they were too few and too dispersed, and they found great difficulty in manoeuvring because of the congestion of vehicles on the foreshore.
This congestion was chiefly due to the absence of specialised armour capable of dealing with the natural obstacles and fixed defences. The British had learned from the Dieppe Raid that engineers cannot consistently perform under fire the deliberate tasks required of them unless they are given armoured protection. No such protection was available on OMAHA. Apart from lightly armoured bulldozers the Americans had no mechanised equipment for dealing with the obstructions and fortifications. They were expected by their commanders to attack pillboxes with pole-charges and man-pack flame-throwers, to clear barbed wire entanglements and concrete walls with explosives manually placed and to lift mines by hand, all under fire. That they often failed is not surprising. Throughout the morning tanks, guns and vehicles were immobilised at the water’s edge because the engineers could not clear gaps in the shingle bank, a comparatively minor obstacle. Throughout the afternoon, infantry were compelled to move across the beach in single file because the sappers had no mechanical means of dealing with mines and hand-clearance was too slow. At the Vierville exit the last strongpoints were reduced by 2 p.m., but it was another eight hours before the mines and obstructions had been cleared, for they had to be cleared by hand.
At dark only this road and one other were open for vehicles, and the full sweep of the beach was still under fire from artillery and mortars. The corps beachhead was six miles wide and less than two miles deep at the point of greatest penetration, and there was a grave shortage of tanks, anti-tank guns and of artillery generally. Most of the battalions were seriously weakened, for the day’s fighting had cost 3,000 casualties. In short, although the Americans were ashore, they held an area barely large enough to be called a foothold, and were in no condition to withstand any large-scale counter-attack with armour during the next two critical days. But whether or not the Germans would, or could, develop such an attack depended on the course of events on the front of Dempsey’s Second British Army.