CHAPTER 11

Early morning hours, Pointe du Hoc, France, June 6, 1944

“Alles kaputt! Alles kaputt!” Bleeding from his head, with blood pouring down his dust-covered uniform, a German soldier suddenly burst into the home of nineteen-year-old French civilian Gerette Le Normand, who lived on a farm near Pointe du Hoc. While the young man and his grandmother held each other tightly and cowered in the corner, the German soldier shouted that all was lost on the Pointe.

“It seemed like the sky was burning. All the houses in the vicinity shook,” recalled Le Normand. Meanwhile, the distraught German continued shouting. “Because of what he was saying, I deduced that everything at Pointe du Hoc was destroyed—the commandant and all the soldiers killed,” the Frenchman remembered.

Beginning around 4:50 A.M. on June 6, 108 heavy Royal Air Force (RAF) bombers saturated Pointe du Hoc, dropping approximately 635 tons of ordnance as part of Operation Flashlamp. While the intensity of the barrage was a dramatic increase from earlier attacks, this was hardly the first raid to hit the area. Prior to D-Day, the U.S. Ninth Air Force and the RAF bombed Pointe du Hoc more heavily than any other target on its bombing list. Leading up to the massive June 6 attack, the Allies dropped 380 tons of bombs on the site—more than ten tons per acre. However, to prevent the Germans from determining the exact location of the Normandy invasion, the Allies flew three missions against other targets for every mission executed against the D-Day landing sites.

The first raid occurred in mid-April when thirty-five A-20 bombers dropped more than thirty-three tons of bombs, damaging some of the guns at the Pointe. The Germans wisely moved the artillery pieces out of their emplacements and into an apple orchard about a thousand yards away. They draped heavy camouflage nets over the twenty-foot-long guns and placed telephone poles in the casements to deceive Allied photo reconnaissance.

The movement of the guns did not go unnoticed by French Resistance cells working in the area. Although accounts vary, the French partisans apparently did attempt to alert the Allies of the guns’ movements. According to one person on the scene, the French attempted to use carrier pigeons to relay the crucial information; but the German 352nd Infantry Division defending the area had established anti-pigeon patrols. Based on German records, the 352nd shot down twenty-seven birds from March 20 to May 27.

One French civilian who knew of the guns’ new location was Guillaume Mercader, a famous French cyclist who became an active member of the resistance in Normandy. During the war, Germans used his shop to repair and maintain their bicycles. Following “the first Allied bombardment,” Mercader explained, “I was visited by Jean Marion who informed me that the cannons on the site had been moved.” Mercader then told “Eugène Meslin, alias ‘Morvin,’ who, like me, thought the information should be communicated as quickly as possible. It was transmitted to London by radio, and on April 26 was decoded by Raymond Berthier, encoding attaché for London.”

Meanwhile, the Germans continued beefing up their defenses on the Pointe. Along with approximately 120 artillerists from 2./HKAA 1260 assigned to man the six big guns at Pointe du Hoc, they also deployed over a hundred more men—all from an infantry unit—to the west of the Pointe. Most of the German positions were located further inland to fend off a land-based attack. The first line of the inland defense comprised fifteen men from an artillery unit that employed six-barrel rocket launchers known as Nebelwerfers. They were moved to augment the interior defenses about two weeks before the landing. Converted into machine gunners, the former artillerymen hunkered down in foxholes along the eastern and western sides of the cliff top.

One of those gunners, nineteen-year-old German Wilhelm Kirchhoff, arrived at Pointe du Hoc two weeks before D-Day and described the massive Allied attack the night of June 5–6. “When the bombers arrived, we the fifteen men of the Werfer unit crouched down in our little earth bunkers. There were so many bombers that we couldn’t count them. They were coming from the northeast direction, and the raid was heavy. We could see red flares and bursts from the explosions and everything shook. I didn’t know it then but my ears would be permanently damaged during this attack. The bombardment lasted for well over half an hour.”

Louis Le Devin, then a thirteen-year-old French civilian from Criqueville, recalls the terrifying attack that preceded the Allied invasion. “The bombing during the night… was the most violent of all. Our house was shaking, and we were all frightened. When the bombs began falling, we all ran outside. The sky was on fire.” Louis’s family waited out the bombing in a trench-type air-raid shelter covered with logs and earth in their garden. Other villagers were not so prepared and had to hide in the ditches. At least one bomb hit the village church, blowing out all the windows with the intense pressure.

The overwhelming onslaught became too much for some of the German soldiers. Karl Jäger, one of the artillery sergeants, admitted to a fellow German veteran after the war that he and several of his men deserted their position. “They can go to fucking hell!” Jäger shouted as he left.

About the same time, the Germans received word that American paratroopers had landed. A German detachment stationed on the Pointe set off to look for the airborne troops.⁷

When the Allies’ carpet bombing finally ceased, the Germans took stock of the damage done. “My unit was untouched in the bombing, but all the camouflage net fixings were torn loose and the trenches were filled with earth,” recalled Kirchhoff. “In darkness we repaired what we could so we could move about once again. Then we had something to eat and we asked ourselves what else would happen to us that day?”

The answer came at 5 A.M. in the pre-dawn light. With a light fog hovering over the sea, German soldiers at Pointe du Hoc remained on alert. Suddenly, they saw the silhouettes of hundreds of ships approaching their cliff-top position. “After the fog lifted, we couldn’t see the water any more—only vessels,” remembered twenty-five-year-old Rudolf Karl an Unter-offizier (NCO) in 2./HKAA 1260.

Kirchhoff noted, “There were so many landing craft that I couldn’t count them all. Then suddenly the enemy navy started to fire at the coast, and everyone was shouting anxiously, ‘Sie kommen! Sie kommen!’ [‘They come!’] This was at exactly 5:55 A.M.

“We could still see the flashes of naval guns in the distance,” Kirchhoff continued. “As a soldier, I never really felt worried, but because of the violent bombardment I hunkered into the ground as low as I could and sat behind my machine gun. Again the shells mostly passed overhead, but a few hit the cliff edge and caused masses of earth to fall. Suddenly on the horizon we saw the ships so precisely we could identify them by exact type. They were large vessels and in large numbers. I had never seen anything like that before… I panicked and shivers went down my back. I asked myself what was going to become of us because something was about to start right now.”