CHAPTER 15

Bunkers and Farms

En route to the coastal highway, First Sergeant Lomell and his men knew they had to overcome several bunkered buildings that served as German crew quarters. From his training and his memory of photographs presented at various briefings, Lomell remembered that the Germans had mined the entire area. The Rangers would have to traverse these dense minefields. In addition, the 37 mm antiaircraft gun on their right flank was tearing up the area around them, putting up a lot of fire.

As the Rangers advanced upon the bunkered position, Lieutenant Ted Lampres and a couple of E Company men approached Lomell. “What are you doing, Len?” Lampres asked.

“What I’m gonna do is move up and throw a bazooka into them and blow the whole God damn thing up.” Lomell moved the bazooka into position. Unfortunately, the loader forgot to pull the pin on the bazooka round, and it failed to detonate.

Meanwhile, the antiaircraft gun bore down on Dog Company. “The son of a bitch was giving us a really hard time,” recalled Lomell. Lieutenant Lampres and several men moved off to the right flank to try to take out the AA gun.

From the shell hole, Lomell and his men studied the crew quarters. “We’re gonna hit ‘em hard,” Lomell told his men. The Rangers charged. “We were hooting and hollering, yelling ‘EEAAGGHH!!’ We wanted to scare the shit out of them,” recalled Lomell.

The Americans attacked the quarters, firing their Thompsons and M1s into the buildings. Many of the Germans were unarmed, dashing for their weapons as they were putting on their shirts and uniforms. While some of the enemy fought back tenaciously, others ducked into underground tunnels.

As the Rangers pushed inland in pursuit of the enemy, a creeping artillery barrage exploded behind them.

Lomell’s men charged forward to the coastal road with a deadly rain of steel at their backs. The first sergeant’s small group included his best friend, Staff Sergeant Jack Kuhn. The two best friends each led a column of men, one on either side of the sunken road. The men soon came across a centuries-old stone barn.

Suddenly, Lomell grabbed Kuhn’s arm, threw him into the doorway of the Norman barn, and rushed inside himself. Kuhn was startled. “Why’d you do that?”

“Didn’t you see that Jerry kneeling on the road, aiming at us?” Lomell asked in amazement.

Kuhn peeked around the doorway. Two German rounds barely missed the Ranger sergeant.

Lomell poked his tommy gun through a window of the barn and fired at the Germans. He missed. Kuhn went to fire his tommy gun, but a bullet had struck the ammunition clip where it inserted into the weapon, rendering it useless.

Meanwhile, elements of George Kerchner’s 1st Platoon came up the side of Pointe du Hoc with Rudder’s command group. The 37 mm gun continued taking its bloody toll, while small bands of Rangers made their way toward the projected gun positions.

The Germans counterattacked, emerging from the rubble of Pointe du Hoc. They seemed to pop up all around the maze of ruined trenches and underground shelters and bunkers. For the Rangers, the pockmarked surface of the Pointe made it difficult to distinguish friend from foe. Similar to a game of whack-a-mole, Germans emerged from craters and trenches. Kerchner rounded up most of his 1st Platoon along with other members of Dog Company. The German AA gun continued to fire at his group while 1st Platoon tried to take it out with rifle fire. Pinned down, they had difficulty even getting a shot off.

In an attempt to flank the gun, Kerchner jumped into the communication trench. “I was by myself at this time, and I have never felt so lonesome before or since in my life because every time I came to a corner in this communications trench, where I had to make a turn to see what was in the next twenty-five-yard section, I didn’t know whether I was going to come face-to-face with a German or not.”

Kerchner stooped low as he darted through the trench. His loneliness gave way to sadness when he caught sight of Bill Vaughan, one of Lomell’s climbing “monkeys.” The Ranger officer related, “I realized as soon as I saw him that he was dying. He had been practically stitched across with a machine gun. He wasn’t in any pain because he was hit too bad. I knew he was dying.”

The lieutenant from Baltimore approached the mortally wounded Ranger and compassionately told him, “Bill, we’ll send a medic to look after you.”

Kerchner continued skulking cautiously through the trench, eventually meeting up with the rest of his men, much to his relief. Together, they found their way through the labyrinth until it emptied out near the ruins of a farmhouse. Finally out in the open, 1st Platoon pushed on toward the coastal road, their secondary objective.

When Dog Company sergeants Bill Cruz and William Robertson reached the top of Pointe du Hoc, they ran into Lieutenant Colonel Rudder. Despite being wounded, Rudder’s charismatic presence inspired the men around him. Cruz had been hit in the arm on the beach before scaling the cliffs, but, like many of the Rangers, he carried on in spite of the pain. The men were told to guard the area that Rudder had designated as his new command post, but the persistent crack of deadly sniper fire filled the air around them.

Sergeant Cruz and another Ranger fired at the sniper, but missed. Suddenly, machine gun and antiaircraft fire from the 37 mm opened up. Rudder looked at both men and said, “Go after it.”

Whenever the Rangers opened fire, artillery rained down on their heads. As they crawled forward through the countless shell craters, they came upon approximately ten men pinned down near gun position number six, including Richard J. Spleen of D Company and Harold D. Main of E Company. Together, the Rangers held their fire “for fear of drawing 88 fire.”

The small group crawled west in an attempt to get a better position on the German machine gun nest and the AA gun. Cruz spotted a German soldier waving a helmet on a rifle, attempting to draw the Rangers’ fire and expose their positions. “Somebody [in our group] came up from behind and unwisely fired on this decoy. Right away, 88 fire and mortar fire hit.”

Because the men were bunched up in the craters, they took off in different directions to avoid being hit in one group. When the men separated, Cruz found himself alone in the maze of tunnels and craters. He yelled out, “Is anybody there? Is everybody alright?”

Sergeant Main responded, “[We’re] OK.”

Cruz waited for fifteen minutes. Small arms fire crackled in the distance. The Ranger NCO started crawling back across a crater and took fire from snipers. He reached a trench near gun position six, where he spotted Spleen, who was recently separated from Sundby, and two other men in a trench right nearby. “All the sudden, [a]lot of firing, machine guns and machine pistols… [began hitting] close to the west. He saw Spleen’s men throw down their guns out of the trench they were in, surrendering.” Cruz kept quiet, hugging the ground.

“The firing died down and after the first few seconds, he saw no one. Later, crawling out back toward the command post he passed a pile of weapons, lying on the ground near gun position number six—eight or nine rifles, some pistols, and four Thompsons.” Later, the Rangers found some of the packs from the captured group. Cruz was the sole survivor.

Another Ranger also found himself alone. Bill Hoffman was the only Ranger in an underground bunker atop Pointe du Hoc. “I managed to get over to a bunker, not the one I was supposed to be in, but I got in there. They were shelling us pretty good. Inside the bunker things got quiet.” Hoffman ended up in a room full of German bicycles, where he considered his next course of action. “I was sitting there trying to make up my mind when I heard this God awful explosion in the corridor between the rooms. It scared the hell out of me.”

“What is that? What am I gonna do?” Hoffman thought to himself.

After a second explosion, Hoffman threw one of the bicycles out into the hallway. Seeing fins from a bazooka round nearby, he thought, “Oh, my God, they have our equipment!” Suddenly, a voice barked out, “Come out with your hands up!”

“Geez, they speak really good English,” Hoffman thought to himself. After sticking his hand out into the hallway to make sure they weren’t planning to shoot, he slowly emerged. In front of him stood a lieutenant and a sergeant, who was holding a grenade.

“Hey, Sarge! What are you going to do with that?” asked Hoffman.

“I’m going to roll it right down that hallway,” replied the sergeant.

“What are you doing in here?” the lieutenant asked Hoffman.

He answered, “I’m getting out of the artillery fire.”

“We got word there were Germans in here,” said the lieutenant.

“There are no Germans here, just me,” Hoffman replied.

Bleeding and exhausted from climbing and fighting through the trenches, Lomell looked at his remaining men and said, “Follow me.”

The firefight in the farm buildings had taken its toll. Still, Lomell led the most sizable force on top of Pointe du Hoc. The small band headed along a dirt road that led to the blacktop coastal road.¹² The men made their way towards the intersection. Abruptly, a wall of small arms fire enveloped the Ranger patrol. Jack Conaboy, one of Lomell’s platoon sergeants, was flattened in the middle of the intersection. “Len! Len! I’m hit!”

“Where’re ya hit?”

“In the ass,” responded Conaboy.

“Well, get the hell over here,” said Lomell.

With a burst of adrenaline, Conaboy jumped up and ran towards the ditch where Lomell and the others had taken cover.

Conaboy dropped his pants, and Lomell inspected the wound. The bullet didn’t go all the way through.

“You’re lucky; you’ve got a souvenir here.” Lomell pulled out the bullet and packed the wound with sulfa powder.

After taking care of Conaboy, Lomell’s group cautiously made their way down the coastal road. Suddenly, Lomell and Kuhn spotted a platoon of about thirty-five heavily armed Germans. They knew engaging them would be suicide. The men flattened themselves in the ditch as the Germans marched past. “Three men against thirty-five was stupid, and it would ruin our mission,” recounted Lomell. “So we let them pass.”

A stone fence paralleled the road. Suddenly, a German soldier appeared in an opening in the fence and looked down the highway. Not detecting the Americans, he ran across the road and right up to where Jack Kuhn was hiding. Kuhn jumped up and fired point blank with his tommy gun, hitting the German in his chest.

“My slugs must have cut the strap on his weapon, for it fell to the ground about three feet in front of me. The German ran a few steps and dropped.”

Johnson asked Kuhn to retrieve the dead German’s MP-40 submachine gun. As Kuhn attempted to grab the machine pistol, he saw another German soldier aiming at him. “I had no way to protect myself and felt I was about to be shot.”

Just then, machine gun bullets from Lomell’s Thompson ripped into the German, killing him, but not before one of the enemy’s bullets struck the road next to Kuhn, barely missing him. At this point, Lomell and Kuhn decided to have the men pair up and keep searching for the missing guns: “There’s a minefield on our left full of mines. ‘Well,’ we decided, ‘there’s nobody but us, so let’s split up into twos.’”

Lomell and Kuhn set off together and soon discovered tire tracks in the lane. Lomell realized that the grooves couldn’t have been made by a simple farm wagon—the impressions were far too deep. Something massive had crossed the earth. “We figured we ought to take a look.”