CHAPTER 16

The Guns of Pointe du Hoc

Lomell and Kuhn moved down the sunken road, which cut through several pastures and high hedgerows. “You could have hid a column of tanks in it, that’s how deep it was,” recalled the first sergeant.

The two Rangers carefully traversed the road, moving about one hundred yards down the country lane. Lomell scouted out the position while Kuhn covered him, then the two men switched off, or “leapfrogged,” as they made their way deeper and deeper into German territory. Suddenly, Lomell and Kuhn came upon a picturesque, lush apple orchard.

“My God, there they are!” Lomell said to himself.

Lomell turned to Kuhn. “My God. Look at them. They’re ready to go.” The long, 155 mm barrels of the guns of Pointe du Hoc loomed directly in front of them.

Five of the K418 guns—the German designation for the former French artillery pieces—had been towed inland and pointed at Utah Beach. They could easily have been turned around and used to fire upon Omaha Beach as well. Netting covered in fake leaves was draped over the five guns. But the sixth gun was mysteriously missing.

Amazingly, not a soul stood guard near the artillery.¹³ However, they could see about seventy-five to one hundred Germans assembling several hundred feet away in the corner of an adjoining field. “The Germans were in various states of undress. They were putting jackets and shirts on; they were being rallied. They were being talked to by some officer standing in his vehicle. This is now about eight in the morning,” noted Lomell.

It appeared to Lomell that the group included the thirty-five heavily armed Germans who narrowly missed discovering him and Kuhn just minutes earlier.

Lomell asked Kuhn for his incendiary grenade, adding it to his own. With Kuhn covering him, Lomell climbed over towards the guns. Armed with only a submachine gun, his .45, and two thermite grenades, he moved into position near the artillery. He placed a thermite grenade on two of the guns. “The thermite grenade was special for this type of action because we were going to lay them on the moving parts of the artillery and destroy the movable gears in the guns.”

Lomell pulled the pins. POP! A molten, metal-like substance flowed over the parts, seeping into the crevices and welding them together so that they were inoperable. Remarkably, the nearby Germans didn’t detect the first sergeant. He wrapped his field jacket around the butt of his tommy gun, using it to smash the sights of all five artillery pieces. “I didn’t know if I was going to get back, so I wanted to do as much damage as possible.”

Lomell and Kuhn’s actions—the actions of two men who were willing to risk their lives for the mission—had a profound impact on the entire invasion.

Not thinking about anything other than the mission, Lomell scurried back over to Kuhn and whispered to him, “We’ve got to get more grenades.”

Kuhn and Lomell dashed back a hundred yards or so down the road, where they met other men in their platoon and asked for their incendiary grenades. With his field jacket full of incendiaries, Lomell ran back towards the guns with Kuhn at his side.

When they reached the guns, Kuhn trained his Thompson on the Germans in the field. The first sergeant placed thermite grenades on the three remaining guns. As Lomell finished rigging the last field piece, Jack said, “Hurry up! Hurry up!”

After pulling their pins, Lomell scrambled over a nine-foot-tall hedgerow, where Kuhn was standing.

Then “the whole world blew up,” as Lomell and Kuhn flew off the hedgerow and onto the sunken road. “Dust and the stones and the brush came out of the sky. Ramrods and all kinds of things fell around us.”

“What the hell just happened?” asked Lomell. Unbeknownst to the two men, Sergeant Frank Rupinski from Easy Company had detonated an ammunition store near the guns, causing a massive explosion.¹⁴

It was now approximately 8:30 A.M. Two Dog Company Rangers, Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn, had achieved what scores of bombers dropping hundreds of tons of bombs, and the massive fourteen-inch guns of the battleship Texas, as well as a constant bombardment from off-shore destroyers had failed to achieve. Thanks to them, five of the six guns of Pointe du Hoc would never fire again.

After locating the sixth gun nearby, a patrol from Easy Company soon eliminated it.

Rejoining the other men, Lomell dispatched two volunteers to relay the news that they had accomplished the mission. Ironically, he chose Private Harry Fate, the man he accused earlier of shooting him in the side. Sergeant Gordon Lunning accompanied Fate.

Going back through the country roads, traversing the moonscaped surface of Pointe du Hoc, Lunning and Fate fought their way back to the German bunker that Rudder had converted into a command post. The runners from D Company arrived at the command post at approximately 9 A.M. Lunning encountered Lieutenant James Eikner and told him the news. Eikner then informed Rudder. “Should I send a message, sir?” Eikner asked.

“Yes,” Rudder answered.

Most of the Rangers’ radios had been waterlogged or damaged in the landing. Astutely planning for such a contingency, Eikner had brought along a signal lamp. Luckily for the Rangers, Eikner was trained in Morse code and sent off the pre-designated signal to confirm destruction of the guns: “Blow 6.” The lieutenant also requested re-supply and reinforcements.

As the final contingency, in case all the technology failed, Eikner relied on the wings of a carrier pigeon to relay the message. Slipping a small note inside a tube attached to the bird, Eikner released it. Initially, the winged messenger failed its duty miserably, repeatedly circling the command post. Eikner threw pebbles at the bird until, finally, it flew towards the Allied fleet.

An hour later, the destroyer USS Satterlee responded: “No reinforcements available—all Rangers have landed on Omaha.”

Like Lomell and the rest of the men on top Pointe du Hoc, Rudder and the others in his command post were on their own, and tragically, the guns of their comrades would pose the greatest danger.

Several forward artillery observers, including Private Henry Genther and Navy Lieutenant Kenneth “Rocky” Norton, had accompanied the Rangers. Using Eikner’s signal lamp, the men now called in artillery from the nearby Allied warships. They also called in a strafing run from P-47 fighter-bombers. The Thunderbolts arrived first, and the lead plane mistakenly began a deadly dive-bombing raid directed toward Rudder’s command post.

Quickly, Eikner spread out an American flag along the side of the cliff. Spotting Old Glory, the American pilot waggled his wings and flew off toward the German positions across Pointe du Hoc.

The shore-fire control party then used Eikner’s lamp to call in naval fire upon the German machine gun nests and the 37 mm AA gun that was wreaking so much havoc on them. But an artillery shell from the battleship Texas’s 14-inch guns landed short, detonating near Rudder’s command bunker. The shell killed Captain Harwood and Private Genther, also wounding Lieutenant Colonel Rudder and Lieutenant Norton. The fatal round was like an armor piercing shell containing yellow pigment known as “Explosive D” or Dunnite. “The men were turned completely yellow. It was as though they had been stricken with jaundice. It wasn’t only their faces and hands, but the skin beneath their clothes and their clothes which were yellow from that shell.”

Bill Hoffman recalled seeing one of the men killed by the shell. “He had no head and no blood. He was covered with yellow dye. The shrapnel just took his head off, nice and clean. He was all yellow. I said to myself, What the hell is that? It was my first introduction to death in the war.”

Already wounded in the leg, Rudder was wounded again by the yellow marker shell. Despite his wounds, he refused to relinquish command and continued leading his men.

After Eikner sent out “Praise the Lord,” indicating success, Rudder instructed Lunning and Fate to take a message back to Lomell’s group, which had set up a roadblock—the second part of their mission. Rudder’s orders were simple: “Hold ‘til duly relieved.” The pair of Dog Company men set out across the maze to find the roadblock.