Dog Company

Hypothermia was setting in and the strong current of the English Channel was pulling their exhausted bodies downward. Several had drowned already as Ruggiero, Slater, and McBride encouraged fellow Rangers to keep their legs moving to keep the icy water from claiming more lives from The Duke’s sinking landing craft.

Earlier, when Lomell’s boat had pulled ahead, things began to go horribly wrong for Slater and the others on LCA 860. While the majority of Dog Company was engaged in scaling the cliffs and searching for the missing guns, Slater and the other Rangers aboard LCA 860 were fighting a very different kind of battle. Still out in the channel, the men riding in the captain’s boat struggled to avoid capsizing in the turbulent, freezing seas.

Sometime around 7 A.M., when Lomell’s LCA 668 took the lead, LCA 860 was already in trouble. Shells whizzed by, nearly hitting the boat several times. “We were bailing water. We were all seasick and throwing up—I know I was,” recalled Tom Ruggiero. In an attempt to get some fresh air and see how far they were from the objective, Ruggiero stood up in the boat. “How far is it until we land?” he murmured.

Dominick Sparaco, who was behind Ruggiero, reached up, yanked the five-foot-three Italian down, and yelled, “You damn fool! There’s things flying all over. They hit you, they’re going to blow the whole boat up.”

Ruggiero was carrying C-2 plastic explosives intended to destroy the guns on top of Pointe du Hoc. He had placed the C-2 in a belt around his waist. Like most of the Rangers in the boat, he was carrying about sixty pounds of equipment, which included several bandoliers of ammunition, six fragmentation grenades, a thermite grenade, a trenching tool, and a .45 he had attached to his belt with a rawhide lanyard.

In the channel, the Texas, a stalwart battlewagon from World War I, continued to shell Pointe du Hoc with its large guns. But German ordnance persisted in firing at Slater’s landing craft as well as the bigger ship. Several near misses brushed by LCA 860. “You could feel it. Every time a shell came down, it was like it was knocking you in the guts,” recalled Ruggie.

From one of the shells splashing down, Ruggiero caught a mouthful of saltwater, which “made things even worse. Stuff was coming in pretty close,” he recounted.

Then a shell came in and hit near the front of the boat. “The front went up and the boat tipped over sideways. That’s when we knew we were going to flood. Before we entered the boats, they told us they wouldn’t sink. ‘Don’t leave the boat.’ I never saw a boat go down so fast in my life,” declared Ruggiero.

The men started shedding their extra equipment and gear, tossing it all over the side of the boat. Johnny Corona had his girlfriend’s picture in his helmet. “Baby, it’s either you or me,” he said, tossing the picture and his helmet just before he hit the cold water.

Around them, geysers of water from landing shells engulfed the men. The concussion blast of a shell killed one Ranger instantly. Life or death boiled down to a matter of reflexes, a handful of seconds, and a lot of luck. Besides scrambling to remove their sixty pounds of equipment, the men also rushed to press the buttons that would inflate their lifebelts. “I squeezed it as soon as I hit the water, and it self-inflated,” Ruggiero explained.

All were not so fortunate, though. Tough Guy’s fingers anxiously worked on the defective lifebelt he wore, as he struggled in vain to activate his lifebelt. But as Ruggiero had warned him, it didn’t work. And so Riendeau, the best swimmer in Dog Company, the miracle man who had survived a fall from the steep precipice of the Needles, went down in the channel waters “like a rock.” Several other men soon shared his fate, including Army photographer, Private First Class Kegham Nigohosian, who had been attached to the outfit only days earlier.

The rest of the men continued scrambling to remove the heavy equipment that was pulling them into the dark, cold waters. Ruggiero’s .45 pistol was tapping his knee. With all his “brute strength,” he broke the rawhide lanyard and freed the gun. He looked over at the men, including Slater and McBride, who were bobbing in the water.

Ruggiero could sense that his friend was starting to slip into the water and drown. “I was a dancer; my legs were strong. I told the men, keep your legs going like pedaling a bicycle.”

A similar fate had befallen another landing craft, LCA 914, the Rangers’ supply boat. It went down, drowning most of those on board; the lone survivor was Private First Class John Riley of Dog Company.

While the men from the capsized boat were battling the frigid waters of the channel, they could see their fellow Rangers assailing Pointe du Hoc. Hypothermia began setting in, dragging more men to the bottom. Duke Slater and his Rangers were dying a slow, cold, watery death.

As they desperately fought to survive in the ice-cold water, help arrived, surprisingly in the form of a gunboat that had initially gone to the wrong beach. After having gone to Utah Beach, it had been directed back to Omaha Beach. It was there that the boat intersected the path of Slater, McBride, Ruggiero, Secor, and other Dog Company men still clinging to life

At that point, Ruggiero noticed that one of his fellow Rangers was about to go under. He pointed at the man, yelling for the crew to save him first. The gunboat crew cast a donut-shaped life preserver to the man. “He got one arm in it and lost it.” As the crew pulled the donut towards the boat, they hoisted the freezing Ranger on board. “He was dead when they pulled him up,” recalled Ruggiero.

The gunboat started retrieving the other men of LCA 860. A weighted rope “nearly hit me in the face,” remembered Ruggiero. As he grabbed it, the crew pulled him through the water “like a torpedo.” Once he reached the boat, friendly arms tried to pull him aboard. “That’s OK, I can climb,” Ruggiero told the crew. “As soon as I hit the cold air, I went right back down like a rock,” he later admitted.

Several men never came out of the water alive. Ruggiero, Slater, McBride, and the other survivors were separated from one another, given blankets, and taken into the warm, inner part of the ship. Ruggiero ended up in the powder magazine. Shells still splashed in the water near the boat, some of them coming in pretty hot. A crew member snidely remarked to Ruggiero, “Since we’re in the magazine, we won’t even know what happened when it hits.”

In addition to receiving blankets, the men were given shots of medicinal brandy to warm them up. Still suffering from the hypothermia, the Rangers then transferred to the Texas, where the ship’s surgeon examined them. Gung ho, eager to join the fight and help his fellow Rangers, Slater begged to be allowed to go back to Pointe du Hoc. Realizing they lacked weapons and equipment and were barely alive, the ship’s surgeon looked at Slater and said flatly, “You’re not going anywhere right now.” It would be nearly two and a half weeks before Slater, McBride, Ruggiero, and the other “swimmers” of LCA 860 would rejoin the rest of Dog Company.