CHAPTER 19

Nighttime Attacks

Around 7 P.M., Kerchner and his fellow officers manning the L-shape line welcomed twenty-three members of the 5th Ranger Battalion. Captain Ace Parker, commanding officer of A Company, had led most of that company’s 2nd Platoon as they spent all day fighting their way off Omaha Beach and through German defenses to the Pointe. The newly arrived men from the 5th were organized into small bands taking up positions between E and F Companies.

Weapons and supplies soon became an issue of critical importance, and ammunition was running low. “Very few U.S. grenades were left, but a plentiful supply of German ‘potato mashers’ had been found. . . . A few Rangers had lost their rifles and were using German weapons, for which there was plenty of ammunition. E Company had three German machine guns.” The men had not eaten since 3 A.M., and all they had then were the bitter-tasting, chocolate D-Bars, “plus a captured loaf of bread and one can of chicken.” Yet the men’s adrenaline continued to pump, keeping food off their minds.

To increase the amount of daylight for the operation, the men were on what the English called “Double Summer Time.” Darkness wouldn’t fall until after 11 P.M. As they waited for darkness, things became unusually quiet. George Kerchner was lulled into feeling a false sense of security: “We were beginning to relax and feel that the war was almost over for us, and anyway, very shortly the friendly troops were going to come up. We were going to go back to England. We had accomplished our D-Day mission.”

Minutes after darkness fell around 11:30 P.M., a yellow flare streaked into the inky blackness, shattering the silence. The flare destroyed Kerchner’s thoughts of being relieved as the field-gray silhouettes of a large German force loomed in front of Dog. Scores of enemy soldiers descended on the Ranger lines at near point-blank range. The cries of men, the shrill sound of whistles, the staccato of automatic fire, the violent explosions from German potato mashers, and acrid smoke all permeated the air. “This was the most frightening moment of my entire life—from being completely quiet and solemn . . . to this tremendous firing . . . going on. Grenades bursting, flares, men yelling, whistles blowing, and it just seemed like there were hundreds and hundreds of Germans running toward us,” remembered Kerchner.

The attack focused on the angle between Dog and Easy Companies. The huge tide of German soldiers nearly swept over the two-man listening positions of Dog Company’s Sergeant Branley and Private First Class Carty.

“Carty, we gotta get the hell outta here!”

BOOM! A grenade detonated near Carty, killing him instantly. A machine gun bullet tore into Branley’s shoulder as he limped back to D Company’s line. He jabbed his thigh with a morphine syrette to block the unbearable, throbbing pain.

Another outpost almost suffered the same fate. A group of Germans suddenly came around a corner in the hedgerow and nearly walked over Thompson and Hornhardt. Thompson saw their distinctive German helmets outlined across his field of vision, “close enough to shake hands with.” The Rangers fired first and immediately knocked down three of the enemy. The others hugged the ground to avoid the deadly German fire and started chucking grenades at them. A potato masher blasted Thompson’s face, closing his left eye for three days. “He gave his BAR to Hornhardt, and they started for the corner.”

In the chaos of battle, American and German lines became fluid. The captured MG-42s in the hands of the Rangers put fear in the hearts of some Germans. Karl Wegner, a private from Grenadier Regiment 1.914, later recalled: “Once we heard the familiar rattle of one of our MG-42s off to our right and I thought one of our groups had broken through their lines. I looked over the edge of our hole but [someone] pulled me back. He yelled at me ‘Wegner, the Amis are using MGs they captured from us, so keep your foolish head down.’ . . . During the night the Rangers would attack and infiltrate our lines, even though we vastly outnumbered them. [We] were too jumpy to try and sleep with these men against us. When we attacked we learned that they were good fighters all around. . . . We were opposing the Americans’ famous Rangers. They were far better soldiers than us.”

George Kerchner surveyed the impending onslaught and turned to Harry Fate, “Look, this is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna get all the men together, and we’re gonna pull out of our line and go around and make an attack on the rear of the Germans.”

Kerchner shouted to his men, “I want you to follow me.” Fate and Kerchner attempted to gather men for the counterattack, but during the “firing and confusion, the men didn’t hear them.” Only Kuhn and Lomell heard.

As the young lieutenant moved toward the German flank, he stumbled into Lomell’s foxhole. Lomell could see that Kerchner was nervous. “George, what do you expect to accomplish by this? First of all, you don’t know how many they are. You don’t know where they are. Let’s talk this thing over.” Lomell shouted, trying to calm Kerchner down. It was sound advice. Lomell convinced Kerchner to break off the ill-advised counterattack and hold their position.

About two minutes after the German assault started, the Rangers saw “an immense sheet of flame over to the west, near the position of the German 155s.” The Rangers’ guess was that more German powder charges had somehow been set off. The explosion illuminated the entire area, silhouetting the Germans in the orchard. After about a minute, the white glow of the flare died down and the firing ceased.

Over seventeen hours after reaching the shore below Pointe due Hoc, the whistles and flares started again at about 1 A.M.: the Germans were practically on top of the Rangers, with their attack focused on the angle. Then, perhaps as a form of psychological warfare or maybe just to locate their men, the Germans, who outnumbered the Rangers, began shouting out their names in the form of a roll call.

“Hans!”

“Johan!”

“Klaus!”

Heavy machine gun fire and bursts from machine pistols swallowed up the German voices. “Much of the fire was [from] tracers, high and inaccurate, designed for moral effect. Ball ammunition was spraying the hedgerow from the angle east.” Sporadic mortar fire also peppered the Rangers’ position. Potato-masher grenades sailed into the Ranger lines. And, according to one report, “some mortar shells were thrown in by hand.”

The German attack overwhelmed the Rangers manning the angle. Some survivors of the night’s attacks were about twenty-five yards to the east. “Branley, wounded, had gone out about thirty yards north of the angle on Dog’s front. Branley reports hearing Stecki’s BAR open up from the corner and fire almost steadily for about two minutes. He heard grenades explode near the angle. Then came a lull.”

A Ranger then yelled, “Kamerad!” More grenades sailed into the Ranger position. Dog heard German voices and realized the enemy had captured the angle—the line had been breached.

“Nobody north or east of the threatened angle knew after the attack just what had happened at the corner. North of it, the bulk of Dog Company’s men, who, [largely] had not been involved in the firefight, lay quiet. Twenty-five yards east of the corner, Sergeant Rupinski and Barnett didn’t go over and see what the situation was.” After the attack, the Rangers were unclear about how far the Germans had penetrated. Communication had ceased with D Company.

At the makeshift command post behind the L-shaped line, Lieutenants Lampres and Arman were laying plans for a withdrawal. Ominously, the Ranger officers failed to communicate their plan to Dog.

Rudder’s command bunker, early morning hours, June 7, 1944

Doctor Block moved from one wounded patient to another. Rudder’s command bunker doubled as an aid station and resembled a Civil War field hospital, complete with the sights, sounds, and smells of dying and wounded men. It was “pitch black,” with the darkness pierced by flickering candlelight, which eerily illuminated the cavernous, subterranean pillbox, casting shadows on the rusted steel ceiling. Ranger casualties from the German night attack poured into Rudder’s bunker. The adjoining room doubled as a mortuary and a “spare ammunition room.” The bodies of the fallen were positioned tightly, side by side.

“At times there were so many patients, the men had to lie in the command post until maybe one of the other patients would die or be patched up well enough to go back out, maybe to fight,” noted medic Frank South.

Every Ranger on the Pointe strained to stay awake. Under constant attack, most men hadn’t slept for two days. The Army had issued stimulants in pill form, which Block dispensed to the sleep-deprived men. As he described in his medical report: “We carried stimulant drugs, but suggest that drugs, such as epinephrine [adrenaline], caffeine sodium benzoate, and digitalis, be put in syrette form such as the morphine syrette packet.”

In the dimly lit cavern with the din of battle erupting outside the command bunker, Corporal Louis Lisko attempted to provide succor to Doc Block’s patients. As Lisko approached Captain Jonathan Harwood, the artillery fire control officer, he saw Harwood’s bandaged and bloodied body lying on a stretcher. Lisko tried to put a spoon up to the captain’s mouth. Fighting back tears, Block looked at Lisko and said, “He is not going to need it. He’s going to be dead in a couple of hours.” Both residents of Chicago, Block and Harwood were boyhood friends tragically reunited at Pointe du Hoc. Within hours, Block’s prediction came true when Harwood succumbed to his wounds.

Lieutenant Colonel Trevor was also in the command bunker. Rudder approached the rugged Commando and asked, “What do you think will happen next?”

Trevor lit his pipe and replied, “Never have I been so convinced of anything in my life as that I will either be a prisoner of war or a casualty by morning.”

That night, the bunker was under constant sniper fire. Lisko, a member of James Eikner’s radio team, recalled one incident: “We motioned for a young, freckle-faced German soldier to come walking out of the command post… He started to walk up, and the other German followed him.” The Germans put their hands on their heads as the Rangers trained their carbines on the backs of their enemies. When the young German emerged above the lip of the crater, the Rangers “heard a burst of fire.” Having seen the young man emerge from the command post, a German sniper had assumed he was an American: “And when this freckle faced boy stood up and the bullets hit him, he fell forward. . . . A second German . . . had his hands clasped in a prayer-like motion, begging us not to send him up. He thought we were sending them up to have them killed.”

Behind the L-shaped line, early morning hours, June 7, 1944

“I think we’ve been overrun!” Lampres told Arman.

“Yeah, I know, and the krauts are yelling behind us. I think maybe they broke through and have cut us off!”

At Arman and Lampres’s makeshift command post, panic set it. Initially, the German voices they heard were the German prisoners they captured earlier in the afternoon. In the confusion, the officers mistook those German voices for an attack that had enveloped the Ranger line.

But minutes later, an actual German attack began. The shriek of the whistles blew, and a steady roll call of names pierced the night air once again. Several German MG-42s and machine pistols sprayed the Ranger line with fire. Pushing out from the angle, the German attack fell on the middle of E Company’s positions and “rolled up the Ranger line from there westward.”

A great deal of machine gun fire and mortars slammed into the Ranger position. “The western half of E Company’s position was overrun a short time after the attack opened.” Ranger participants noted:

One foxhole east of Lieutenant Leaggins’s E-Company command post near the middle of E Company portion of the line, Maine heard the Germans come up close in the wheat field just in front of him. After the pause following the heavy opening fire, they rushed the command post area [and] Crook’s BAR went silent. In a few moments, Maine could hear the Germans talking on his side of the hedgerow and knew what had happened. Wounded by a grenade, he crawled under the thick tangle of briars and vines into the hedgerow. Hidden there, he saw Simmons, ten feet away, surrender. But the Germans came no further east. Burnett, about twenty-five yards east of the corner, where E and D joined, confirmed the impression that the decisive action was over toward Lieutenant Leaggins’ command post. Near his position, the Germans had come close through the orchard; heavy fire from automatic weapons sprayed the hedgerow, keeping the Rangers from delivering much return fire. However, they used their plentiful stock of German grenades in a close-range exchange. Burnett had a box of twenty-four. After a fight which seemed in Burnett’s memory to have lasted an hour (but by the weight of much other testimony could have only been a few minutes), Begetto’s BAR near Lieutenant Leaggins had gone silent. The fire began to come along the hedgerow from due east, insulating the Ranger positions. Burnett and Palmer (nearby) were wounded.

The Germans had broken the center of the Ranger line. “They started attacking, and we were shooting at the enemy tracers,” remembered Salva Maimone. “Every time we’d shoot, and every time we would fire, they’d come back with another [round of] fire. They could see the bullet tracers, ammunition, and somehow, they’d know where to shoot. They had lots of mortar shells going in the position where they thought we were, but we weren’t in there. We took about another twenty-five or thirty yards in front of their position, and the mortar shell was going over us. So we fought for about a couple of hours on top of that—up there, and machine guns on each side, and the more fire we put out, the more fire we’d get. Then we’d started slacking up a little bit and tried to feel our way—which way to shoot.”

The Germans had rolled up E Company. As dawn began to break, a sergeant near Maimone asked how many Rangers were left. According to Maimone, only a handful of E Company remained in the fight. “I was working on a boy, my buddy, who was shot right through the shoulder, and the bullet ran all the way through his right shoulder and left a hole about as big as my fist. I had a kit there with a needle, and I gave him a shot and pushed the sulfa inside of this hole.”

As Maimone was patching up his Ranger buddy, Germans suddenly appeared. A Ranger “sergeant turned up the flag to surrender. They were right on top of us with bayonets.” The Germans then barked, “Anyone alive, stand up!”

According to Maimone, the Germans threatened to stick bayonets in them if the Americans didn’t stand up. “So that’s what we did. We all got up, and I picked [the wounded man] up and got him on his feet,” Maimone remembered.¹⁶

There was a brief scuffle, when Rupinski and other Rangers discussed whether or not to surrender. Suddenly, Rupinski shouted, “Kamerad! Kamerad!”

The Germans then rounded up Rupinski, Burnett, about twenty men from Easy Company, and several men from Dog Company. Lieutenant Leaggins was dead. “Then they marched us on out to the road and finally we walked through that night to the next morning.”

Enemy fire came from a field north of the angle. A Ranger from Easy Company burst into the command post and frantically shouted, “The Germans have broken through. We couldn’t hold them, lieutenant! My God, there’s guys getting killed everywhere!”

It was the final nail in the coffin, precipitating Arman’s decision to withdraw. A Ranger even came across the field from the D Company position, “reporting that [Dog] had been wiped out.”

About ten minutes earlier, someone had informed Sergeant Petty of Lieutenant Arman’s plan to withdraw. Several of the officers had a hasty council of war. “The message was that, if attacked, the outpost was to withdraw to the main line of defense immediately [back to Rudder’s perimeter].” Grudgingly, Petty inquired, “What do you mean immediately? Do you mean not even try to fight them off? Some Ranger outfit we are!”

Sarcastically, the lieutenant replied, “You’ve had a couple of years of college, so you should know what ‘immediately’ means; I mean just that—no heroics; withdraw the moment that they hit.”

L-Rod retorted, “But lieutenant, I have eight good men out there, a German machine gun, and my BAR, plus the fact we are at the top of a steep bluff behind a stone wall. Christ, we can kick their ass, or at least hold them off until you get ready back there. Give us a shot at it.”

The lieutenant acidly responded, “No more lip. You’re getting too big for your britches! Get on back there and prepare your men for withdrawal when the time comes.”

Petty, a classic pain in authority’s ass, responded, “How does one prepare for withdrawal? That wasn’t included in Ranger training.”

The officer’s face turned “choleric” as he sternly raised his voice. “You’re the self-appointed leader out there. Figure it out for yourself, damn it!”

L-Rod turned his back on the officer and let off a final salvo: “Not ‘self-appointed’—you put me in charge; but what’s going to happen to our Rangers’ fighting spirit if we run every time we’re attacked ?” Petty walked away with a “spring in his step.” He thought to himself, “God, how I like to break officers’ chops, especially this swaggering loudmouth.”

Petty wondered to himself if he was up to the challenge. “Rather than fear, I discovered that I was ready and willing to close with the enemy whenever the opportunity arose. Somewhere in me, there has always been a sort of instinctive energy that emerged when there was [an] unknown or danger [that] alerted me for whatever action was needed. I knew from my farm background that when a startled sheep broke away from the herd, the entire flock followed regardless of the clear path. Was there a hidden sheep syndrome working in the hearts of frightened soldiers?”

Petty tackled problems head-on. “If it was really tough or dangerous, I seemed to be removed from my body. I was L-Rod watching some stranger functioning.” The sergeant didn’t learn this tactic at Ranger training—he most likely developed these finely tuned survival mechanisms, defending himself against a violent father. Little did Petty know how well these skills would serve him now.

Petty remembers when the full force of the German attack finally hit his position. “It had to be fate. Seconds later, a machine gun opened up with a vengeance from the right flank.” The bullets pounded the metal farm roller in front of Petty “like a hailstorm.” Petty thought to himself, “Where the hell is Easy Company?” He soon found out. “The German attack had opened with a fury—whistles were blowing, burp guns coughing, flares bursting overhead, and Easy Company men screaming, ‘Kamerad!’”

“Piss on the lieutenant’s stupid orders,” Petty thought to himself. “That son of a bitch is trying to kill me.” When there was a lull in the fighting and a flare silhouetted a German machine gunner, Petty rose to his feet, charged and shot from the hip, “emptying a full magazine” as he ran.

After his charge, Petty dove into a nearby ditch, which held several other Rangers, a platoon leader, and an American paratrooper who had “mis-dropped.” “Tracer bullets from across the field began to enfilade our position, strangely, at three or four feet above the ground.” The men began to make wise cracks about the Germans’ marksmanship. Everyone in Petty’s group was “too stupid until it was too late,” to realize the elevation of the tracers had a purpose: the enemy was crawling under the stream of gleaming, white tracer bullets. Someone yelled, “They’re crawling in on us under the tracers!” Petty and the men opened fire, but not the platoon leader, who “ducked to the bottom of the ditch.” Petty thought to himself, “The yellow bastard!” He later recalled, “I wanted very much to empty my gun into the cowering leader.”

Suddenly, six to eight Germans jumped into the ditch with Petty and the other men. Petty shouted, “Everyone hit the dirt!” Somehow, the paratrooper became separated from the group.

Only the Germans were standing. “I fired a full burst of twenty rounds into them.” Several of the Germans were still alive. At that point, Winsch, Petty’s assistant BAR gunner, yelled out, “Hey, there’s a German crawling this way from the other end!”

Winsch rolled a grenade right under the wounded man’s body; the pineapple grenade detonated, hurling the figure several feet in the air.

Petty then asked the platoon leader, “Lieutenant, what about a rear guard?” The officer responded, “What about a rear guard? Do you want to do it?”

“No, but I will,” answered Petty. “I’d hate to see Rangers get shot in the ass, running.”

“OK, you’re the rear guard,” the lieutenant scoffed.

Meanwhile, with the center of the Ranger defense line punctured, Arman, Lampres, and Ace Parker of the 5th Rangers had withdrawn, unbeknownst to Dog Company.

As the rear guard, Petty and another Ranger “lay in the lane and enfiladed the other side of the field with fire,” and then moved back towards the ditch that they had recently evacuated. Suddenly, Petty spotted an American helmet still buckled on a man’s head. Riddled with shrapnel, the corpse wore a paratrooper patch on his shoulder. To Petty’s horror, he realized that the “German” whom Winsch had blown up with a grenade was actually the American paratrooper.

“Damn! Damn!” Petty swore.

“I became so filled with guilt that I wanted to vomit.” He suppressed his emotions as scores of Germans crossed the field, heading straight for his position. Petty decided to keep the tragic news of the paratrooper’s fratricide to himself. “I could not tell Winsch of my discovery. There was no point in him carrying the guilt too.” The Germans were coming in full force, and Petty thought to himself, “To hell with being the rear guard!” He bolted down the country lane toward Rudder’s perimeter.

As he ran for his life, he encountered two “Dog Company men” crossing the lane. Petty began pushing them aside, shouting, “We’re retreating back to the Pointe!”

They resisted his shove, and the shadowy figures began cussing at him in German. To his horror, he realized the men he thought were from D Company were actually the enemy. Petty managed to escape from the two men and ducked into a hedgerow.

Before the landing, Petty had decided he would never surrender. “No German would ever hear a cry of ‘Kamerad!’ coming from my throat! . . . To me, it was not about being brave—that I was not—it was a combination of common sense and fear. I knew that when a man lay down his weapon before an armed enemy, his fate rested with the amount of feral that still dwelled in that man’s breast. To some, the battlefield was a place where the thrill of [a] kill could be savored without being concerned about the hangman’s noose. It had always been thus, proving that civilization is only skin-deep for some.”

Petty made a quick decision. Adrenaline surged as he continued to run, firing his BAR from the hip. Scattering the Germans, he dove into the next hedgerow, “out of breath but with a feeling of exhilaration.”

Darting in and out of hedgerows, Petty made his way back to the Pointe. Along the way, he recognized another Ranger. Suddenly, a German burp gun coughed. Four Germans emerged from the shadows. Petty yelled at the other Ranger, “Hit the dirt! I can blow them away. When I open up, run!”

The first burst missed the Germans. The Ranger stood with his hands raised over his head. Petty shouted, “Run, you damn fool!”

Suddenly, the Germans began returning fire. Rescuing the other Ranger was now out of the question. If Petty stayed, they would surely kill both men. So he continued pushing back towards the Pointe alone.

As Petty worked his way back to the cliffs, he remembered that minefields ringed the area. Rather than risk life and limb negotiating his way through the deadly mines at night, he found a large bomb crater and “soon fell asleep in deep exhaustion.”

When Petty, the rest of Fox Company, and Easy Company withdrew from the defense line near the apple orchard, they did not inform Dog Company of their plans. As the men of Fox and Easy ran towards Pointe du Hoc, they split into two groups. One group went down the exit road to the Pointe; the other went to the small Norman village of Auguay, which was near the Pointe. A German prisoner, a captain familiar with the area, led the group from Auguay to the Pointe, where the men reassembled in gun positions five and three.

Back in the hedgerow defensive line, Dog Company was now completely on its own, but continued to man their positions, carrying out Rudder’s order to hold until relieved. “We didn’t know they were pulling out. . . . E and F had gone. They didn’t know we were in this hedgerow that was heavily overgrown, in the brush and deep holes,” noted Kerchner. Reduced to little more than a dozen men, Dog Company held their line and blocked the coastal highway. As Lomell explained, “Dog Company didn’t even move. We didn’t move an inch, and the reason for that was simple. We knew we had a roadblock here; we had an outpost here. . . . We just stayed in this area around this roadblock, and we held it. . . . These men knew, as we all knew in Dog Company, this is our mission. . . . These [men] were dedicated and would give their life for this roadblock if it needed it. My wife gives me hell for saying this. I’ve been quiet for forty-some years. What am I going to do, go to my grave for all the guys that died with me? Seven guys died with me here, and not tell the truth? We didn’t retreat. We didn’t withdraw. We all did what we were told to do.”

Completely surrounded and cut off nearly a mile behind German lines, Dog was now alone. Obeying his orders from Rudder, Kerchner was determined to remain in position until “duly relieved.” Outnumbered, with hundreds of Germans between them and Rudder’s command post nearly a mile away, the men dug in for a long wait. Unable to leave their holes, the men were forced to use their helmets as toilets.

True to their mission, they waited to see what the dawn would bring.