That so much had been accomplished by the attacking battalions was due in part to the support of the Navy warships. Forward observers had accompanied the 4th Division men inland and whenever they ran into enemy artillery or tanks called back to the battleships and cruisers for suppressing fire. Spotter planes did the same. The Navy poured it on.
Lt. Ross Olsen was a gunnery officer on the Nevada. “I recall that our 5-inch guns fired so much that the paint peeled off the guns and all that was left showing was the blue steel. We also had to halt the guns for awhile to clear the deck of empty shell casings. Normally these were saved for reloading but this day they were dumped over the side as they were hindering the movement of the gun turrets.”
On one occasion, Nevada got a target that required all its guns, the 14-inch as well as the 5-inch, to fire almost straight ahead. When Nevada unleashed the volley, it cost Olsen his hearing in his right ear and 50 percent of his left; he has worn hearing aids ever since. “The shelling also destroyed the twenty-six-foot motor whaleboat on the boat deck, knocked the door off the mess hall, peeled all the insulation material off the mess hall bulkhead, and broke almost every light bulb in the overhead fixtures on the port-side.”27
Badly wounded men, German as well as American, were being brought out to the big ships by the returning landing craft. Pharmacist Mate Vincent del Giudice was on the Bayfield. He was busy all day, tending to many men, but two stuck especially in his mind. One was a Mexican-American GI who had the terrible experience of stepping on two S-mines simultaneously. German medics had treated him by putting tourniquets on both legs and both arms, but they had been driven off by an American patrol and left him in the field. He was picked up by some GI stretcher-bearers and transported back to the Bayfield, but they had failed to remove the tourniquets and gangrene had set in.
Del Giudice assisted in amputating one leg below the knee, the other above, and both arms. The soldier also had abdominal wounds which Del Giudice debrided.
“It was a sad sight,” Del Giudice said. “The man did not complain. He had a look of resignation on him. He came out of his anesthesia, looked at his four stumps, closed his eyes and went back to sleep.”
Later, Del Giudice tended a wounded German corporal, “tall, thin, a rather handsome chap with blond hair. He had been wounded on his right hand and all five fingers were dangling and his hand and fingers were blackened.” Del Giudice amputated his fingers with scissors, put sulfa powder on his hand, “and for my effort I got a smile and a ’danke schön!’ ”28
• •
Lieutenant Jahnke was in an improvised dugout on the dunes, firing with his rifle at the incoming Americans. A tank spotted him and blasted the dugout with its 75 mm cannon. Jahnke was buried alive. He felt someone dragging him out. It was a GI.
Jahnke had won an Iron Cross on the Eastern Front. His instinct was to get away—anything rather than captivity. He saw a machine pistol on the ground and dove for it. The American pushed it aside and in a calm voice said, “Take it easy, German.”
The GI sent Jahnke, hands clasped over his head, to a POW enclosure on the beach. There Jahnke was wounded again by shrapnel from an in-coming German shell.29
• •
Seabee Orval Wakefield was up by the seawall. He said that “by middle afternoon the beach had changed from nothing but obstacles to a small city. It was apparent that we NCD units had done our job well because as far as I could see to one side the beach was all the way opened, there was nothing holding the landing craft back. We figured our day was well spent, even though no one ever knew who we were.
“We were being questioned. ‘Who are you guys? What do you do?’ The coxswains didn’t like us because we always had so many explosives with us. When we were inland, the Army officers wanted to know what is the Navy doing in here.”
An Army medical officer spotted Wakefield’s team and said he needed volunteers to carry wounded men down to the shore for evacuation to a hospital ship. “He said, ‘Are you guys going to just sit here or are you going to volunteer?’ We didn’t think much about that idea, we had just come off the hot end of the demolition wire but finally we did volunteer to do it for him. We carried the wounded down to the shore. German shells were still coming in.”
By this time, Wakefield noted, “it was no longer a rush of men coming ashore, it was a rush of vehicles.” Then he saw a never-to-be-forgotten sight: “All of a sudden it seemed like a cloud started from the horizon over the ocean and it came toward us and by the time it got to us it extended clean back to the horizon. Gliders were coming, to be turned loose inland.”30
Reinforcements were pouring in from the sea and from the air. Utah Beach was secure. In the morning, the Americans would move out to cut the base of the Cotentin, to take Cherbourg, to get on with the job of winning the war so they could go home.
At dusk, Wakefield “had my most important thought that day.” Wading into chest-deep water at first light that morning, “I found that my legs would hardly hold me up. I thought I was a coward.” Then he had discovered that his sea bags with their explosives had filled with water and he was carrying well over 100 pounds. He had used his knife to cut the bags and dump the water, then moved on to do his job. “When I had thought for a moment that I wasn’t going to be able to do it, that I was a coward, and then found out that I could do it, you can’t imagine how great a feeling that was. Just finding out, yes, I could do what I had volunteered to do.”
• •
Overall, casualties were astonishingly light. The 8th and 22nd regiments had only twelve men killed, another 106 wounded. For the 12th Regiment, the figure was sixty-nine casualties. Nearly all were caused by mines, either sea or land, mostly those devilish S-mines. The 4th Division had taken heavier losses in training (in the disaster at Slapton Sands, it lost almost twenty times as many men as it did on June 6).
Equally astonishing was the speed with which the 4th Division and its attached units got ashore. This was thanks to the organization, training, and skill of all those involved, whether Army, Navy, Army Air Force, or Coast Guard. They overcame logistical problems that seemed insurmountable. On D-Day, in fifteen hours, the Americans put ashore at Utah more than 20,000 troops and 1,700 motorized vehicles. General Jodl had estimated that it would take the Allies six or seven days to put three divisions into France. At Utah alone, counting the airborne divisions, the Americans had done it in one day.
D-Day was a smashing success for the 4th Division and its attached units. Nearly all objectives were attained even though the plan had to be abandoned before the first assault waves hit the beach. By nightfall, the division was ready to move out at first light on June 7 for its next mission, taking Montebourg and then moving on to Cherbourg. It went on to fight battles far more costly than the one it won on the Cotentin beach on June 6, distinguishing itself throughout the campaign in northwest Europe, especially in taking Cherbourg, in holding the German counteroffensive at Mortain, in the liberation of Paris, in the Hürtgen Forest, and in the Battle of the Bulge.31
There were many reasons for the success of the 4th Division on D-Day, not least being the German reliance on mines, flooded areas, and fixed fortifications instead of high-quality troops to defend the supposedly impregnable Atlantic Wall. As important was the air and sea bombardment, and the naval shelling through the day. Credit belonged, too, to General Roosevelt and his colonels, men like Van Fleet, Reeder, and Jackson, for making quick and correct decisions. Junior officers, men like Captains Ahearn and Mabry, made indispensable contributions.
But most of all, the 4th’s success was thanks to the airborne troopers behind the German lines. The paratroopers held the western exits. They confused the Germans and prevented any concentrated counterattacks aimed at the seaborne invaders. They put out of action batteries that might have brought heavy artillery fire down on Utah Beach. How the paratroopers did it, and why they were so thankful to link up with the 4th Division, whether at noon or nightfall, is its own story.