IN NORTH AFRICA in 1943 General Eisenhower had reprimanded a general officer who had built an elaborate, bombproof underground HQ for himself, where he stayed during the Kasserine Pass battle. Eisenhower told him to go on a front-line inspection tour and explained to the reluctant warrior the simplest truth of war: “Generals are expendable just as is any other item in an army.”1
War is waste. Men and equipment—and generals—are expendable so long as their destruction or death contributes to the ultimate goal of victory. At Omaha Beach, they were expended in fearful numbers. Hundreds of young men and boys, trained at enormous expense, were killed, many—perhaps most—of them before they could fire one shot. Equipment losses were staggering. Hundreds of tanks, trucks, self-propelled artillery, jeeps, and landing craft of all types went to the bottom or were destroyed on the beach by German artillery. Thousands of radios, rifles, machine guns, ammunition boxes, K and D rations, BARs, bazookas, flamethrowers, gas masks, hand grenades, and other matériel were destroyed, abandoned, or sunk.
The equipment had made a long journey, from factories in California, Illinois, Michigan, and the Deep South to East Coast ports, then across the Atlantic to England, by truck or rail to Portsmouth, finally across the Channel, only to go to the Channel bottom off Omaha Beach. Some of those vehicles still rest there today. Aside from the German gunners, the major culprits were the runnels, deep trenches just inside the shallow sandbars, and the mined obstacles, which at high water took a ghastly toll.
• •
The first vehicles on Omaha Beach were Sherman tanks. They arrived at H-Hour minus thirty seconds, in Lt. Dean Rockwell’s flotilla. The LCTs hit a sandbar fifteen meters or so off the shoreline, where they dropped their ramps and the tanks drove off. Those coming off Rockwell’s LCT dipped into the runnel, gunned their waterproofed engines, and climbed toward the beach.
As the tanks went clanking and grinding down the ramp, a German 88mm gun that was enfilading the beach took them under fire. As Rockwell retracted, he noticed two of the tanks get hit by 88 shells. One of them was burning. The following two, and others from the battalion, stayed offshore, about half under water, and commenced firing their machine guns and 75mm cannons.2
Not all the tanks got that far. Ens. F. S. White, skipper of LCT 713, later reported to Rockwell: “The ramp was again lowered, and the first tank was launched. The water was much deeper than expected, and as the tank went off the ramp it went to the bottom and settled. The tank commander gave the order to abandon tank and the entire crew was brought back to the ship by means of a heaving line thrown from the ship.” Ensign White retracted, moved 100 meters east, and beached a second time. The other three tanks made it to the water’s edge even as LCT 713 took a direct hit.3
Pvt. J. C. Friedman was a tank driver in the 747th Tank Battalion. His LCT came in on the third wave. Through his periscope he could see “tanks, half-tracks, jeeps, and trucks being blown up by land mines. The noise of gunfire and gun powder as well as the smell of death seemed to be all around us. Everyone in my tank was praying. I kept thinking, Is this the end of me? Constant shelling and shrapnel flying off the tank seemed to indicate an unleashing of the powers of hell. I wondered if all this was worth the lives taken and if we would see the next day.”4
Col. John Upham commanded the 743rd Tank Battalion. It went in on the heels of the first wave. He stayed a few hundred meters offshore, directing his tanks by radio. When his LCT went in at 0800, he jumped over the side and waded ashore to join his tanks. Still on foot, he began to direct their fire. A rifle bullet tore through his right shoulder but he refused medical attention. He came upon Pvt. Charles Leveque and Cpl. William Beckett, who had abandoned their tank after a track had been knocked off. Upham, his right arm dangling uselessly, directed them to the seawall. Beckett commented, “You couldn’t get the colonel excited—not even then.”5
Sgt. Paul Radzom was excited. He was in command of a half-track equipped with multibarreled .50-caliber machine guns. As his LCT approached the shore, machine-gun rounds started bouncing off the side. The ramp went down and “out we go. We were not supposed to be in more than eight feet of water. They dumped us off in fifteen feet. Our track didn’t go anywhere but down. I had the boys elevate that barrel straight up in the air, as high as it would go. There was about six inches of that barrel up above the water, when the swells weren’t hitting it. I lost everything including my helmet.
“I swam back and got back on that ramp and the rest of the crew did, too, except old ‘Mo’ [Carl] Dingledine, who couldn’t swim. Last time I saw Mo he was clinging to that barrel. Never found out what happened to old Mo.” (Ens. Edward Kelly, commanding LCT 200, spotted Dingledine as he was retracting and picked him up.)
Radzom’s LCT backed off and came in again. He jumped on Sergeant Evanger’s half-track as it drove off the ramp. His crew followed him. The track made it to shore. “There was supposed to be a road cleared out for us. Then we were supposed to go in about five miles and secure a position. We couldn’t have gotten five yards.” The track got hit and Radzom jumped off. He picked up a helmet, then a rifle.
“I saw a first louie laying there dead. There was the neck of a bottle sticking out of his musette bag. I snitched it. It was a bottle of Black & White scotch.” He rejoined Evanger’s crew and passed the bottle around. “That was the first time and the only time in my life that I drank scotch. I never felt a thing.” He got hit with shrapnel in the face, side, and back, and eventually was evacuated.6
Cpl. George Ryan was a gunner on a 105mm howitzer. The vehicle was called an M-7. The cannon was mounted on a Sherman tank chassis. There were four M-7s on the LCT. The skipper saw that his designated landing site on Easy Red was too hot so he said he was going down a little way to find a softer spot.
“Nobody was arguing with him,” Ryan remembered.
The skipper turned toward shore and just that quick the craft was stuck on a sandbar. Ryan’s CO shouted, “Every man for himself,” and over the side the CO jumped.
“Holy smokes,” Ryan remarked. “He was just gone. We lowered the ramp. Everybody in the first M-7 took a deep breath and they gave it the gun, down the ramp they went and into the water. The thing almost disappeared from sight, but the driver gave it the gun and broom, right out of the water it came. He did it so fast.”
The second M-7 drove off “and it went glonck. It just disappeared from sight. The guys started popping up like corks. They swam in.”
Shells were bursting around the LCT. “We gotta get off this thing,” someone in Ryan’s crew shouted, and they all jumped into the water. Ryan held back. “I wasn’t so much afraid of them bullets or the shells as I was of the cold Channel water. I cannot swim.”
Ryan threw off all his equipment, inflated his Mae West, and began to tiptoe in off the ramp when “some German opened up on the side of the LCT with his machine gun, blblblblang. That convinced me. Into the water I dove. I pushed with all my might and then I started going. I’m swimming and I’m swimming. Somebody taps me on the shoulder and I look up. I was in a foot of water, swimming. You talk about the will to live. If they hadn’t stopped me I would have swam two miles inland.”
Ryan made it to the seawall. He threw himself down beside a 16th Regiment infantryman. “You got a cigarette?” Ryan asked.
A bit later, a piece of shrapnel made a scratch on Ryan’s hand. Nothing much, “almost like a cat would give you.” Soon a medical officer came along. He said, “Every man on this beach deserves the Purple Heart, just for being here. Give me your names, fellows. If you are wounded I can take care of you. If you are dead, I can’t. If there’s nothing wrong with you, I can see that you get a Purple Heart anyway.”
“How about this, Major?” Ryan asked, showing his scratch. The doctor said he would get him the medal. But Ryan thought, “No, I can’t do this. It would cheapen it so much. A guy loses a leg and gets the Purple Heart; I get it for a scratch; that just ain’t fair. I turned it down.”7
Another crew chief on an M-7 was Sgt. Jerry Eades. There were two M-7s on his LCT. They were hooked by cable to two half-tracks behind; directly behind one of the half-tracks, also connected by cable, was a truck, while a jeep was behind the other. The M-7s were supposed to drag a half-track and a truck or jeep to shore.
As the landing craft approached the beach, the 105mm howitzers fired at the bluff. At first “it was just like a picnic,” because no one was firing back. “All of a sudden, shells hit the water around us and we knew we were back in the war [Eades had been in North Africa and Sicily]. We came alive. It was a feeling of, well, I don’t know how to explain fear, a feeling that went over you that you knew that the next breath could be your last. Of course, we were continuing to do our job.” They would fire, lower the elevation, fire again, one shell every thirty seconds.
There were some GIs, infantry, on the LCT. There was nothing they could do but “wait for the slaughter. Us guys on the guns, at least we felt like we were doing something, shooting back. As long as you were shooting, you felt like you were in the war. But as for me, I would think, Let me hold my control, not let the guys see how scared I am, not lose control. That was my biggest fear, being caught afraid.”
At 2,000 meters, the howitzers could not depress sufficiently to hit the bluff, so they stopped firing. German machine-gun bullets began to zing off the LCT. “I got down as low as possible, wishing I could push right on through the bottom of the boat, with the helpless feeling of ‘I can’t do anything now.’ ” The LCT was “going awfully slow. We were all having that urge like at a horse race, kind of shaking your shoulders to get the horse to run faster; we were trying to get this boat to go faster.”
Eades looked at his watch. It was 0800. “All of a sudden I was real hungry. My thoughts drifted back to a bar and grill in El Paso, when I was in the old horse cavalry down there. The California Bar & Grill. They served a tremendous big taco for $.10 and an ice cold Falstaff beer for $.10. I could imagine myself sitting there at the bar with a beer and a taco for $.20 and here I was with maybe $200 in my pocket and I couldn’t even buy a beer and taco.”
When the LCT grounded on a sandbar (after three unsuccessful tries) and dropped the ramp, the skipper was “running madly around the boat shouting, ‘Get them damn things off my boat! Get those damn things off my boat!’ My lieutenant had his arm up; when he dropped his arm forward, I kicked the driver in the back of the head and off we went. I heard a kind of ‘glub glub blub blub’ sound. The water was deeper than our air intake and we were immediately flooded.”
Eades thought about “all the stuff we had just lost. The Navy boys had given us fifty pounds of sugar, thirty pounds of coffee, fifty cartons of cigarettes, and we had lost all this stuff—and our gun.”
Eades made it to shore and up to the shingle, where he asked himself, “Just what in the hell am I doing here when I could be back in Ft. Bliss, Texas.” He was old Army, with an arm full of hash marks, an experienced goldbrick who knew how to avoid the tough assignments and garner the soft ones. To his consternation, he ended up spending D-Day as a rifleman on Omaha Beach, about the worst predicament an old soldier could find himself in. He organized “a kind of a provisional platoon” of infantry, engineers, and artillerymen, and up the bluff he led them.8
Because so many vehicles went glub glub, many specialists found themselves ending up as ordinary infantry. Capt. R. J. Lindo was a liaison officer for the Navy. He landed at 0730, with two men to carry his radio. His job was to direct naval gunfire in support of the 18th Regiment. But “my worst fears and my best training were for naught as we lost our radios coming in from the LCT to the beach. So there I was, helpless to assist in any way. I became instead a part of the infantry attack.”9
Sgt. William Otlowski, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, came in on a DUKW. He was in command of an M-7, which was far too heavy for the DUKWs to carry in anything but calm water. His DUKW was slammed up and down by a wave as it backed off its LST ramp. The rudder hit the ramp and got bent.
“So we’re going around in little tight circles and we can’t straighten out, so the coxswain, a Navy boy, he decided to shut off the motor, which was a mistake, because that shut off the pumps and the DUKW started to fill with water and of course we sank.”
Otlowski yelled at his crew to keep together, hold hands, stay in a circle. A passing LCVP, returning to its mother ship for another load, picked them up. They transferred to a Rhino ferry.
The Rhino hit a sandbar. A lieutenant tied a rope to a jeep and told the driver to take off to test the water depth. The jeep promptly sank.
“Hey, men,” the lieutenant called out, “grab the rope and pull up the jeep.” Just then an 88 burst on one side of the Rhino, then another on the far side.
Otlowski yelled to the lieutenant, “Those are 88s, and the third one’s going to hit right in the middle, get your men off this f—ing boat!’
“He said, ‘Sergeant, stay where you are!’
“I said, ‘To hell with you, Lieutenant, if you want to die, go ahead. Okay, men let’s go!’ ” Otlowski and his crew jumped ship and swam to shore.
“I looked back, the third 88 had hit smack in the middle of that damn barge and every consecutive shot was right on target.”
Otlowski picked up a rifle, ammunition belt, and helmet “and scooted up across the beach to the seawall.” He saw a young soldier walking behind it, with a big roll of communication wire on his back. A lieutenant spotted the soldier and called out, “Oh, boy, do we need that. Sit down right here. Give me that wire.”
The soldier replied, “I can’t, Lieutenant. What will I do with this?” In his right hand he was carrying his left arm. Otlowski helped get the wire off his back, gave him some morphine, and yelled for a medic.10
Charles Sullivan was a Seabee on a Rhino. He helped bring in three loads on D-Day. Most of the vehicles were destroyed before they could fire a shot, but he concluded, “In twenty-eight years of service, three wars, fourteen overseas tours of duty, thousands of faces, only Normandy and D-Day remain vivid, as if it happened only yesterday. What we did was important and worthwhile, and how many ever get to say that about a day in their lives.”11
Sullivan’s comment brings to mind Eisenhower’s remark to Walter Cronkite that no one likes to get shot at, but on D-Day more people wanted to get in on it than wanted to get out.
• •
A tremendous tonnage of tanks, half-tracks, M-7s, jeeps, trucks, and other vehicles had attempted to come into Omaha between 0630 and 0830. Many had sunk, others were destroyed, and the few survivors were caught on an ever-shrinking beach with no place to go. The vehicles were more of a problem than they were an offensive weapon.
Beside and between the tanks, half-tracks, M-7s, and the rest, the Higgins boats were coming in, carrying the 116th and 16th regiments. With them were demolition teams composed of Seabees and Army engineers (five of each in a team). There were sixteen teams, each assigned to a distinct sector of the beach with the job of blowing a gap some fifty meters wide. Not one landed on target.
A Seabee described his experience: “As we dropped our ramp, an 88mm came tearing in, killing almost half our men right there, the officer being the first one. We all thought him the best officer the Navy ever had. . . . From then on things got hazy to me. I remember the chief starting to take over, but then another shell hit and that did it. I thought my body torn apart.”
Bleeding heavily from shrapnel in his left leg and arm, the Seabee looked around and saw no one alive. Fire on the Higgins boat was about to set off the demolition charges. “So I went overboard and headed for the beach.” He reached the obstacles, looked back, and saw the craft blow up.
“That got me. Not caring whether I lived or not, I started to run through the fire up the beach.” He made the seawall, later picked up a rifle, and spent the day with the 116th as an infantryman.12
Other demolition teams had better luck. They got off their craft more or less intact and went to work, ignoring the fire around them. They were better off than the infantry; the GIs who landed at the wrong place and whose officers were wounded or killed before they made the seawall did not know what to do next. Not even heavy gunfire puts such a strain on a soldier’s morale as not knowing what to do and having no one around to tell him. The demolition teams, however, could see immediately what to do. Even if they were at the wrong place, there were obstacles in front of them. They started blowing them.
Comdr. Joseph Gibbons was the CO of the demolition teams at Omaha. He strode up and down the beach, giving help where it was required, supervising the operation. The first two of his men he met told him the whole of the rest of their team had been killed. They had no explosives with them. Gibbons told them to get behind the seawall until he found a job for them. Then he found a team that had landed successfully and was already fastening its charges to the obstacles. The men moved methodically from one obstacle to another, fixing the charges to them.13
Pvt. Devon Larson of the engineers made it ashore. He was alone but he had his explosives with him so he went to work anyway. “Lying on the beach, I saw only two steel obstacles in front of me. Both with Teller mines atop of them. I wrapped a composition C pack around the base, piled about a foot of sand on my side so that the explosion would be away from me, pulled a fuse lighter from my helmet, yelled ‘Fire in the hole!’ and pulled the fuse. I heard several more shouts of ‘Fire in the hole!’ to my left. I rolled to the right. The explosion rolled me a little farther, but my two steel posts were gone. No more obstacles were in front of me or on either side, so I headed for the seawall.”14
Altogether, the demolition teams were able to blow five or six partial gaps instead of the sixteen that had been planned, and the gaps that did exist were not properly marked by flags. As the tide rose, this situation caused immense problems for the coxswains bringing in the follow-up waves of infantry and vehicles.
Seaman Exum Pike was on patrol craft 565. The job was to guide LCIs and other craft into the beach. But with landmarks obscured by smoke and haze and with no clear path through the obstacles, PC 565 could not accomplish its mission. It became, in effect, a gunboat, firing its machine guns at the bluff, from which Pike could see “a rain of fire that appeared to be falling from the clouds.” Pike remembered seeing a DUKW hit an obstacle and set off the mine. “I saw the bodies of two crewmen blown several hundred feet into the air and they were twisting around like tops up there, it was like watching a slow-motion Ferris wheel.”
Then PC 565 took a hit. Six men were wounded. “Blood was gushing down the gunwales of that boat like a river.” Recalling the scene forty-five years later, Pike commented, “I have often told my two sons I have no fear of hell because I have already been there.”15
• •
Ens. Don Irwin was the skipper of LCT 614. His crew consisted of another ensign, the executive officer, and twelve Navy enlisted men. His cargo consisted of sixty-five GIs, two bulldozers, and four jeeps with ammunition-carrying trailers. He was scheduled to go in at 0730.
“As we headed toward the beach,” Irwin recalled, “the most ear-splitting, deafening, horrendous sound I have ever heard or ever will took place.” The Texas was firing over the top of LCT 614. Irwin looked back “and it seemed as if the Texas’s giant 14-inch guns were pointed right at us.” Of course they were not; they were aiming at the bluff. “You’ll never know how tremendously huge a battleship is,” Irwin commented, “until you look up at one from fairly close by from an LCT.”
Irwin was headed toward Easy Red. So far no Americans had landed on that section of the beach. To Irwin, it seemed “tranquil.” He allowed himself to think that the briefing officer had been right when he said, “There won’t be anything left to bother you guys when you hit the beach. We’re throwing everything at the Germans but the kitchen sink, and we’ll throw that in, too.”
But as Irwin ran LCT 614 onto a sandbar and dropped the ramp, “all hell tore loose. We came under intense fire, mainly rifle and machine gun.” When the first two men from the craft went down in water over their heads, Irwin realized the water was still too deep, so he used his rear anchor and winch to retract. He spent the next hour trying to find a gap in the obstacles where he could put his cargo ashore. Finally he dropped the ramp again; the bulldozers made it to the shore “only to be blasted by German gunners with phosphorus shells which started them burning.”
The GIs were trying to get off, but when the first two got shot as they jumped off the ramp, the others refused to leave. Irwin had orders to disembark them. The orders stressed that to fail to do so could result in a court martial. He had been told that, if necessary, he should see to the execution of the order to disembark at gunpoint.
“But I could in no way force human beings to step off that ramp to almost certain wounding or death. The shellfire had grown even more intense. Pandemonium everywhere, with lots of smoke and explosions. Bodies in the water.
“The men in my crew, who were still at their battle stations and who had been standing erect on our way to the beach, were now flattened out against the craft as if they were a part of it. A couple of them were yelling, ‘Skipper, let’s get out of here!’
“After an hour of trying to get my load of troops and vehicles off, believe me I was ready.”16
• •
It was now 0830. Men and vehicles, almost none of them operating, were jammed up on the beach. Not a single vehicle and not more than a few platoons of men had made it up the bluff. At this point, the commander of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion made a decision: suspend all landing of vehicles and withdraw those craft on the beach.
• •
Ensign Irwin got the order to retract over his radio. He was told that the beach was too hot and that he should go out into the Channel, anchor, and await further orders. It was the most welcome order he ever received, but the one that he had the most difficulty in executing. As he began to retract, his LCT suddenly stopped. It was hung up on an obstacle. It could have been panic time, but Irwin kept his head. He eased forward, then back again and floated free. His crew began taking in the anchor cable. But just when the anchor should have been in sight, it stuck.
“Try as we might we couldn’t free that anchor. I gave the command ‘All engines ahead, full!’ This did cause the anchor to move, and soon coming to the surface was a Higgins boat that had been sunk with our anchor hooked into it.”
Irwin turned his LCT, gave it a couple of shakes, and freed the anchor. He got out to deep water and dropped the anchor.I
• •
The 0830 general order to retract craft on the beach and postpone the landing of others until gaps in the obstacles had been blown added to the confusion. With nowhere to go, over fifty incoming LCTs and LCIs began to turn in circles.
For most of the skippers and crews, this was the first invasion. They were amateurs at war, even the old merchant mariners commanding the LSTs. The crews were as young as they were inexperienced.
Seaman James Fudge was on one of the two LSTs that had made it to the beach. When the order came to get off, “this is where our ship got in trouble, where our captain panicked. We had dropped our stern anchor. We had not unloaded a thing. The LST to our right got hit with an 88. And what our skipper needed to do was give the order ‘Haul in the stern anchor! All back full!’ But he said, ‘All back full!’ and forgot about the anchor. So he backed over his stern anchor cable and fouled the screws.”
The LST was helpless in the water, about 500 meters offshore. Eventually, it was off-loaded by a Rhino. Fudge said, “It was quite difficult to unload tanks from the LST to the Rhino. You had to have a crane, it was a terrible time in a somewhat choppy sea to have a barge to unload trucks and tanks without dropping them in the water. But we didn’t lose any.”
Fudge recalled that “an admiral came by on an LCVP and in front of the whole crew he scolded our skipper for being so thoughtless as to back over his own cable. He had some very insulting things to say to our skipper. Directly. He was a very angry man.”17
While the LST was being unloaded, Fudge saw a sight that almost every man on Omaha Beach that morning mentioned in his oral history. The incident was later made famous by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day. At about 0900, zooming in from the British beaches, came two FW-190s. The pilots were Wing Comdr. Josef Priller and Sgt. Heinz Wodarczyk. Ryan recorded that when they saw the invasion fleet, Priller’s words were “What a show! What a show!” They flew at 150 feet, dodging between the barrage balloons.
Fudge commented, “I can remember standing sort of in awe of them and everyone was trying to fire at them. People were shouting, ‘Look, look, a couple of Jerries!’ ” Every 40mm and 20mm in the fleet blasted away.
So far as Fudge could make out, many of the gunners were hitting the ship next to them, so low were Priller and Wodarczyk flying. No one hit the planes. As Priller and Wodarczyk streaked off into the clouds, one seaman commented, “Jerry or not, the best of luck to you. You’ve got guts.”18
• •
There was one battalion of black soldiers in the initial assault on Omaha, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (Colored). It was a unique outfit attached to the First Army. The troopers brought in barrage balloons on LSTs and LCIs in the third wave and set them up on the beach, to prevent Luftwaffe straffing. (About 1,200 black soldiers landed on Utah on D-Day, all of them truck drivers or port personnel from segregated quartermaster companies.) Black Coast Guard personnel drove Higgins boats and black sailors manned their battle stations on the warships. Overall, however, it was remarkable that so few black servicemen were allowed to participate in the initial attack against the Nazi regime, and a terrible waste considering the contributions of black combat troops in Korea and Vietnam.II
• •
It was the Navy’s job to get the men to shore, the tankers and artillerymen’s jobs to provide suppressing fire, the infantrymen’s job to move out and up, the demolition teams’ job to blow gaps in the obstacles, and the engineers’ job to blow remaining obstacles, provide traffic control on the beach, blast the exits open, and clear and mark paths through the minefields. For the engineers, as for the others, the first couple of hours on Omaha were full of frustration.
Sgt. Robert Schober was with the 3466 Ordnance Maintenance Company. His unit’s job was to dewaterproof vehicles. His tools were crescent wrench, screwdriver, and pliers. The task was simple: tighten fan belts, open battery vents, remove packing from various parts of the engine. When Howell got to the beach, “I felt a ding on the helmet. When I realized it was a bullet, I was no longer scared. I made up my mind that when the next wave of infantry took off for the seawall, I was going too. I did, and dug in when I arrived.” He and his buddies stayed there through the morning, because they could not locate any vehicles that needed dewaterproofing.19
At least they made it to the wall. Cpl. Robert Miller, a combat engineer with the 6th ESB, did not. He was in an LCT that landed around 0700 on Easy Red. He glanced to his right “and saw another LCT, with the skipper standing at the tower, receive a blow from the dreaded German 88. After the smoke cleared both the skipper and tower had disappeared.”
Miller worried about the trucks packed full of dynamite on his LCT taking a hit from an 88, but that turned out to be the wrong worry: the craft was rocked by a blast from an underwater mine. The ramp was jammed, a half-track up front badly damaged, many of the men on board wounded.
“The skipper decided to pull back to dump off the halftrack, transfer the wounded, and repair the ramp. As this was being done a Navy officer in a control craft pulled alongside and raised hell with the skipper, saying we should not be sitting there and to get our a—into the beach where we belonged.”
The skipper took the LCT back in and managed to drop the ramp in eight feet of water about 100 meters offshore. He told the engineers, “Go!” Miller’s platoon commander objected “in no uncertain terms, reminding the skipper his orders were to run us onto the beach, but the skipper refused to budge.”
A jeep drove off. It went underwater but the waterproofing worked and it managed to drive to the shore. The trucks also made it, only to get shot up. The men came next. Miller went in over his head. He dropped his rifle and demolition charges, jumped up from the Channel floor, got his head above water, and started swimming to the beach.
“It was a very tough swim. The weight of the soaked clothes, boots, gas mask, and steel helmet made it near impossible but I did reach hip-deep water finally and attempted to stand up. I was near exhaustion.
“At last I reached shore and was about fifteen feet up the beach when a big white flash enveloped me. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back looking up at the sky. I tried to get up but could not and reasoned, my God, my legs had been blown off since I had no sensation of movement in them and could not see them for the gas mask on my chest blocked the view. I wrestled around and finally got the gas mask off to one side. I saw my feet sticking up and reached my upper legs with my hands, and felt relieved that they were still there, but could not understand my immobility or lack of sensation.”
Miller had been hit in the spinal cord. It was damaged beyond repair. Those first steps he took on Omaha Beach were the last steps he ever took.
A medic dragged him behind a half-track and gave him a shot of morphine. He passed out. When he came too he was at a first-aid station on the beach. He passed out again. When he regained consciousness, he was on an LST. He eventually made it to a hospital in England. Four months later, he was in a stateside hospital. A nurse was washing his hair. “To her and my own astonishment, sand was in the rinse water, sand from Omaha Beach.”20
Sgt. Debbs Peters of the engineers was on an LCI. When the craft was about 300 meters offshore, a shell hit it in the stern, then another midships. “Those of us on deck were caught on fire with flaming fuel oil and we all just rolled overboard.” Peters inflated his Mae West and managed to swim to an obstacle to take cover and catch his breath. Then he managed to stand and tried to run to the seawall, “but I was so loaded with water and sand that I could just stagger about.” He crouched down behind a burning Sherman tank; almost immediately a shell hit the tank. (That was an experience many men had at Omaha; the urge for shelter sent them to knocked-out tanks, half-tracks, and other vehicles, but it was a mistake, because the tanks were targets for German artillery.)
Peters managed to reach the seawall. There he found Capt. John McAllister and Maj. Robert Steward. “We agreed that we should get out of there if we expected to live and Major Steward told me to go ahead and find the mines.” Peters had no equipment for such a search other than his trench knife, but he went ahead anyway.
“I jumped up on the road and went across, fell down into a ditch, up again, through a brier patch, then up against the bluff.” He climbed carefully, probing for mines with his knife, leaving a white tape behind to mark the route. Near the top of the bluff he started taking machine-gun fire. Bullets ripped open his musette bag and one put a hole in his helmet. He tossed a grenade in the direction of the pillbox and the firing ceased. He had done his job, and more.21
Pvt. John Zmudzinski of the 5th ESB came in at 0730 on an LCI. “Our job was supposed to be to bring in our heavy equipment and cut the roads through the beach and bring the cranes and bulldozers in.” Zmudzinski got ashore without getting hit. On the beach he saw some men freeze and just lie there. Beside them, he saw “a GI just lying there calmly taking his M-1 apart and cleaning the sand out of it, he didn’t seem to be excited at all.”
At the seawall, Zmudzinski threw himself down beside his CO, Capt. Louis Drnovich, an All-American football player at the University of Southern California in 1939. “He was trying to get things moving. He sent me down the beach to see if one of our bulldozers got in. I came back and told him nothing that heavy was getting in at that time. There was a half-track part way up to the exit road and Captain Drnovich sent me there to see what was holding him up. I went and hid behind it; it was all shot up and under heavy fire. When I got back to report, Captain Drnovich was gone.”
Drnovich had gone back to the beach and climbed into a knocked- out tank to see if he could get the cannon firing. As he was making the attempt, he was hit and killed.
At the seawall, Zmudzinski found that he was protected from machine-gun fire but taking mortar rounds. “It was a matter of Russian roulette. I didn’t know whether to stay where I was or go down the beach. It was just a matter of chance, whoever got hit.” He saw half-tracks on the beach getting hit “and then one whole LCT loaded with half-tracks catch fire and burn up.”22
Pvt. Allen McMath was a combat engineer who came in on the third wave. He found swimming difficult but managed to reach a pole sticking up in the water. “I held on to it for awhile to get my wind. I happened to look up. There on top of that pole was a Teller mine and that scared me so darned bad I took off and headed on in for shore.”
A wave hit McMath and tumbled him. He was drifting parallel with the shore when a Higgins boat came straight at him. He tried to grab the front of the boat but there was nothing to hold onto, so he slid under and came up behind. “I still don’t know how I missed that prop.III After that ordeal was over I was glad I hadn’t caught onto the boat as it was hit soon after it passed over me.”
McMath finally made shore. He picked up a rifle and cleaned the blood and sand off it. Then he took some dry socks off a dead soldier and changed his socks.
“I found some cigarettes that were dry and wouldn’t have taken any amount of money for them.” He moved up to the seawall. He could find no members of his company. Looking around, “there in a foxhole was a kid I had practically lived with most of my civilian life. What a surprise. I crawled into his hole and we had a little chat about how glad we were that we had both made it.”23
Pvt. Al Littke was a combat engineer who came in with the first wave on an LCM. His initial task was to act as a pack horse; he was to carry demolition charges to the obstacles and drop them there. Then he was to continue to the beach and clear minefields. He draped his demolition charges over one shoulder, his M-1 over another, and carried a suitcase with his mine detector in his hand. He jumped off the ramp into knee-deep water, took a few steps, and fell into a runnel.
“I let go of my suitcase and I hit bottom. I pushed myself off; it was a good thing I had my life preserver on. I did a little dog paddle-breast stroke until my knees hit solid ground, then I got up and started to walk in.”
When he reached the beach, Littke dropped his demolition charges beside an obstacle, then went on to the seawall. “It was pretty crowded there.” Nevertheless, he kept his mind on his job. He fired a clip from his M-1 toward the bluff, reloaded, crossed the seawall, and got to the base of the bluff. When he started to move up, “about a foot in front of me little puffs of dirt flew up, about a dozen.” He dug a foxhole and waited “for how long I do not know.”
Unlike the leaderless infantry behind him, Littke knew what he was supposed to do and he was determined to do it. “I thought I’d better go up and look for mines. I had a roll of tape that brought it to my attention. I tied a stick around the tape and I took off again.” As he moved up the bluff, leaving a trail marked by his tape behind, he went cautiously, watching for prongs sticking above the surface indicating Bouncing Betties or for any indentation in the sand indicating possible Teller mines or box mines. When he found some, he probed with his bayonet to dislodge and disarm them. After his tape ran out, he ran back to his foxhole.
Littke looked back at the beach. He saw an LCI unloading, soldiers coming down the two sides. “All of a sudden there was a flash on the portside, it hit right where the GIs were coming down the ladder. GIs fell into the water screaming and hollering for medics. I thought that if I ever got out of this alive, I would never miss going to church on Sundays again.”
Just then an infantryman from the 116th Regiment appeared. He looked down at Littke in the foxhole and asked, “Kid, are you all right?” Littke said he was. The soldier started up the trail Littke had just marked; a half-dozen other GIs followed. Littke said to himself, “Hell, I might as well go with them.”
He jumped up to do so when he heard someone call out, “Fatty!” It was a corporal from his platoon. Littke joined him to help a wounded man into a foxhole, then asked the corporal if he knew where their sergeant was. Back on the beach. Littke started down. He saw a sickening sight; a wounded soldier had crouched behind a tank for shelter. Shells were hitting near the tank. Littke could hear the tank commander yelling, “Let’s get the hell out of here, they’re zeroing in on us!” The tank backed up and crushed the soldier.
Later that morning, on the beach, Littke had what must have been a moment of intense satisfaction. He ran into a brigadier general and a colonel. The general asked him, “Son, how do we get to the top?”
“I just pointed toward my white tape.”24
Pvt. John Mather of the engineers followed Littke’s path. His team was more or less intact, led by a Lieutenant Allen. The men were carrying picks, shovels, bangalore torpedoes, bazookas and rockets, mine detectors, and satchel charges. They had landed at the wrong place, but Allen decided to go through the same gap Littke had used and stick to the marked path. When they reached the top Allen realized they were nowhere near their initial objective. A platoon from the 116th Regiment was exchanging fire with Germans in the next hedgerow. The engineers were not equipped for a firefight. Allen returned to the beach and tried to locate the exit he was supposed to be using. He led the men up another trail, found he was still in the wrong place, and again returned to the beach.
“At this point,” Mather commented, “I started to get angry and frustrated at the lack of action on our part.” He joined Lieutenant Allen, who was in consultation with the company commander. The CO was in a state of shock; he had lost half his men. “He looked like hell and very dispirited. I asked the lieutenant if there wasn’t something we could do but got a negative answer. I’m sure he would have been willing but he couldn’t get the CO to take action. So we sat in our holes and listened to the sound of the mortars swishing overhead and watched the tide go out.”25
Lt. Barnett Hoffner of the 6th ESB came in on the rising tide. “The sight of the waves breaking onshore choked us up. It seemed like thousands of homeless were floating in a long line all around us. When our ramp dropped and we charged out into the water wading toward the beach, we went through what looked like hell itself. On the fifty or so yards of sand between the seawall and the water line lay blasted tanks, trucks, tractors, dozers, tangles, anything, blazing trucks filled with gas, everything was blown up. Of the sixteen teams we had trained for the demolition, only five came in for their assignments and three of them had nothing with them. All their equipment was gone. And only three bulldozers out of sixteen were left and they couldn’t maneuver because the infantrymen were taking cover behind them.”26
Lt. Col. Frank Walk was an assistant beachmaster for the ESB. His responsibility was to serve as traffic patrol officer, to direct incoming vehicles to open exits so they could climb to the top. But there were no open exits, and in any case Walk—who landed at about 0800—could not get off the beach. He and his radioman and his runner were under intense small-arms fire, “and one thing they spent a lot of time teaching us in the Army was how to dig foxholes. That is wasted training time. It is a natural instinct when you’re under fire to dig a hole as fast as you can even if you have to do it with your fingernails. No one has to teach you how to dig a hole.”
When the fire let up a bit, Walk moved to the seawall and located his CO, who had landed with an earlier wave. The CO was shell-shocked. “He was really just not at all in control of himself. He had gone completely berserk.” He had to be evacuated; Walk took command.
By this time, around 0830, more brass was coming ashore. Lieutenant Colonel Walk was awfully junior to be giving assistant division commanders orders, but he did it anyway.
“They were accustomed to having their way,” Walk commented. “So I would say, ‘General, I’m sorry to tell you, you can’t take those units through that exit. You’ve got to go over there.’ ”
“Who says so?”
“Well, General, I say so. I’m the traffic control officer here.”27
Col. Paul Thompson, who had run the assault training center back in England, commanded the 6th ESB. He came in on an LCI at about 0830. Very little was going the way it was supposed to go, the way he had trained the assault units to take a fortified beach.
Thompson wanted to get things moving. He noticed a group of combat engineers held up by barbed wire on the beach road. “Some of the engineer personnel were trying to blow it with bangalore torpedoes, and of course I had conducted that exercise hundreds of times in training and it seemed to me they were going about it kind of clumsy.” Thompson went forward to show them how to shove the bangalore under the wire. He got hit twice by rifle fire, one bullet through the right shoulder, the other through the jaw. The wound was unique because it was from the inside of the mouth out: Thompson had been shouting orders when he got hit.28
Thompson had longed to see the divisions he had trained take the beach and move inland. He had longed to see his engineers do the job they had been trained and equipped to do. He had longed to participate in the fight for the first 1,000 yards. It was not to be.
Thompson’s frustration that morning was shared by every survivor of the first two hours of the battle, whether tankers or infantrymen or artillerymen or engineers or demolition teams. Many thought they had failed. When the 0830 order to cease landing came through, men were close to despair. At Omaha at least, Rommel’s fixed defenses seemed to have stopped them cold.
• •
At Widerstandsnest 62, Pvt. Franz Gockel thought so. At 0630 he had opened fire with his machine gun. The sand shaken loose by the naval bombardment caused it to jam. “I tore the belt from the feed tray, shook it clean, and slapped it back into the tray. At that instant the machine gun was torn from my hands by an explosion. I have no idea how I survived.”
Gockel grabbed his rifle and began firing as “the first closely packed landing troops sprang from their boats, some in knee-deep water, others up to their chests. Within seconds the first wave of assault troops collapsed after making only a few meters headway. Assault craft careened leaderless back and forth on the water.
“On came the second waves of assault craft. Again we opened fire. The beach became strewn with dead, wounded and shelter-seeking soldiers. They reached the low stone wall, but the safety offered there was temporary. Our mortar crews had waited for this moment and began to lay deadly fire on preset coordinates along the sea wall. Mortar rounds with impact fuses exploded on target. The shell splinters, wall fragments, and stones inflicted severe casualties. The waves of attackers broke against our defenses.”
Gockel and his comrades had plenty of ammunition for their rifles and machine guns, plenty of hand grenades stored nearby, plenty of mortar rounds. They had taken only light casualties. When at 0830 transports began turning out to sea without unloading their troops, “we believed the Americans were initiating a withdrawal.”29
I. Six hours later Irwin went back in and got most of his cargo ashore. One sergeant refused to drive his jeep off the ramp; not until D-Day plus one did he go ashore, and then at a British beach.
II. In December 1944, during the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower allowed black truck drivers to volunteer for combat infantry posts. Nearly 5,000 did, many of them giving up their stripes for the privilege of fighting for their country. Initially they were segregated into all-black platoons, with white officers. They compiled an outstanding record. A staff officer from the 104th Division remarked on the performance of the black platoons: “Morale: Excellent. Manner of performance: Superior. Men are very eager to close with the enemy and to destroy him. Strict attention to duty, aggressiveness, common sense and judgment under fire has won the admiration of all the men in the company. The colored platoon has a calibre of men equal to any veteran platoon.” A few white officers declared that the black troops were too aggressive and occasionally overextended themselves, but when the black units suffered losses and could no longer function as platoons, the survivors were formed into squads and served in white platoons. This was the beginning of integration in the U.S. Army. Mr. James Cook of Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania, provided information on the 320th.
III. One of the features of the Higgins boat was a protected, enclosed propeller.