THE SEABEES on the demolition teams, naval beachmasters, and spotters for the warships were the first Navy men on the beach. The beachmasters’ job was to put up flags to guide the landing craft assigned to a particular sector, but twelve of the sixteen beachmaster teams never made it to shore, and the four who did were at the wrong place.1
Seaman Robert Giguere was on an LCI that hit a floating mine as she was going in, wounding or killing about half the men on board. The skipper dropped the ramp on the left side; the one on the right wouldn’t work. A Coast Guardsman swam to shore with a rope; Giguere and infantry from the 16th Regiment used the rope to help themselves get ashore. On the way in, Giguere was hit in the left arm, but it was only a flesh wound. Ashore, he could not find any members of his beach party, so he picked up a rifle as he made his way to the seawall. There he switched from being a sailor assisting a beachmaster to a soldier.
At the seawall, Giguere heard Colonel Taylor say, “We might as well get killed inland as here on the beach.” Giguere pointed to the markings on his helmet indicating that he was a Navy man; Taylor told him to join the infantry. Someone put a bangalore under the barbed wire; Giguere joined a small group from the 16th and crossed the road, only to be pinned down by a pillbox.
“I threw a couple of grenades in the pillbox openings,” Giguere recorded. “I guess that helped to finish it off.” He worked his way up the bluff. Late that morning he participated in a rush on a house that proved to have no Germans in it, but there were five Frenchmen in the cellar. A lieutenant told him to escort them down to the beach for interrogation.
On the beach, Giguere found that “artillery was landing everywhere. I was wounded again. When I came to, I was in the 40th General Hospital in Cirencester, England. It was my eighteenth birthday.”2
The few beachmasters who made it ashore could hardly do their jobs in the chaotic conditions. Still, they tried to help out as best they could. Seaman William O’Neill was on an LCT. He recalled spotting a beach-party member “half crouching, waving his semaphore flags furiously at us. Without much thought, I grabbed a pair of flags and scrambled to the top of the wheelhouse and gave him a king, which means go ahead. His message was stay low, keep your head down. I really had some evil thoughts about getting that gratuitous advice.”
Looking around, O’Neill could see that “our chances of reaching the beach at that place were very poor, but the chances of being slaughtered by machine gun and mortar fire were very high.” He decided to pass his insights on to his skipper.
The skipper, an Ensign Phillips, was a “ninety-day wonder,” but O’Neill thought he was “just great. Unassuming, never unjustly critical, a courageous and resourceful leader. It was a privilege to have served with him.”
O’Neill did not think so much of Phillips’s executive officer, another ensign, “who was a kind man but in battle he became literally paralyzed, unable to give orders or even to move.” The third officer, an Ensign Fox, “was an absolute joy, bright, brave, and cool; we would do anything for him. His father was a Methodist bishop and his mother president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Maryland. He would dutifully pass around the temperance literature his mother would send, then lead the march to the nearest pub. He would point to himself as living proof that the ministers’ kids were the worst in town.”
Up on the wheelhouse, O’Neill was “really excited. I said to the skipper, ‘What the hell are you doing here? You’ll get us all killed! There’s more of a chance to get in to our right.’ ”
Ensign Phillips agreed and off to the right the LCT moved, sailing parallel to the beach for a kilometer or two, where other LCTs were moving in. Phillips closed the beach. He could see tanks sinking in runnels, so he asked for a volunteer who would test the water depth by wading into shore before the bulldozer in the front of his LCT unloaded.
“That was a nutty idea,” O’Neill commented, but someone did volunteer “to be a human depth finder.” Phillips ran onto the sandbar. At that moment, an LCT to the right, carrying seven half-tracks, dropped her ramp and the lead vehicle was hit just as it left the ramp. O’Neill saw “an immediate explosion and the entire LCT erupted in flames and then the ammunition began to explode so it was really quite a mess.”
Ensign Phillips gave the order to drop the ramp. The volunteer jumped into the water, but the bulldozer driver did not wait to see the result; he just drove off, almost overrunning the volunteer. The driver had his blade raised to its maximum position, which provided an excellent shield for him. Down into the runnel he went. The waterproofing worked and he chugged his way forward, dragging a line of jeeps attached by cable behind him.
O’Neill remembered “my last vision of my friend Bill Lynn was of him sitting in his jeep being pulled along into deep water and then disappearing beneath the surface and then appearing soaking wet, water sloshing out of the jeep, some fifty yards further.”
On the LCT, the gun crews were firing their 20mm guns into the bluff. So far as O’Neill could tell, “We were the only U.S. offensive activity in that area. Even the tanks were sheltered behind the sand dunes, unable to fire over them. Our orders had been to land, retract, and return for another load, but instead we stayed and continued to fire.”
The executive officer cowered in the hold, but Ensign Fox led O’Neill and others ashore to bring wounded men to the LCT. “We filled our bunks, our inside decks, and every available space on the main deck. The wounds were gross. There was one medic and our cook to tend to all of them, and we did our best using our inexpert hands as well as we could.”3
• •
It was about 0830. So far the Navy had not done any better than the Army in carrying out the plan for Omaha. The 12-inch and 14- inch shells from the prelanding bombardment had mostly gone over the top of the bluff. The skippers on the landing craft had mostly put their men and cargoes ashore in the wrong places. The cutting edge of the invasion force, the infantry from the 116th and 16th regiments, had taken horrendous casualties; the survivors were mostly huddled at the seawall. They were receiving precious little fire support.
The Allies controlled the air over Normandy, which with the rarest of exceptions on D-Day kept the Luftwaffe from strafing the lucrative targets on the beach or bombing the beach or ships offshore, but the Air Force could contribute little in the way of direct support to the troops on the beach. The heavy bombers did not have the pinpoint accuracy required to hit the bluff but miss the beach; after the preassault bombardment, the big bombers returned to England, refueled and reloaded, and then hit targets such as railroads and crossroads well inland. That helped considerably in the following days by making German movement difficult, but it contributed nothing to the battle of June 6.
Later in the war, the Allied fighter pilots and the Army developed an efficient, indeed deadly, ground-to-air radio communication system, but even had the system been in place on D-Day it wouldn’t have helped much, as 80 percent of the radios with the infantry at Omaha were lost in the surf or destroyed on the beach.
LCTs had managed to land some tanks, but most of them had been disabled. The Navy had been unable to get many field artillery pieces ashore. About all the help the infantry was receiving was coming from those little 20mm guns on the LCTs. That wasn’t much.
The warships at sea had big guns, but they had lifted their fire as the first waves went in and were under orders not to resume firing until they had a definite target radioed to them from fire-control parties ashore. But the fire-control parties had not made it ashore, and there was no shore-to-ship liaison. The gunships closest to the shore, the destroyers, did not dare fire into the bluff, even when they could see fortified positions, for fear of hitting advancing American infantry.
“It was most galling and depressing,” Commander W. J. Marshall of the destroyer Satterlee wrote in his action report, “to lie idly a few hundred yards off the beaches and watch our troops, tanks, landing boats, and motor vehicles being heavily shelled and not be able to fire a shot to help them just because we had no information as to what to shoot at and were unable to detect the source of the enemy fire.”4
Lt. Owen Keeler was the gunnery officer on the destroyer Frankford. He too was frustrated because he had no targets. Aside from all the other problems, “German camouflage was excellent, so we could not see who was where or pinpoint anything to shoot.” His skipper, Lt. Comdr. James Semmes, decided to go in closer for a better look. Navigating by fathometer and seaman’s eye, he got to within 400 yards, as close as he could possibly go without running aground, but “the camouflage on the beach was still good. We could not spot a target—and we did not know how far our troops had advanced.”5
Destroyer Harding’s executive officer and navigator, Lt. William Gentry, shared the feeling of helplessness. He watched DUKWs sink: “All we could do was stay clear of the assault craft and hold ourselves ready for counterfire.”6 (Chief Engineer Lt. Ken Shiffer on Harding was able to make a small contribution. He went up on deck to see the assault. “All of a sudden I saw a heavily loaded DUKW. The coxswain yelled, ‘Which way is the beach?’ I realized that the DUKW was so low in the water he couldn’t make out the low-lying shoreline. I pointed to the east and he steamed away.”7)
The skipper of Harding, Capt. George Palmer, wrote in his action report, “This ship ceased firing while troops landed on beach and we commenced patrolling area about 2000 yards offshore searching for targets of opportunity. The smoke on the beach was so heavy that no targets could be seen and unobserved fire was deemed unsafe.”8
After two hours of such frustration, skippers began to act on their own responsibility. Evidently the first to do so was Lt. Comdr. Ralph “Rebel” Ramey on McCook. He sailed into the western sector of Omaha, close enough to see that the troops were not getting up the bluff. He began blasting away with his 5-inch guns at the Vierville exit, hitting gun positions, pillboxes, buildings, and dug-in cliff positions. Two guns set into the cliff, enfilading the beaches, were particular targets. After almost an hour of shooting, one of the German guns fell off the cliff onto the beach and the other blew up.9
Pvt. Ernest Hillberg of the 1st Division was on a Higgins boat. The coxswain had received orders not to land yet, so “with those shells flying past,” Hillberg remembered, “he decided we had to find a place to hide. McCook was a great place to hide. So we hid behind her. I’m sure there were a hundred small craft hiding behind McCook, which was slowly but methodically cruising along the coast, spotting the gun emplacements and taking them under fire. It was beautiful to see. We were scared to death McCook was going to run aground.”10
Other destroyers were joining McCook. Lt. W. L. Wade commanded an LCI group that was circling offshore, waiting for orders to go in. He described the scene in front of him at 0930: “Enemy fire on the beaches was terrific—105mm, 88mm, 40mm, mortars, machine guns, mines, everything. Destroyers were almost on the beach themselves, firing away at pillboxes and strong points.”11
The scene looked different to different men, in at least one case to men standing next to each other on the same bridge. At 0856 Harding went to the command vessel for Omaha, Ancon, to pick up Adm. Charles Cooke and Maj. Gen. Thomas Handy, who wanted to go close in to observe. Harding then cruised the beach, firing away as she did so.
Admiral Cooke declared that “the landing was a complete disaster” and commented that “the troops were pinned to the beach.” But to Lieutenant Gentry, Harding’s executive officer, “it looked to us Navy destroyer types as if everything was proceeding according to the book. Troops were moving off the beach inland, enemy fire appeared to have died down, and it seemed to me the U.S. Army was getting its act together.” But Cooke “kept muttering disaster.”12
• •
At 0950 Adm. C. F. Bryant, commanding the gunfire support group off Omaha, called all destroyers over TBS (Talk Between Ships) radio: “Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can’t have anymore of that! We must stop it!” Every destroyer off Omaha responded, the skippers taking the risk of running aground (several did scrape bottom but got off), firing point-blank at targets of opportunity on the bluff.13
Comdr. Robert Beer on Carmick went in to within 900 meters of the beach, where he could keep up a visual communication of a sort with the troops ashore. When he saw a tank fire a single shot at a certain point on the bluff, Beer blasted the same spot. When he could see riflemen firing at a target, he laid into it with his 5-inch shells.14
Seaman Edward Duffy was in the radio room of Shubrick. His skipper was engaging shore batteries in what Duffy called “Dodge City shootouts.” He had two packs of cigarettes and a pound box of lemon drops with him; he went through both, plus a dozen cups of “Godawful coffee” in three hours. (It was years before he ate another lemon drop; “When I eat one now it brings back a lot of memories.”)
Down in the radio room, “We could hear the projectiles exploding in the water around us. We were below the main deck at just about the water level, so the sounds of the explosions reverberated within the steel hull.
“I was scared. I had my life jacket very securely tied tightly about my (then) skinny frame. I expected at any moment to hear a shell come crashing through the bulkhead. I kept repeating to myself a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Then I became so tired of being scared I began paying attention to what the ship was doing.”
Shubrick moved close in and pounded away point-blank. Duffy could “see” the battle over his earphones. “The spotters would report to all stations what was happening.” At one point, the range finder reported a German officer walking on the crest. “Our officers suspected that he was scouting and spotting for the guns in this area. We trained our main battery and director in his direction, took a range on his location, and sent him a four-gun salute. A direct hit and the tension was relieved because we had gotten one of the bastards ourselves.”15
That a destroyer could fire a salvo at a single individual indicates what a superb job American industry had done in supplying the men of D-Day. Shubrick fired 440 rounds that day; McCook 975; Carmick 1,127; Satterlee 638; the other destroyers between 500 and 1,000 rounds of 5-inch shells. They were supposed to save half their ammunition for possible German surface attack, or for antisubmarine work, but in many cases the destroyers returned to England with few or no rounds remaining in the locker.
Frankford fired away from shoal water 800 meters off the beach. Gunnery Officer Keeler recalled: “A tank sitting at the water’s edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a 5-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party. Our range-finder optics could examine the spots where his shells hit.”16
A bit later McCook had the perhaps unique experience of forcing German troops to surrender. As “Rebel” Ramey was firing at a cliff position, German soldiers appeared waving a white flag and attempting to signal the ship by semaphore and flashing light. For nearly an hour Ramey’s semaphore man tried to establish communications, he using broken German, they using poor English.
When Ramey tired of the game and signaled that he was resuming fire, a prompt answer came back—“Ceize fire!” Ramey had his man signal to the Germans that they should come down the bluff and surrender themselves. They understood and did, coming down single file with hands up to turn themselves over to GIs on the beach.17
• •
Admiral Morison got it right when he wrote, “This destroyer action against shore batteries . . . afforded the troops the only artillery support they had during most of D-Day.”18 The cruisers and battleships, unable to go in close, were banging away at major emplacements on the cliffs east and west of Omaha whose position was known before the invasion and with good effect, but the troops ashore could neither see nor sense the results. But the effect on the troops on Omaha of the destroyers’ heroic and risky action was electric.
Before he got hit in his spinal column, while he was still on his LCT, Cpl. Robert Miller could see “a destroyer ahead of us with heavy smoke pouring from its stack. It seemed to be out of control and heading right for the beach. I thought, my God, they’re going to run aground and be disabled right in front of the German emplacement, when the ship made a hard left pulling parallel to the beach, blazing away with every gun it had point-blank at the position. Puffs of smoke and mounds of dirt flew everywhere on the hillside as the destroyer passed swiftly by.”19
Seaman Giguere was on the beach when a destroyer “came in as close to shore as could be. She was firing at a pillbox just over my head. It was a funny feeling hearing the shells go over my head.”20 Seaman O’Neill, also on the beach, recalled, “The destroyers were firing their 5-inch shells point-blank at the pillboxes, you could see the shells as they went screaming overhead and smacked against the thick concrete walls. They bounced skyward off the sloping sides of those pillboxes, but they managed to get a few of them into the gun ports. The enemy fire soon stopped.”21
Lt. Joe Smith, a Navy beachmaster, remembered seeing “the destroyers come right into the beach firing into the cliff. You could see the trenches, guns, and men blowing up where they would hit. They aimed right below the edge of the cliffs where the trenches were dug in. There is no question in my mind that the few Navy destroyers that we had there saved the invasion.” In his conclusion, Smith spoke for every man who witnessed the scene: “Believe me, I am a destroyer man from that day on.”22
Forty-five years later, James Knight, an Army engineer on a demolition team who landed at 0630 at Fox Red, wrote a letter to the crew of the Frankford, published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Knight said that he had been pinned down until, “at about 1000 or 1030, a destroyer loomed out of the sea . . . headed straight toward me. Even though she wasn’t listing or smoking, my first thought was that she had either struck a mine or taken a torpedo and was damaged badly enough that she was being beached.”
But the destroyer began to turn right. Before she was parallel to the beach she was blazing away with all her guns. Shells landed just a few feet over Knight’s head. He watched her proceed westward along the beach, firing constantly. He expected to see her pull out to sea at any moment “when suddenly I realized she was backing up and her guns had yet to pause. She backed up almost to where she had started, went dead in the water for the second time . . . and again headed toward the other end of the beach, with all guns still blazing.”
Over the years since D-Day, Knight tried to find out the name of the destroyer, but neither Ryan nor Morison nor any other author mentioned the incident (although Morison did say that Frankford went in closest that morning). Then Knight saw a notice of a reunion for the Frankford in the VFW Magazine. He attended the reunion, in 1989. There he confirmed that the destroyer that had so impressed and helped him was the Frankford.
In his letter to the crew, Knight wrote, “Regardless of the time of arrival, nearly every living person on Omaha was pinned down from the time he reached the dune line until after you made your ‘cruise.’ Not long after you swung out to sea, there was movement on the beach, which eventually enabled the infantry to advance up the slope onto the flat land and beyond.”23
The chief of staff of the 1st Division, Col. S. B. Mason, wrote Rear Adm. J. L. Hall on July 8, 1944, after an inspection of the German defenses at Omaha. Those defenses should have been impregnable, Mason wrote, and indeed the Germans had hurled back everything the Army had thrown at them. “But there was one element of the attack they could not parry. . . . I am now firmly convinced that our supporting naval fire got us in; that without that gunfire we positively could not have crossed the beaches.”24
When Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow went ashore at 1900 hours on D-Day, to establish his V Corps headquarters on the beach, his first message back to General Bradley on Augusta was: “Thank God for the United States Navy!”25
The Navy was part of a team. Indispensable, obviously, especially the destroyers, but still just a part. Much hard fighting remained before the bluff and high ground could be secured even after Frankford and the others had expended virtually all their ammunition and withdrawn. What the Navy had done was to give the men on Omaha a fighting chance. It was up to the infantry to exploit it. The first task was to open those exits and relieve the traffic jam on the beach. To do that, the infantry had to get to the top and come down on the German defenders from the rear.
• •
The outstanding job the Navy did of destroying German pillboxes on the bluff was matched by the outstanding job the Navy did of caring for the wounded. Medical care began on the beach, with men dragging the wounded out of the water to keep them from drowning in the rising tide. Chief Yeoman Garwood Bacon of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion was on an LCI that hit a mine at 0810 on Dog Green. Many were wounded; the craft was burning. With the other members of his team, Bacon got a rubber raft into the water; he got aboard while they pitched onto it a radio set and medical packs plus their weapons and ammunition. As machine-gun and rifle fire whined past their ears, they pushed the raft through the obstacles to shallow water, then unloaded the contents on the sand.
“Hey, Bacon,” Seaman Johnakin called out, “do you think that we can make it out to the ship again? Some of those wounded guys will never make it ashore.”
“I’ll give it a try if you will,” Bacon replied.
They tossed their packs, tommy guns, and helmets onto the beach, grabbed the raft, and began crawling backward out into deeper water, again dodging obstacles and trying to avoid bullets as they picked up wounded men from the water. “In a matter of a few minutes some fifteen wounded or nonswimmers were crammed into it or hanging on the outside of the raft, and with the help of free hands and feet flailing the water we all managed to reach shore once more where several able-bodied men helped to take the wounded to the protection of the seawall and administer first aid wherever possible.”26 An Army Signal Corps photographer took a snapshot of the scene; it became one of the best-known photos of Omaha Beach.
Bacon grabbed a carbine (someone had already picked up his tommy gun) and made his way to the shingle seawall. He saw a group of fifty or so men, “all prostrate on the sand or rocks. Thinking they were lying there held down by gunfire, I threw myself down between two soldiers and buried my face in the sand. Suddenly I realized there was no rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun whining overhead so I lifted my head cautiously and looked around. The sickening sight that met my eyes froze me on the spot. One of the men I had dropped between was headless, the other was blown half apart. Every last one of them was dead.” He could render no first aid to dead men, so he set off in search of his party.27
German snipers would shoot at the Army medics (universally praised by the veterans of D-Day as the bravest of the brave) as they tried to tend wounded men on the beach who could not be moved. Wounded men who could be dragged to the seawall were treated by the medics as best they could, which wasn’t much more than applying tourniquets, giving wounds a quick cleaning, applying sulfa and/or the new wonder drug penicillin (the U.S. pharmaceutical industry had produced a record-breaking 100 million units of penicillin the previous month28), giving a shot of morphine, and waiting for an opportunity to take the man by litter down to a landing craft that was going back to the mother ship for another load.
Seaman O’Neill and a beach engineer carried a stretcher to O’Neill’s LCT. When they set the litter down, O’Neill saw that one side of the wounded man’s face was gone. “His eyeball and teeth and jawbone were plainly visible. It looked like one of those medical drawings or a model. I asked him how he was doing. He said he felt OK.”
O’Neill continued to bear the stretcher until his LCT was jammed with wounded. An Army medic and the cook on the LCT took over. The medic had some blood plasma, but his supply was soon exhausted. As the LCT moved out toward the transport area, where the wounded could be transferred to a hospital ship, O’Neill heard the medic say, “This man’s going to need some plasma or else he isn’t going to make it.”
“There isn’t any more,” the cook said, tears in his eyes. They were still an hour and a half away from the hospital ship. When they finally got there, the ship was ready for them, with booms rigged to load litters. The LCT tied up alongside; hospital corpsmen came off the ship and aboard the LCT with medical supplies of all types. One by one, the wounded were lifted by litter to the ship.29
Time was the great danger to the wounded. Pain could be endured or handled—a combination of shock and morphine helped (when a medic or a GI administered a shot of morphine he would tag the man so that another soldier coming along later would not give a second shot)—but loss of blood could not. But if the flow could be stopped and the man put into a doctor’s hands on a hospital ship, the chances of survival were good.
The crews on the landing craft did their best to get the wounded to treatment. Sgt. Stanley Borkowski of the 5th ESB was running a DUKW back and forth from a Liberty ship to the beach, carrying cargo. On the return trips he brought wounded to the hospital ship, which was anchored about two miles out. “I do not wish to comment about the wounded soldiers,” Borkowski said in his oral history, his voice choking with the thought of what he had seen. “I was glad to get them to the hospital. My prayers are always with them.”30
• •
The LCI on which correspondent A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker was riding picked up some wounded men from Omaha Beach to take out to a hospital ship. Three of them had to be sent up in wire baskets, “vertically, like Indian papooses. A couple of Negroes on the upper deck dropped a line which our men made fast to the top of one basket after another. Then the man would be jerked up in the air by the Negroes as if he were going to heaven.
“A Coast Guardsman reached up for the bottom of one basket so that he could steady it on its way up. At least a quart of blood ran down on him, covering his tin hat, his upturned face, and his blue overalls. . . . A couple of minutes after the last litter had been hoisted aboard, an officer leaned over the rail and shouted down, ‘Medical officer in charge says two of these men are dead. He says you should take them back to the beach and bury them.’ A sailor on deck said, ‘The son of a bitch ought to see that beach.’ ” The skipper of the LCI refused the absurd order.31
Seaman Ferris Burke was a sixteen-year-old on LST 285, which served as a hospital ship. “The doctors were outstanding,” he recalled. “Just unbelievable. They worked for hours, amputating arms and legs, removing shrapnel, patching bullet wounds, and trying to calm down some men who were completely out of their minds.”
Burke had an awful experience for a sixteen-year-old (or anyone else for that matter). He remembered Dr. Slattery asking him to go down to the shipfitter’s shop and get half a dozen pieces of angle iron, two feet long. Burke did. When he returned with the metal Dr. Slattery told him to tape the arms and legs he had amputated to the metal and throw them overboard. Later, when Burke told the shipfitter what he had used the angle iron for, the shipfitter was “a bit upset because he had given me very good metal. He said if he had known what the doctor wanted the metal for he would have given me some scrap from around the shop instead of the good stuff.”32
There were many heartbreaking scenes. Pharmacist Mate Frank Feduik recalled administering morphine to a GI on the deck of an LST. He was lying on a stretcher. “He suddenly raised his body and let out an awful yell. He had realized that his right leg was missing. I pushed him back down and I remember him saying, ‘What am I gonna do? My leg, I’m a farmer.’ ”33
• •
War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.
Captain Palmer on Harding was prowling just off the beach, blazing away with every gun on his ship. Palmer was described by Lieutenant Gentry as a man full of “autistic energy and nervous tension.” The medical officer on Harding was a Dr. McKenzie. At 1024 McKenzie had persuaded Palmer to cease firing long enough to launch the ship’s boat so that he could go ashore to render medical aid to wounded men on a Higgins boat that had been hit. Upon completion of that duty, although under intense rifle and machine-gun fire, McKenzie had the ship’s boat take him to a DUKW holding some wounded so that he could tend to them. Then he returned to Harding.
On board, McKenzie faced an emergency. Ens. Robert Reetz had acute appendicitis. Only an immediate operation could save his life. McKenzie asked Palmer to cease fire so that he could operate. Palmer reluctantly agreed. After a half hour or so, Palmer sent Lieutenant Gentry down to the wardroom that had been converted to an operating room to see what was holding things up.
McKenzie told Gentry he had given Reetz “enough anesthesia for two people but still couldn’t get him quieted down enough to operate.” Ens. William Carter was there, along with three others trying to hold Reetz down. (Carter remembered that “Dr. McKenzie had promised for months to let me assist in an operation; this was the first major one and he called for me to assist.”) The overhead light was out; Carter held a lantern with one hand and Reetz with the other. It took another forty-five minutes for the anesthesia to do its work, “with the captain calling down every five minutes for a progress report,” as Gentry put it. Finally, after one and a half hours, the operation was successfully completed. Captain Palmer let go a “Thank God” and ordered all guns to commence firing.34
• •
The medics were not the only men on the beach whose job was not to destroy but to preserve. The Army Signal Corps and the Coast Guard sent photographers ashore to record the battle. These were the men on the beach who carried only cameras and black-and-white film. They went in with the first waves.I
Perhaps the bravest and certainly the best known that day was Robert Capa of Life magazine, who went into Omaha with Company E in the second wave. His craft mislanded at Easy Red. Capa was last off. He paused on the ramp to take a photograph. The coxswain “mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear.” Capa got behind an obstacle and shot a roll of film. He dashed forward to gain the protection of a burned-out tank in waist-deep water. He wanted to get to the seawall “but I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards.” He stayed behind the tank, repeating a sentence he had learned in the Spanish Civil War (where he had taken one of the best-known photographs of combat in the Twentieth Century, of a soldier just as he got hit in the chest): “Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria.” (“This is a very serious business.”)
Capa finally made it to the seawall, where he threw himself to the ground. “I found myself nose to nose with a lieutenant from our last night’s poker game. He asked me if I knew what he saw. I told him no and that I didn’t think he could see much beyond my head. ‘I’ll tell you what I see. I see my ma on the front porch, waving my insurance policy.’ ”
Mortars were landing all around. Capa kept shooting, inserting new rolls of film and shooting some more. He ran low on film. Turning to the beach, he saw an LCI.
“I did not think and I didn’t decide it. I just stood up and ran toward the boat.” Holding his cameras high above his head, he waded out to the LCI. “I knew that I was running away. I tried to turn but couldn’t face the beach and told myself, ‘I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.’ ”
Coast Guardsman Charles Jarreau was on the LCI, picking up wounded men to take back to a hospital ship. He spotted Capa: “Poor fellow, he was there in the water, holding his cameras up to try to keep them dry, trying to catch his breath.” Capa called out for help; the skipper told him to come aboard. “He was really grateful to get out. He came aboard. He took pictures on our ship, which appeared in Life magazine.”35
Capa got back to Portsmouth later that day, then went by train to the developing studios in London. He turned in his film for development. The darkroom assistant was so eager to see the photos that he turned on too much heat while drying the negatives. The emulsions melted and ran down. Of the 106 pictures Capa had taken, only eight were salvaged and they were blurry.
Capa was understandably upset until he realized that the gray, murky photos of men hiding behind beach obstacles or coming ashore from Higgins boats caught the chaos and fear on Omaha Beach exactly. Thanks in part to the overeager developer, Capa had taken some of the most famous photographs of D-Day.36
• •
Hollywood director and producer John Ford was head of a photographic unit for the Office of Strategic Services. On D-Day, he had a team of Coast Guard cameramen working for him. They crossed the Channel on destroyer USS Plunket, carrying $1 million worth of camera gear. Twenty years later, Ford talked about his experiences to writer Pete Martin for the American Legion Magazine. Ford had brought with him to Omaha Beach his wonderful director’s eye; his oral history needs to be quoted at some length.
“When we started,” Ford told Martin, “we were the last ship out in our huge convoy. . . . Suddenly our flotilla was switched about . . . which put out Plunket in the lead. I am told I expressed some surprise at leading the invasion with my cameras.”
Plunket dropped anchor at 0600 off Omaha Beach. “Things began to happen fast.”
Ford saw the first wave go in. “They didn’t have a chance.
“Neither did the LCMs bringing in bulldozers and more tanks. They really caught hell. Later I heard that only three bulldozers out of 30 or 40 made it. I also remember seeing landing craft swing out of control and smash against obstacles where they touched off a mine and blew sky high. On a later day, much later, I discovered that it was this very week that the first U.S. shipyards were getting ready to lay off hundreds of men as war-time orders slackened.”
The objective of Ford’s team was “simple, just take movies of everything on Omaha Beach. Simple, but not easy.” Ford offloaded onto a DUKW. Going in, “I remember watching one colored man in a DUKW loaded with supplies. He dropped them on the beach, unloaded, went back for more. I watched, fascinated. Shells landed around him. The Germans were really after him. He avoided every obstacle and just kept going back and forth, back and forth, completely calm. I thought, By God, if anybody deserves a medal that man does. I wanted to photograph him, but I was in a relatively safe place at the time so I figured, The hell with it. I was willing to admit he was braver than I was.”
The infantry also made a vivid impression on Ford: “The discipline and training of those boys who came ashore in the later waves of landing craft, throwing up and groaning with nausea all the way into the beach, was amazing. It showed. They made no mad rush. They quietly took their places and kept moving steadily forward.”
When Ford hit the beach, he ran forward and began directing his photographers to selected spots (mainly behind beach obstacles). They began setting up and shooting. “I wouldn’t let them stand up. I made them lie behind cover to do their photographing. [Nevertheless] I lost some men. To my mind, those seasick kids were heroes. . . . I take my hat off to my Coast Guard kids. They were impressive. They went in first, not to fight, but to photograph.
“My memories of D-Day come in disconnected takes like unassembled shots to be spliced together afterward in a film.
“I was reminded of that line in ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ about how the soldiers were always busy, always deeply absorbed in their individual combats.
“My staff and I had the job of ‘seeing’ the whole invasion for the world, but all any one of us saw was his own little area. . . . In action, I didn’t tell my boys where to aim their cameras. They took whatever they could. . . . There was no panic or running around.”
The film went back to London, where it was processed. Most of it was in Kodachrome, which was transferred to black-and-white for release in the newsreels in movie theaters. “My cutting unit . . . worked 24-hour watches, picking out the best part of the film that had been shot. I’m sure it was the biggest cutting job of all time. They worked four-hour shifts—on four, off four. . . . Very little was released to the public then [because] apparently the Government was afraid to show so many American casualties on the screen.”37, II
I. In 1991, one of my students remarked, “World War II? Isn’t that the one they fought in black and white?”
II. Not until 1945 did the government release movie or still photos of dead American soldiers. In his 1964 interview with the American Legion Magazine, Ford said, “All of it [the D-Day film] still exists today in color in storage in Anacostia near Washington, D.C.” Where it was thirty years later the Eisenhower Center has been unable to discover.