JOHN RAAEN, the twenty-two-year-old captain with the 5th Rangers, commanding HQ Company, was the son of an Army officer. Born at Fort Benning, a January 1943 graduate of West Point, Raaen loved the Army. He stayed in for forty years and fought in three wars. He retired as a permanent major general. “I wouldn’t change a single day of my military life,” he concluded his oral history. “There were bad days, all right, but they made the good days better.”
On June 6, 1944, within minutes of going into combat for the first time, Raaen had learned an important lesson—that to give a frightened man something specific to do would work wonders for his nerves. When he got up the bluff at Vierville later that morning, he learned some more lessons: don’t trust intelligence and don’t make assumptions about terrain until you have seen it with your own eyes.
“As we had looked at the maps and the models of the Normandy area,” Raaen related, “we had recognized hedgerows surrounding all of the fields. Of course we were all familiar with hedgerows from England.” Like virtually every other officer in the invasion, Raaen assumed that the French hedgerows would be similar to those in England—low, compact, built as much for fox hunters to jump over as to maintain a barrier. Reconnaissance photos from the air did not show the height of French hedgerows. “As soon as we got to the top of the crest off the beach,” Raaen said, “we immediately found out that French hedgerows were different. In France, the hedgerow was a mound of dirt from six to ten or twelve feet high with heavy hedges on top and roots that worked down into the mounds, and the mounds themselves were very effective barriers. You simply could not pass through a hedgerow. You had to climb up something and then at the top you were practically blocked by the jungle of the plant roots and trunks, vines, branches, everything.” Usually, there was a single gap in the hedgerow, to allow the farmer to get his cows or equipment in and out, but the gaps were covered by machine-gun fire.I
“The Germans would dig into the back of a hedgerow,” Raaen remembered, “put a machine-gun nest in there, and then cut a very small slit looking forward, providing them with a field of fire with what was for practical purposes absolute protection. You couldn’t see them as they fired.” Typically, the Germans would place their MG-42s at the corners opposite the gap, so that they could bring crossing fire to bear on anyone who ventured into the gap or out into the field. Further, they had presighted mortar and artillery fire on the field. In the initial hedgerow fighting, the Germans would allow a squad of GIs to get into the field, then cut them down.
Eventually, the Yanks learned to fight hedgerow-style. They would use TNT to blast a hole in the hedge away from the gap, then send a Sherman tank into the hole so that it could fire white phosphorus shells—terrifying to the Germans, loved by the Yanks—into the far corners. Or they would weld steel rails (picked up from the beach obstacles, thus turning Rommel’s defenses into their own assets) to the front of a Sherman, so that when it drove into the hedge the rails would dig into the earth and prevent the tank from going belly-up against the skyline with its unarmored bottom an easy target for German gunners. But those methods were developed only after a couple of weeks of hedgerow fighting, and in any case there were no tanks on top until late in D-Day.
When Raaen set up his company CP in a field outside Vierville, it came under artillery fire. He quickly learned another lesson. “After five minutes under artillery fire, you learned when you had to duck and when you didn’t. You could tell from the sound of the incoming rounds where they were going to hit. If they were going to hit fifty yards away, it was too much trouble to hit the dirt. You just stayed up and kept moving. Of course, if they were going to come in a little closer than that, you hit the dirt and prayed.”
The objective of the 5th Ranger Battalion was Pointe-du-Hoc. That meant moving through Vierville and west along the coastal road. But Colonel Schneider, always quick to make a decision on the basis of what he was seeing even when it meant abandoning the plan, sent a patrol from Raaen’s company to the left (east) to link up with patrols coming up the Les Moulins draw. Raaen did, moving in the ditches and sunken roads between the hedgerows, and “we ran into a patrol of 1st Division troops [actually, Company K of the 116th Regiment, 29th Division, attached to the 1st Division for June 6]. It included one paratrooper from the 101st who had landed in water off Omaha Beach, and the 1st Division boys had fished him out and he was now fighting with them.”
The linkup, probably the first for the Americans coming up at Vierville and those coming at St.-Laurent, cut off the Germans on the bluff between Dog Green and Easy Green beaches, as well as those between the crest and the coastal road. Raaen observed that “any reasonable commander should have attempted to move his troops off the beach defenses and inland so that they could continue to fight instead of being captured in the mop-up operations.” But the Germans—and the Ost troops on whom German NCOs held pistols—remained loyal to their führer’s and Rommel’s doctrine of standing and fighting in place. Raaen felt that they had to have known “they were being caught in a trap,” but they stayed in their trenches and pillboxes. Something similar was going on over to the west, near Colleville.1
• •
Lieutenant Frerking of the Wehrmacht, who had been directing fire on the beach through the morning, finally was blasted out of his bunker. A Sherman tank got it. His last message before fleeing was: “Gunfire barrage on the beach. Every shell a certain hit. We are getting out.” He had waited too long. His battery was out of ammunition, and he and most of his men were killed trying to escape.
Other German batteries were running low on ammunition. Colonel Ocker, commander of the artillery of the 352nd Division, telephoned to tell 1st Battery that a truck with more shells was coming. “It’s on its way already,” he promised. It was, but it took a direct hit from a 14-inch naval shell. The explosion left nothing describable.2
Most Germans did not know it yet, but they had lost the battle. They had expended most of their immediately available ammunition and failed to stop the assault. Things were in reverse. With land lines of communication, the Germans should have been able to move unlimited quantities of ammunition to their guns—as they had done in World War I. But Allied naval and air power had turned the Calvados coast into something like an island, which meant the Germans in the front lines would have to fight with what they had at hand. Meanwhile, the Americans should have found it difficult to supply their men ashore as they had no ports and everything from bullets to shells had to be brought in over water to an open beach. Yet it was the Americans who had a steady stream of reinforcements and fresh supplies coming into the battle and the Germans could do nothing to stop them.
The general German failure to fall back and regroup once American patrols had infiltrated the German line was a major mistake. Still it had some benefits: Germans in observation posts on the bluff and crest could call in artillery fire on the beaches and keep the exits under fire, so long as ammunition held out, while those in the trenches and pillboxes could continue to direct aimed fire on the beaches. But the price was far too high. Staying in place meant the Germans could not form up for concentrated counterattacks against the squads, platoons, and companies that had made it to the top at a time when the GIs had no artillery support and no weapons heavier than BARs, .30-caliber machine guns, and mortars.
“They could have swept us off with a broom,” one ranger declared,3 but instead the Wehrmacht soldiers stayed in their fixed defenses, from which they could still kill Americans but not win the battle. They paid the price for Hitler’s obsession with defending every square inch of his conquered empire, and for Rommel’s obsession with stopping the invasion cold on the beach.
On the high ground, too, the Germans fought a strictly defensive action. Partly this was because the hedgerows were such marvelous defensive positions, mainly it was because they were receiving few reinforcements even as the Americans sent wave after wave of combat infantry onto the beach and into the battle. The Germans were supposed to counterattack immediately, in battalion strength, but because they were confused with their senior commanders absent, because they had their troops scattered in platoon strength in the small villages of Normandy and it took time to assemble them, because they were still a horse-drawn army for the most part, and mainly because the Allied air forces, which had done so little to help the infantry on the beach, did an outstanding job of strafing and bombing bridges, crossroads, and assembly points inland all through D-Day, thus hampering German movement to the sound of the guns, the Germans were unable to launch even one company-strength counterattack at Omaha Beach on D-Day.
They fought effectively, inflicting casualties and for the most part holding their hedgerows, thus preventing the Americans from getting inland more than a couple of kilometers—far short of their intended D-Day objectives—but they fought isolated, confused, small-unit actions designed to delay and harass and hold rather than to drive the Americans off the high ground.
• •
As Raaen was establishing contact with K Company, 116th, Colonel Schneider pushed the remainder of the 5th Rangers across the coastal road, intending to go around Vierville to the south and head out for Pointe-du-Hoc. But the leading companies were held up by machine guns firing from hedgerows south of the road. Three times Schneider tried to outflank the German positions, only to run into new ones.
“We ran into the doggonest bunch of Germans you ever did see,” Pvt. Donald Nelson recalled. “We got pinned down and we really couldn’t move.” Colonel Schneider came up and wanted to know what the trouble was.
“Snipers,” Nelson replied.
“Can’t you get them?” Schneider asked.
“No, sir, we can’t even see them,” Nelson answered.
Schneider took his helmet off, got a stick, put the helmet on the stick, and eased it up.
“The moment that helmet got up above the hedgerow,” Nelson said, “the snipers started shooting at it. That’s the way we got a few of the snipers.”
Nelson was on “the very tip of the front line.” He wanted to see more so he and a buddy “crawled up on this hedgerow and took our helmets off and a five-man German machine-gun crew set their gun right in front of us. We laid real quiet and watched them. They were about twenty feet from us. They got the machine gun all set up and pulled the slide back and put a shell in the chamber. My buddy tapped me on the side of my foot with his foot, and I tapped him back. We let them have it. I covered him while he went and rolled them over to see if they were all dead. They were.”4
As the rangers continued to extend their line to the south in the attempt to outflank Vierville, Company C of the 116th Regiment moved through the village, without opposition. Company B of the rangers joined up; the combined forces then moved west, along the coastal road, toward Pointe-du-Hoc. At about 500 meters out of Vierville they were stopped by machine-gun fire from hedgerows. For the next few hours the Americans tried to outflank the positions, only to run into new ones. Every attempt to move across an open field was checked by German rifle and automatic-weapon fire at ranges of 200–300 meters.
A major problem for the Americans was keeping up the momentum of the advance. This is always a problem for an attacking force, made much worse at Omaha by the natural and inevitable tendency of the men who had made it up from the hell on the beach to the comparative quiet of the high ground to feel that they had triumphed—and thus done their job for that day. In addition, they were exhausted. Furthermore, as with the paratroopers at Utah, when the men got into a village they had immediate, easy access to wine. Sgt. William Lewis of the 116th recalled spending the afternoon of D-Day “trying to get organized outside Vierville. I had liberated a big jug of wine and we all had a drink.”5
(The residents of Vierville were, of course, terrified. Pierre and Fernand Piprel decided to flee to the south. On the way, they saw some soldiers crouching behind a hedgerow. Pierre Piprel said it was “hard to tell who they were since we did not know the Allied uniforms. Arriving close, I asked them, English? and they answered, No, Americans. Seeing their packs of Lucky Strikes, we knew we were safe. They let us go on.”6)
The absence of radios, the lack of unit cohesion, and the nature of the terrain also contributed to the inability to maintain momentum west of Vierville. Where individuals could set an example and lead the way up the bluff, in the hedgerows the brave got cut down when they exposed themselves by dashing forward.
“We were under observation all afternoon long,” Cpl. Gale Beccue of the rangers recalled. “One man moving alone would draw sniper fire, but any concentration of men would bring in the artillery and mortar rounds. We had the village secure but outside Vierville we had only fleeting glimpses of the Germans.”7
Those who led the way off the beach and up the bluff had a much better chance than those who tried to lead on top. The men behind the seawall could see for themselves that to stay where they were was to die, that they could not fall back, that only by following advancing columns did they have any chance at all. On top, a man crouched behind a hedgerow was safe right where he was.
Isolation contributed to the loss of momentum, as it led many men to the conclusion that their groups were on their own—as was indeed often the case. “From noon through the balance of June 6,” Pvt. Harry Parley of the 116th said, “I am unable to recall chronologically what happened to me. The rest of the day is a jumbled memory of running, fighting, and hiding. We moved like a small band of outlaws, much of the time not knowing where we were, often meeting other groups like ours, joining and separating as situations arose, always asking for news of one’s company or battalion.”
Parley related one incident from the early afternoon. He was moving along a road when he heard the characteristic clank of a tracked vehicle, then the roar of a German cannon. “Terrified, I turned, ran like hell, and dove into a roadside ditch. Already there was a tough old sergeant from the 1st Division lying on his side as one would relax on a sofa. I screamed at him, ‘It’s a tank—what the hell do we do now?’ ”
The sergeant, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, stared calmly at Parley for a few seconds, poker-faced, and said, “Relax, kid, maybe it will go away.” Sure enough, it did.8
• •
Colonel Canham, CO of the 116th, moved out of Vierville at around 1200 to set up his HQ at the prearranged CP location, the Chateau de Vaumicel, a half kilometer south of the village. In the process, his HQ group (three or four officers and a couple of enlisted men) got isolated behind a hedgerow just short of the chateau. Pvt. Carl Weast with a platoon of rangers came on the scene; Canham spotted the men and ordered them to act as his CP guard.
The chateau was full of Germans. A German riding a bicycle came up the road. The rangers shot him, then took up outpost positions around the chateau. Weast watched as a platoon of German soldiers came out of the chateau and formed up in a column around an old two-wheeled horse buggy with wounded in it. The Germans were unaware of the presence of Americans; they had their rifles slung over their shoulders.
“They were pulling the cart along, two guys shoving and two guys pulling. We waited until they got real close, maybe ten yards, and we stepped out in the road with our weapons pointed at them and they surrendered immediately.
“Now, with this kind of a situation, what in the hell do you do with twenty-five prisoners? We put them in an orchard and we put one man guarding them and we tried to interrogate them. Hell, there were no Germans! They were all Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, anything but Germans. There was one German noncom, middle-aged, and this guy looked like he wanted to do anything but fight a war. He was just happy as hell to be a prisoner, although he was concerned about a German counterattack, but not nearly as concerned as we were.
“The situation was becoming very, very tenuous. Here was Colonel Canham with 1500 yards of front to cover, and he had a total of about thirty-five men to do it with, expecting a German armored attack. Oh, man, you talk about bad spirits.”
As the afternoon wore on, there was talk among the rangers about shooting the prisoners, but Weast pointed out that “not only is that illegal and immoral, it’s stupid.” When the light began to fade, “we had them lay real close to each other and we put a man with a BAR at the end and we made it plain to them that when it got dark we wouldn’t be able to observe them but we could hear them and if anybody made any move we were going to get the whole bunch of them with the BAR. They lay there through the night and believe me, those were some damn quiet enemy.”9
At 1400 Lt. Jay Mehaffey of the rangers was on the outskirts of Vierville. He lost a man who had been crossing a gap in a hedgerow to a German sniper. Just then a ranger came down the road with eight German POWs. Mehaffey lined the prisoners up in the gap, hands clasped over their helmets, then had his men get past the gap behind the prisoners.
“We didn’t have time to fool with prisoners,” he said, so once safely beyond the gap he just waved to the Germans to continue on down the bluff and find someone to whom they could surrender.10
• •
Colonel Canham’s isolation was complete. His only working radio belonged to the liaison officer from the 743rd Tank Battalion and even he could not contact any of the tanks still down on the beach. Canham did get some help—that may not have been needed—from the Navy. At 1350, a signalman on LCI 538 at Dog Green beach sent a visual message to destroyer Harding: “Believe church steeple to be enemy artillery observation post, can you blast it?”
Harding replied, “Which church do you mean?”
“Vierville.”
“Don’t you mean the church at Colleville?”
“No, Vierville.”
Harding called the commander of Force O Forward Observers to report the request. CFOFO replied five minutes later, granting permission to fire on the church for one minute. Harding’s action report noted, “At 1413 opened fire at a range of 3200 yards and completely demolished church, expending 40 rounds, every shell of which landed on the target.”11
The incident was typical in a number of ways of not only D-Day but of the later fighting in France. Whenever the Americans took artillery fire they were convinced that the Germans were using the spires of nearby churches for observation posts and used their own artillery to knock those spires down. Sometimes they were right about the OP, often they were wrong; in any case there were few standing spires left in Normandy after the battle.
In the case of Vierville, the town was in American hands (unknown to LCI 538 and Harding) and none of those on the spot thought the spire was being used as an OP. Harding claimed a ranger officer later confirmed that the church contained four enemy machine guns “which were completely demolished.”
Harding’s claim to have hit the church with every shell was contradicted by Mayor Michel Hardelay of Vierville, who said that the first shell exploded in his house, causing the wall of the second floor to collapse. The second hit the bakery, killing the maid and the baker’s baby. The following shells hit the surrounding buildings as well as the church. The GIs in the town took some casualties from the naval fire.12
Such contradictions in the testimony of eyewitnesses, well known among witnesses to traffic accidents, are commonplace in war; in the case of the D-Day fights at Vierville, St.-Laurent, and Colleville, they are exacerbated by the nature of the action—small groups without knowledge of what was going on around them, no radio or other contact, each group engaged in its own battle.
When the American destroyers had a spotter, they could be deadly accurate. Private Slaughter of the 116th saw Satterlee do some fine work. Slaughter was on the edge of the Vierville draw. He spotted Sgt. William Presley leading a small band of men. Presley was six feet four inches, weighed 230 pounds, and was, according to Slaughter, “the epitome of a first sergeant: rugged-looking, immaculate, and gifted with a booming voice.”
In front of Presley there was a naval forward observer, lying face down, dead, with a radio strapped to his back. Presley had been observing a battery of Nebelwerfer, 105mm mottars, firing from a fixed position a couple of hundred meters to his front. The shells were playing hell with the reinforcements arriving on the beach. Presley retrieved the radio and made contact with Satterlee. He said he had a target and gave the coordinates. Satterlee fired; Presley gave a correction; another shell, another correction; then Presley called, “Fire for effect.”
Slaughter, watching all this, recalled, “We heard the salvo, ‘Boom-ba-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom-ba-be-boom!’ Soon the shells came screaming over on the way to the German tormentors. ‘Ker-whoom-ker-whoom-ker-whoom! Ker-whoom-oom-oom-ker-whoom-oom-oom!’ The ground trembled under us. The exploding shells saturated the area, some of them landing too close for comfort to our position. That action put the Nebelwerfer out of action and earned Presley the Distinguished Service Cross.”
Shortly thereafter, Slaughter saw his first German prisoner. He was being interrogated by a German-speaking American officer armed with a carbine. The captive was on his knees, hands behind his head. The American demanded to know where the minefields were located. The prisoner replied with his name, rank, and serial number.
“Where are the damn minefields?” the officer shouted. With an arrogant look on his face, the prisoner gave his name, rank, and serial number. The American fired his carbine between the German’s knees. With a smirk on his face, the German pointed to his crotch and said, “Nichthier.” Then he pointed to his head and said, “Hier!”
The American interrogator gave up and waved the prisoner away. Slaughter commented, “This convinced me that we were fighting first-rate soldiers.”13
• •
“At nightfall the Vierville area was the weakest part of the beachhead,” the Army official history states.14 The 5th Rangers and elements of the 1st Battalion, 116th, with some combat engineers, were holding defensive positions west and southwest of the village. Many were surrounded. (One ranger platoon had, amazingly, managed to make it to Pointe-du-Hoc, almost without incident.) Communication ranged from poor to completely absent. The Vierville draw remained closed almost until dark. Dog Green, White, and Red sectors on the beach were still under heavy artillery fire and few landings had been attempted after 1200, which meant that few reinforcements were coming up to help.
Lt. Francis Dawson of the rangers had already earned a DSC for his actions in getting men off the beach. When he got to Vierville his unit was stopped on the west side by machine-gun fire. “We failed to eliminate this gun, so we withdrew and came back to the Vierville road and tried to outflank it. But as night fell, we were not too far from Vierville. We dug in.”15
Others had similar experiences. Lieutenant Mehaffey got through Vierville in the midafternoon, then stopped. “Our right flank was the English Channel, our left flank our own outposts. We held this position the rest of D-Day. We were less than a mile from where we had landed.”16
Pvt. Paul Calvert of the 116th, after describing the route his company followed to Vierville, declared, “The end of the day saw this group completely fatigued, demoralized, disorganized, and utterly incapable of concerted military action. The men were scattered from captured German positions overlooking the Vierville draw to the designated CP with Colonel Canham.”17
But the Germans at Vierville were also fatigued, demoralized, disorganized, and incapable of concerted action. From behind their hedgerows, German snipers and machine gunners could delay and harass and stop the American advance—but they could not push the men from the rangers and the 116th back down the bluff.
• •
The village of Vierville had not been defended by the Germans, but St.-Laurent held a company of infantry from the 352nd Division. The Germans were dug in on the high ground commanding the upper end of the Les Moulins draw. They were on both sides of the road coming up the draw and controlled the approaches to the main crossroad on the western outskirts of the village. Maj. Sidney Bingham, CO of 2nd Battalion, 116th, organized a series of attacks against the German position, only to be stopped by machine-gun fire from positions which his men were unable to locate.
In the afternoon, the GIs at St.-Laurent got help from the 115th Regiment, 29th Division. The 115th landed at E-1 draw just before noon, but it took many hours for the regiment to clear the beach and launch an assault on St.-Laurent from the northeast. It was slowed by mines—and by a rumor sweeping through the troops that American mine detectors could not locate German mines, so that the paths marked out by white tape were not safe. German snipers on the bluff caused some casualties and many delays.
“We moved cautiously and hesitantly, partly because of fear and partly because of the strangeness of the situation,” Sgt. Charles Zarfass recalled. St.-Laurent was only about a kilometer up from the beach, but the 2nd Battalion, 115th, did not start its attack against the village until late afternoon, while the 1st Battalion did not reach its objective south of St.-Laurent until 1800.18
Pvt. John Hooper got near St.-Laurent in midafternoon. “Creeping forward, ever so cautiously, I tripped a Bouncing Betty mine. It popped into the air and I hit the ground expecting to be blown to bits. It fell back to earth with a thump—a dud. Greatly fatigued, I just lay there wondering if the war would last much longer.”
Hooper got up and advanced, only to be held up by machine-gun fire coming from a wood. A prolonged firefight ensued. Rifle ammunition for the GIs was running critically low. A lieutenant with an M-1 and binoculars told Hooper to cover him—he intended to climb a tree and “get those bastards.”
“That’s not a good idea, Lieutenant,” Hooper said. The lieutenant glared at him, turned, climbed the tree, found a good firing position, and shot three times. Then he came crashing down, screaming, “My God, I’m hit.”
Hooper and a buddy dragged him to a hedgerow. He had been shot in the chest. They called for a medic who gave him some morphine.
“What a thorough waste,” Hooper commented to his buddy. “All the money spent on commissioning this guy and he’s trying to act like a Sergeant York. Didn’t last a day. What a terrible waste.” The lieutenant died that evening.19
By late afternoon, E-1 was open for tracked vehicles. At 2000 hours, Major Bingham sent a runner to ask for tank support in the assault on St.-Laurent. Three tanks from the 741st Tank Battalion came up. They destroyed sniper and machine-gun nests in the vicinity of the village. But just as the infantry began to move in, 5-inch shells from American destroyers came pouring down. As at Vierville, the troops at St.-Laurent had no way of contacting the Navy, and they took some casualties as a result of the bombardment.
After the naval fire lifted, the fighting in St.-Laurent reached a crescendo. GIs ducked around corners, threw grenades into windows, kicked in doors, and sprayed interiors with their BARs and carbines. The Germans, taking advantage of the stone houses that might as well have been fortresses, fought back furiously.
In the midst of this street fighting, several men from the 115th were startled to see Lt. Col. William Warfield, CO of the 2nd Battalion, calmly sitting on a curb with his feet extended into the street, tossing pebbles at a scruffy dog.
Another strange sight: General Gerhardt had come ashore in the late afternoon and set up 29th Division HQ in a quarry in the Vierville draw. He could not get much information on how things were going up on top for his regiments, but he could see a long file of men trudging up the draw. He spotted a passing soldier eating an orange. When the man tossed the orange peel away, Gerhardt sprang up from the maps he was studying and gave the GI a furious tongue-lashing for littering.20
By nightfall, 29th Division troops held positions north, east, and south of St.-Laurent and parts of the town. Elements from five battalions had spent the afternoon fighting through an area of about a square mile without securing it—and it was defended by only a single German company. That spoke well for the German defenders—and showed what excellent defensive positions hedgerows and stone houses on narrow streets provided, as well as how difficult it was in World War II for infantry lacking on-site artillery, tank, or mortar support to carry out a successful assault.
But although the Germans had done well and the Americans had failed to reach their objectives, the prospects for the next day were decidedly dismal for the Germans. The GIs had fresh supplies coming up from the beach, plus reinforcements, plus all those vehicles waiting for a chance to drive up the draws and get into the action. The Germans were all but surrounded, they had no hope of fresh supplies or reinforcements, and they were badly outnumbered.