D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (46 page)

complain. He had a look of resignation on him. He came out of his anesthesia, looked at his four stumps, closed his eyes and went back to sleep."

Later, Del Giudice tended a wounded German corporal, "tall, thin, a rather handsome chap with blond hair. He had been wounded on his right hand and all five fingers were dangling and his hand and fingers were blackened." Del Giudice amputated his fingers with scissors, put sulfa powder on his hand, "and for my effort I got a smile and a
'danke schon!'
"
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Lieutenant Janhke was in an improvised dugout on the dunes, firing with his rifle at the incoming Americans. A tank spotted him and blasted the dugout with its 75mm cannon. Janhke was buried alive. He felt someone dragging him out. It was a GI.

Jahnke had won an Iron Cross on the Eastern Front. His instinct was to get away—anything rather than captivity. He saw a machine pistol on the ground and dove for it. The American pushed it aside and in a calm voice said, "Take it easy, German."

The GI sent Janhke, hands clasped over his head, to a POW enclosure on the beach. There Janhke was wounded again by shrapnel from an in-coming German shell.
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Seabee Orval Wakefield was up by the seawall. He said that "by middle afternoon the beach had changed from nothing but obstacles to a small city. It was apparent that we NCD units had done our job well because as far as I could see to one side the beach was all the way opened, there was nothing holding the landing craft back. We figured our day was well spent, even though no one ever knew who we were.

"We were being questioned. 'Who are you guys? What do you do?' The coxswains didn't like us because we always had so many explosives with us. When we were inland, the Army officers wanted to know what is the Navy doing in here."

An Army medical officer spotted Wakefield's team and said he needed volunteers to carry wounded men down to the shore for evacuation to a hospital ship. "He said, 'Are you guys going to just sit here or are you going to volunteer?' We didn't think much about that idea, we had just come off the hot end of the demolition wire but finally we did volunteer to do it for him. We carried the wounded down to the shore. German shells were still coming in."

By this time, Wakefield noted, "it was no longer a rush of

men coming ashore, it was a rush of vehicles." Then he saw a never-to-be-forgotten sight: "All of a sudden it seemed like a cloud started from the horizon over the ocean and it came toward us and by the time it got to us it extended clean back to the horizon. Gliders were coming, to be turned loose inland."
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Reinforcements were pouring in from the sea and from the air. Utah Beach was secure. In the morning, the Americans would move out to cut the base of the Cotentin, to take Cherbourg, to get on with the job of winning the war so they could go home.

At dusk, Wakefield "had my most important thought that day." Wading into chest-deep water at first light that morning, "I found that my legs would hardly hold me up. I thought I was a coward." Then he had discovered that his sea bags with their explosives had filled with water and he was carrying well over 100 pounds. He had used his knife to cut the bags and dump the water, then moved on to do his job. "When I had thought for a moment that I wasn't going to be able to do it, that I was a coward, and then found out that I could do it, you can't imagine how great a feeling that was. Just finding out, yes, I could do what I had volunteered to do."

Overall, casualties were astonishingly light. The 8th and 22nd regiments had only twelve men killed, another 106 wounded. For the 12th Regiment, the figure was sixty-nine casualties. Nearly all were caused by mines, either sea or land, mostly those devilish S-mines. The 4th Division had taken heavier losses in training (in the disaster at Slapton Sands, it lost almost twenty times as many men as it did on June 6).

Equally astonishing was the speed with which the 4th Division and its attached units got ashore. This was thanks to the organization, training, and skill of all those involved, whether Army, Navy, Army Air Force, or Coast Guard. They overcame logistical problems that seemed insurmountable. On D-Day, in fifteen hours, the Americans put ashore at Utah more than 20,000 troops and 1,700 motorized vehicles. General Jodl had estimated that it would take the Allies six or seven days to put three divisions into France. At Utah alone, counting the airborne divisions, the Americans had done it in one day.

D-Day was a smashing success for the 4th Division and its attached units. Nearly all objectives were attained even though the plan had to be abandoned before the first assault waves hit the

beach. By nightfall, the division was ready to move out at first light on June 7 for its next mission, taking Montebourg and then moving on to Cherbourg. It went on to fight battles far more costly than the one it won on the Cotentin beach on June 6, distinguishing itself throughout the campaign in northwest Europe, especially in taking Cherbourg, in holding the German counteroffensive at Mortain, in the liberation of Paris, in the Hiirtgen Forest, and in the Battle of the Bulge.
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There were many reasons for the success of the 4th Division on D-Day, not least being the German reliance on mines, flooded areas, and fixed fortifications instead of high-quality troops to defend the supposedly impregnable Atlantic Wall. As important was the air and sea bombardment, and the naval shelling through the day. Credit belonged, too, to General Roosevelt and his colonels, men like Van Fleet, Reeder, and Jackson, for making quick and correct decisions. Junior officers, men like Captains Ahearn and Mabry, made indispensable contributions.

But most of all, the 4th's success was thanks to the airborne troopers behind the German lines. The paratroopers held the western exits. They confused the Germans and prevented any concentrated counterattacks aimed at the seaborne invaders. They put out of action batteries that might have brought heavy artillery fire down on Utah Beach. How the paratroopers did it, and why they were so thankful to link up with the 4th Division, whether at noon or nightfall, is its own story.

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"NOUS RESTQNS ICI"

The Airborne in the Cotentin

At dawn the men of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions were scattered in small pockets throughout an area that ran ten kilometers southwest from the mouth of the Douve River to the northern edge of Carentan, then twenty kilometers northwest from Carentan to Pont-1'Abbe, then twenty kilometers northeast to the coast near Ravenoville. Few men knew where they were. Unit cohesion was almost nonexistent. Most of the paratroopers were in groups of a half dozen to fifty men, in some cases all officers, in others all enlisted men. The groups were usually mixed, containing men from different companies, battalions, regiments, and even divisions, strangers to the leaders who were trying to get them to move on objectives to which they had not been assigned and for which they had not been briefed.

As a consequence, the airborne troops fought a score or more different engagements, unconnected to each other, many of them fights for survival rather than battles for planned objectives. For most airborne troopers D-Day was a day of confusion. But precisely because the Americans were so badly confused, the Germans were worse off—they grossly overestimated the size of the force attacking them and they could get nothing coherent or helpful from their POW interrogations.

Thanks to the initiative of individual Americans, some of

them general officers, some junior officers, some NCOs, some enlisted, the 82nd and 101st managed to overcome most of their difficulties and complete their most critical missions—seizure of Ste.-Mere-£glise and the exits from Utah. The way it was done, however, was hardly textbook fashion, or in accordance with the plan.

There was virtually no overall control because it was impossible for the generals and colonels to give orders to units that had not yet formed up. The groups that had come together were unaware of where they were or where other groups were, a problem that was greatly compounded by the ubiquitous hedgerows.

Radio communication could have overcome that problem, but most radios had been damaged or lost in the drop, and those that were working were inadequate. The SCR (Signal Corps Radio)-300, which weighed thirty-two pounds, had a speaking range of five miles but only under perfect conditions. The much more common SCR-536, weighing only six pounds (and called a "walkie-talkie" because a man could talk into it and walk at the same time), had a range of less than one mile. Worse, they were easily jammed by the Germans.

Sgt. Leonard Lebenson was part of General Ridgway's headquarters group. He came in by glider and managed to find his way to Ridgway's command post, near a small farm outside Ste.-Mere-£glise. He described the situation: "Ridgway's aide was there, plus a couple of staff officers and two or three other enlisted men. The command post was trying to be a directional center, but it was not really in control of anything. We were just standing there, waiting for things to develop. Ridgway, a very brave and forceful man, was continually on the move in and out, trying to exercise his control. But what we were doing was just gathering information, trying to find out what was happening. There weren't any messages, we didn't have any phones or radios, we didn't even have a map set up. We were not functioning as a CP."
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At the other end of the command chain, Pvt. John Delury of the 508th PIR remembered "a feeling of euphoria" as dawn came up. "The dreaded night was over, and I was still alive. But my feeling of euphoria was short-lived. Morning had arrived and with it, I found, we lost our best ally, the concealment afforded us by the night. We couldn't dig in and do a holding action because the Krauts had the communications, transportation, tanks, artillery, so once they located us they would surround us and just chew us up—so all

our actions were evasive. We'd go in one direction, hit Germans, run like hell, and try again at a different route, all the time trying to find our own regiment or any other sizable friendly force."
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For Sgt. D. Zane Schlemmer of the 508th, "each field became a separate battleground." He had a sense of intense isolation. In this situation, he found a strange ally in the brown and white Norman cattle. Schlemmer explained: "When there were cows grazing in a field, we were pleased because we could be reasonably certain that the field was not mined. Also by watching the cows, who were by nature quite curious animals, we could tell whether there was anyone else in the field, because the cows would stand, waiting, facing anyone there in anticipation of being milked. Over all these years, I've had a place in my heart for those lovely Norman cows with their big eyes and big udders."

But the cows could only spot Germans for Schlemmer and his small group, not kill them, and the paratroopers had precious little in the way of killing weapons. "By midmorning of D-Day, more troopers had assembled, but we had no mortars, few machine guns, few bazookas, fewer radios, little medical supplies, few medics—really, not much more than a few grenades and our rifles."
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But despite the lack of heavy weapons they had an aggressive spirit and a can-do attitude. Sgt. Sidney McCallum of the 506th PIR got into a typical hedgerow fight, with Sgt. William Adley beside him. They were setting up when a German machine gun fired on them. McCallum and Adley dove to the ground, but not before Adley got hit in the head. The machine gun kept firing over their bodies but could not depress low enough to hit them.

"As the bullets kept hitting the hedgerow inches above our head, I asked Adley if he was hit bad, and these were his words: 'I'm dying, Mickey, but we are going to win this damn war, aren't we! You damn well f—ing A we are.' When the firing ceased, Bill was dead." McCallum concluded his story with a question: "How much farther beyond the call of duty can one go than this?"
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The northern exits from Utah, a kilometer or so inland from the beach across the flooded fields, were no. 4 near St.-Martin-de-Varreville and no. 3 near Audouville-la-Hubert. They were assigned to the 502nd PIR. Lt. Col. Robert Cole, commanding the 3rd Battalion of the 502nd, was the first to get there. He had landed near Ste.-Mere-£glise, wandered through the night, collected a group of about seventy-five men from his own battalion, others

from the 506th PIR, plus a handful of men from the 82nd Airborne, and moved out toward St.-Martin-de-Varreville. Along the way he had a skirmish with a German patrol; the Americans killed several of the enemy and took ten prisoners.

At St.-Martin, Cole sent a reconnaissance party to check out the battery there. It had been damaged by bombing and was deserted. Cole then split his force, sending one group to seize exit 3, another to take exit 4. At 0930, near Audouville-la-Hubert, the Americans saw German troops retreating across the causeway from the beach. Without loss to themselves, the Americans killed fifty to seventy-five of the enemy. By noon, the exits were securely in American hands.

Capt. L. "Legs" Johnson led a patrol down the causeway to the beach. He saw German soldiers in one of the batteries waving a white flag. "They were underground, part of the coastal defense group, and they were relatively older men, really not very good soldiers. We accepted their terms of surrender, allowing them to come up only in small groups. We enclosed them with barbed wire fencing, their own barbed wire, and they were pretty well shocked when they learned that there were a lot more of them than there were of us—there were at least fifty of those guys."

Johnson took his helmet off, set it down, lay on the ground with his helmet as a headrest, "really taking it sort of easy, waiting for the 4th Infantry Division to come up." At about 1100 the infantry were there, "and it was really sort of amusing, because we were on the beach with our faces all blackened, and these guys would come up in their boats and crash down in front of us and man, when they came off those boats, they were ready for action. We quickly hollered to them and pointed to our American flags."
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