D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (47 page)

Inland by about a kilometer from St.-Martin-de-Varreville there was a group of buildings holding a German coastal-artillery barracks, known to the Americans from its map signification as WXYZ. Lt. Col. Patrick Cassidy, commanding the 1st Battalion of the 502nd, short of men and with a variety of missions to perform, sent Sgt. Harrison Summers of West Virginia with fifteen men to capture the barracks. That was not much of a force to take on a full-strength German company, but it was all Cassidy could spare.

Summers set out immediately, not even taking the time to learn the names of the men he was leading, who were showing considerable reluctance to follow this unknown sergeant. Summers grabbed one man, Sgt. Leland Baker, and told him, "Go up to the

top of this rise and watch in that direction and don't let anything come over that hill and get on my flank. Stay there until you're told to come back." Baker did as ordered.
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Summers then went to work, charging the first farmhouse, hoping his hodgepodge squad would follow. It did not, but he kicked in the door and sprayed the interior with his tommy gun. Four Germans fell dead, others ran out a back door to the next house. Summers, still alone, charged that house; again the Germans fled. His example inspired Pvt. William Burt to come out of the roadside ditch where the group was hiding, set up his light machine gun, and begin laying down a suppressing fire against the third barracks building.

Once more Summers dashed forward. The Germans were ready this time; they shot at him from loopholes but, what with Burt's machine-gun fire and Summers's zigzag running, failed to hit him. Summers kicked in the door and sprayed the interior, killing six Germans and driving the remainder out of the building.

Summers dropped to the ground, exhausted and in emotional shock. He rested for half an hour. His squad came up and replenished his ammunition supply. As he rose to go on, an unknown captain from the 101st, misdropped by miles, appeared at his side. "I'll go with you," said the captain. At that instant he was shot through the heart and Summers was again alone. He charged another building, killing six more Germans. The rest threw up their hands. Summers's squad was close behind; he turned the prisoners over to his men.

One of them, Pvt. John Camien from New York City, called out to Summers: "Why are you doing it?"

"I can't tell you," Summers replied.

"What about the others?"

"They don't seem to want to fight," said Summers, "and I can't make them. So I've got to finish it."

"OK," said Camien. "I'm with you."

Together, Summers and Camien moved from building to building, taking turns charging and giving covering fire. Burt meanwhile moved up with his machine gun. Between the three of them, they killed more Germans.

There were two buildings to go. Summers charged the first and kicked the door open, to see the most improbable sight. Fifteen German artillerymen were seated at mess tables eating breakfast. Summers never paused; he shot them down at the tables.

The last building was the largest. Beside it was a shed and

a haystack. Burt used tracer bullets to set them ablaze. The shed was used by the Germans for ammunition storage; it quickly exploded, driving thirty Germans out into the open, where Summers, Camien, and Burt shot some of them down as the others fled.

Another member of Summers's makeshift squad came up. He had a bazooka, which he used to set the roof of the last building on fire. The Germans on the ground floor were firing a steady fusillade from loopholes in the walls, but as the flames began to build they dashed out. Many died in the open. Thirty-one others emerged with raised hands to offer their surrender.

Summers collapsed, exhausted by his nearly five hours of combat. He lit a cigarette. One of the men asked him, "How do you feel?"

"Not very good," Summers answered. "It was all kind of crazy. I'm sure I'll never do anything like that again."
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Summers got a battlefield commission and a Distinguished Service Cross. He was put in for the Medal of Honor, but the paperwork got lost. In the late 1980s, after Summers's death from cancer, Pvt. Baker and others made an effort to get the medal awarded posthumously, without success.
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Summers is a legend with American paratroopers nonetheless, the Sergeant York of World War II. His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood in it to be believed, except that more than ten men saw and reported his exploits.

At 0600, General Taylor made his first D-Day command decision. He had with him Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe (101st artillery commander), Col. Julian Ewell (CO 3rd Battalion, 501st PIR), eighteen other officers, and forty men. With the sunrise, Taylor could see the church steeple at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. "I know the shape of that one," he said, a payoff from the preinvasion briefing.

He was in position to move his group south, to defend the line of the Douve River, or east to exits 1 and 2. Either way he would be carrying out 101st missions. He decided to go east: "It remains for us to help the 4th Infantry Division in every way possible," he said. He set off from just south of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont for Pouppeville (called "Poopville" by the GIs) and exit l.
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Lt. Eugene Brierre was in the lead, with flank guards on both sides out into the fields. As they approached Pouppeville, shots rang out. The village was held by some sixty men of the German 91st Division. They were hunkered down, occasionally firing out of second-story windows. It took Taylor's small force nearly three hours to complete the house-to-house, really window-

to-window fighting. Ewell's battalion suffered eighteen casualties and inflicted twenty-five on the enemy. Nearly forty Wehrmacht troops surrendered.

In one house, Brierre found a wounded German on the floor. "His gun was near him. I almost shot him when I realized that he was seriously wounded. He signaled to me to hand him something; I saw that he was pointing toward a rosary. I grabbed his gun, unloaded it, threw it aside, picked up the rosary and handed it to him. He had a look of deep appreciation in his eyes and began to pray, passing the beads through his fingers. He died shortly thereafter."

With Pouppeville taken, Taylor had possession of exit 1. He sent Lieutenant Brierre on an eight-man patrol down the causeway with orders to make contact with the 4th Infantry Division coming in at Utah. A couple of German soldiers had fled Pouppeville headed toward the beach; four German soldiers at Utah had meanwhile fled inland along the causeway. When they met and realized they were caught in a nutcracker, they hid under a bridge. Meanwhile Captain Mabry was advancing inland along the causeway, flooded fields to both sides.

Brierre shot an orange flare up into the air to show that "we were friends. The troops came on; when they got to the bridge, six Germans came out with their hands up and surrendered. I went to the road and met Captain Mabry. I recorded the time; it was 1110." The linkup at Pouppeville was complete.
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Brierre took Mabry to meet Taylor. When Mabry told him how smoothly the landings at Utah were going, Taylor turned to his chief of staff, Col. Gerald Higgins, and said, "The invasion is succeeding. We don't have to worry about the causeways. Now we can think about the next move."
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When the German 6th Parachute Regiment moved out to attack, it was hit almost immediately by naval gun fire. "No one can imagine what it was like," Pvt. Egon Rohrs declared. "When the ships fired it was like a storm. It was hell. And it lasted, it lasted. It was unendurable. We lay on the ground, pressed against the earth." Pvt. Wolfgang Geritzlehner was in Rohrs's unit. Geritzleh-ner had spent two years worrying that the war would end before he could take part in it. But "at the end of one hour, I wanted only to go home. We were all terrified. There were some who cried and called for their mothers."
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Colonel Heydte wanted to see the situation for himself, so

he set off on his motorcycle and drove from Carentan to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, where he climbed to the top of the church steeple, the one Taylor had spotted an hour earlier. It was fifty meters or so above the ground and gave him a magnificent view of Utah Beach.

What he saw quite took his breath away. "All along the beach," he recalled, "were these small boats, hundreds of them, each disgorging thirty or forty armed men. Behind them were the warships, blasting away with their huge guns, more warships in one fleet than anyone had ever seen before. Cannons from a single German coastal bunker were firing at the incoming American troops, who had no cover on the gently rising slope. Except for this small fortification, the German defense seemed nonexistent or, in any case, invisible."

Around the church, in the little village and beyond in the green fields crisscrossed by hedgerows, all was quiet. The Germans had a battery of four 105mm cannon at Brecourt Manor, a couple of kilometers north of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, but the guns were not firing even though they were perfectly situated to lob shells onto the landing craft on Utah and to engage the warships out in the Channel. An identical battery at Holdy, just to the south of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, was also not firing.
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No one ever found out why. As with the Germans eating breakfast at WXYZ when Summers burst in on them, it was and remains inexplicable. Of course these artillerymen were not top quality troops, nothing to match Heydte's paratroopers; many were overage, some were just kids, few had any heart for fighting American paratroopers. But the biggest problem was the absence of leadership. The junior officers and noncoms in the artillery units either would not or could not take charge and make their men do their duty. They were prepared to defend themselves from their trenches, bunkers, and stone farmhouses; they were not prepared to stand to their guns.

Heydte dashed down the circular stairs from the steeple and got on his radio. He ordered his 1st Battalion to get to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and Holdy as quickly as possible to hold the villages and get those guns shooting.

Thus did the Wehrmacht pay the price for overextending itself. Its best troops were either dead or POWs or invalids or fighting on the Eastern Front. The garrison troops in the Cotentin were almost useless, even a detriment. Heydte's clear mission was to open the road from Carentan to Ste.-Mere-Eglise, concentrate his regiment to drive the small 82nd Airborne force in Ste.-Mere-

Eglise out of town, and by such a counterattack throw the Americans on the defensive. That was what he had intended to do, but the sad state of affairs at the batteries at Brecourt Manor and Holdy forced him to divide his force and put one of his battalions on a defensive mission.

Heydte was the only German regimental commander doing his job that morning. The others were in Rennes for the war game. That was one reason for the failure of the Wehrmacht to launch
any
coordinated counterattacks, even though it had been preparing for this day for the past six months and even though Rommel had insisted on the absolute necessity of immediate strong counterattacks while the invaders were still on the beaches.

But the war game at Rennes was only one small part of the abysmal failure of the Wehrmacht. Paralysis in the high command permeated everything. The BBC radio messages to the French Resistance were more or less ignored (for this failure at least there was an excuse; there had been so many false alarms in the preceding weeks that the German coastal units had become exhausted and exasperated by the continuous alerts; further, the messages did not indicate
where
the invasion was coming). The dummy paratroopers dropped by SAS convinced some German commanders that the whole operation was a bluff. But the major factor in the Wehr-macht's failure appears to have been a consequence of the soft life of occupation.

As early as 0615 Gen. Max Pemsel, chief of staff to General Dollmann's Seventh Army, told General Speidel at La Roche-Guyon of the massive air and naval bombardment; a half hour later Pemsel reported to Rundstedt's headquarters that the landings were beginning—but he added that Seventh Army would be able to cope with the situation from its own resources. With that news General Salmuth, commanding the Fifteenth Army, went back to bed. So did Speidel and most of Rommel's staff at La Roche-Guyon. General Blumentritt from Rundstedt's headquarters told General Jodl at Hitler's headquarters in Berchtesgaden that a major invasion appeared to be taking place and asked for the release of the armored reserve, I SS Panzer Corps outside Paris. Jodl refused to wake Hitler; permission was denied. General Bayerlein, commanding the
Panzer Lehr
division, had his tanks ready to move to the coast by 0600, but did not receive permission to do so until late afternoon.

Berlin radio reported landings in Normandy at 0700; SHAEF released its first communique announcing the invasion at

0930; but not until 1030 did word reach Rommel at his home in Herrlingen. He left immediately for the long drive to La Roche-Guyon but did not arrive until after dark.
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The cause of all this mess, beyond complacency and divided command responsibility, was the success of Operation Fortitude. As Max Hastings notes, "Every key German commander greeted the news of operations in Normandy as evidence of
an
invasion, not of
the
invasion."
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The Calvados and Cotentin coasts were a long way from La Roche-Guyon, a longer way from Paris, an even longer way from the Pas-de-Calais, and a long, long way from the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland. Despite all their postwar claims to the contrary, the Germans just could not believe that the Allies would make their major, much less their sole, landing west of the Seine River. So they decided to wait for the real thing, at the Pas-de-Calais. They were still waiting three months later as the Allied armies overran France and moved into Belgium.