D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (50 page)

Vandervoort had another piece of luck. Capt. Alfred Ireland of the 80th Airborne Antiaircraft Battalion, who had come in by glider shortly after dawn, reported that he had two working 57mm AT guns. (Commenting later on his ride into Normandy and the crash landing of his glider, paratrooper Ireland said of the glider-borne troops, "Those guys don't get paid enough."
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That was

* The German grenade, with its long handle, could be thrown much more easily and farther than the American oval-shaped fragmentation grenade. But the amount of metal on the potato masher was not nearly as much as on the fragmentation grenade. Thus, as William Tucker of the 505th PIR put it, the Germans could use the potato masher "as an assault weapon. They could throw it and run right after it. We threw that damn frag grenade, we would run for cover ourselves."

literally true; the glider troops did not get the extra $50 per month jump pay the paratroopers received.)

Vandervoort set up one of the AT guns at the northern end of Ste.-Mere-Eglise and sent the other north to Neuville-au-Plain to support Turnbull.

Turnbull was half Cherokee. His men called him "Chief," but not in his presence. "He was a good guy," Pvt. Charles Miller remembered. "I used to box with him."
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Turnbull had put two of his squads along a hedgerow to the east of Neuville-au-Plain, the third to the west. Vandervoort set up the AT gun in town, pointing north, then talked to Turnbull, who told him nothing much had happened since he set up some four hours earlier. It was now about 1300.

While they were talking, a Frenchman rode his bicycle up to them and announced in English that some American paratroopers were bringing in a large contingent of German prisoners from the north. Sure enough, when Vandervoort and Turnbull looked in that direction there was a column of troops marching in good order right down the middle of the N-13, with what appeared to be paratroopers on either side of them waving orange flags (the American recognition signal on June 6).

But Vandervoort grew suspicious when he noticed two tracked vehicles at the rear of the column. He told Turnbull to have his machine gunner fire a short burst just to the right of the approaching column, which by now was less than a kilometer away.

The burst scattered the column. "Prisoners" and "paratroopers" alike dove into the ditches and returned fire, the perfidious Frenchman pedaled madly away, and the two self-propelled (SP) guns that had aroused Vandervoort's suspicion began to move forward behind smoke canisters.

At a half kilometer, the SPs opened fire. One of the first shots knocked out Turnbull's bazooka team, another was a near miss on the American AT gun. Its crew scattered, but with some "encouragement" from Vandervoort the gunners remanned the AT and with some fast and accurate shooting put the German SPs out of action. But the German infantry, a full-strength company from the 91st
Luftlande
Division, outnumbering Turnbull's force more than five to one, began moving around his flanks, using hedgerows for cover.

Vandervoort saw that Turnbull would be overrun quickly without reinforcements, so he had his jeep driver take him back to Ste.-Mere-Eglise, where he dispatched Lt. Theodore Peterson and Lieutenant Coyle with 1st Platoon of E Company to go to Neuville to cover Turnbull's withdrawal.

Turnbull, meanwhile, was extending his lines to the east and west in order to force the Germans to make a wider flanking move, but by 1600 he had about run out of men and room. He was taking heavy casualties, primarily from accurate German mortar fire. Of the forty-three men he had led into Neuville-au-Plain, only sixteen were in condition to fight, and some of them were wounded. Nine of Turnbull's men were dead.
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Turnbull was prepared to make a last stand, a sort of Custer at the Little Big Horn in reverse, when the platoon medic, Corp. James Kelly, volunteered to stay behind and look after the wounded. Pvt. Julius Sebastain, Cpl. Ray Smithson, and Sgt. Robert Niland offered to form a rearguard to cover the retreat of the remainder of the platoon, those who could still walk.

Just as Turnbull began the retreat, E Company moved into Neuville-au-Plain. "We hit fast and hard," Sgt. Otis Sampson recalled. He was handling the mortar and he was good at it. He began placing shells smack in the middle of the German force that was coming in on the flank.

"The Jerries were trying to move some men from the left of a lane to the right. One man at a time would cross at timed intervals. I judged when another would cross and had another round put in the tube. The timing was perfect."

Sampson kept moving his mortar around "so as not to give Jerry a target." The rifle squads kept up a steady fire. The momentum of the German advance was halted. Meanwhile Lieutenants Peterson and Coyle took a patrol to meet Turnbull and the few men he had left with him.

"And we started our journey back to Ste.-Mere-Eglise," Sampson said. "I could hear the Jerries yelling as we were leaving. It reminded me of an unfinished ball game, and they were yelling for us to come back and finish it. We withdrew in a casual way as one would after a day's work. I walked alongside Lieutenant Turn-bull. He was a good man."
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The twenty-eight badly wounded men left behind and two of the three volunteers who provided a rearguard were captured. (The third volunteer, Sgt. Bob Niland, was killed at his machine gun. One of his brothers, a platoon leader in the 4th Division, was killed the same morning at Utah Beach. Another brother was killed that week in Burma. Mrs. Niland received all three telegrams from the War Department announcing the deaths of her sons on the same day. Her fourth son, Fritz, was in the 101st Airborne; he was

snatched out of the front line by the Army.) The most critical of the wounded were evacuated to a hospital in Cherbourg by the Germans and were eventually freed when that city was taken on June 27. The others were freed on the night of June 7-8 when American tanks overran Neuville-au-Plain. Turnbull was killed in Ste.-Mere-Eglise on June 7 by an artillery round.
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Turnbull's heroic stand allowed Krause and Vandervoort to concentrate on an even stronger counterattack from the 795th Regiment south of Ste.-Mere-Eglise. It was as big a counterattack as the Germans mounted on D-Day, and it was supported by 88mm guns firing from high ground south of the village.

"The impact of the shells threw up mounds of dirt and mud," Private Fitzgerald recalled. "The ground trembled and my eardrums felt as if they would burst. Dirt was filling my shirt and was getting into my eyes and mouth. Those 88s became a legend. It was said that there were more soldiers converted to Christianity by the 88 than by Peter and Paul combined.

"When the firing finally stopped, it was midafternoon. We still held the town and there was talk of tanks coming up from the beaches to help us. I could not hold a razor steady enough to shave for the next few days.

"Up until now, I had been mentally on the defensive. My introduction to combat had been a shocker but it was beginning to wear off. I found myself pissed off at the Germans, the dirt, the noise, and the idea of being pushed back."
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Others felt the same. When Colonel Krause sent I Company to strike at the enemy flank, it moved out aggressively. It caught a German convoy in the open and with bazookas and Gammon bombs destroyed some tanks. The accompanying German infantry withdrew under a hail of fire. "With the last light of day," Fitzgerald said, "the last German attack came to a halt."
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Reinforcements came in by glider. They tried to land all around Ste.-Mere-Eglise, but the pilots were taking small-arms fire from the surrounding Germans and in any case the fields were too short and the hedgerows too high. Every glider seemed to end up crashing into a hedgerow.

"I was standing in a ditch when a glider suddenly came crashing through some trees," Lieutenant Coyle remembered. "I had not seen it coming and of course could not hear it as it made no sound. I just had time to drop face down in the ditch when the

glider hit, crashed across the road, and came to rest with its wing over me. I had to crawl on my stomach the length of the wing to get out from under."
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Sergeant Sampson dove to the ground as a glider crashed into a hedgerow. "The tail end of the glider was sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle. I went to see if I couldn't help. As I came up, a hole started to appear on the right side of the glider. The men were kicking out an exit. Like bees out of a hive, they came out of that hole, jumped on the ground, ran for the trees and disappeared. I tried to tell them they were in friendly country, but they passed me as if I wasn't even there."

During the night, the Germans were firing flares, shooting rifles, mortars, and occasionally 88s at Ste.-Mere-£glise, yelling out orders and threats at the Americans. "They seemed to be so sure of themselves," Sampson said. "A barrage would hit us, and then they would open up with their machine pistols, yelling as if to attack. Then it would quiet down and then burst out anew. I snuggled up close to my mortar and caressed the barrel. How I wanted to fire it. But we were too intermingled; I might have hit some of our own men.

"The enemy never came on. Maybe they thought with all their yelling and firing we would give our positions away by running. I wondered what had happened at the beaches. The infantrv should have been with us by now.

"Many things ran through my mind. I was afraid the invasion had been a failure. I was thinking of my country and the people we were trying to help. I was almost certain I would never see daylight again. I can't say I was afraid. I just wanted a chance to take as many Jerries with me as possible. I wanted them to come where I could see them. I wanted to see a pile of them in front of me before they got me. It would have been so much easier dying that way."
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Ste.-Mere-Eglise was secure, if barely. The official history records this as "the most significant operation of the 82d Airborne Division on D-Day."
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Another victory for the 82nd had been won by Captain Creek at Chef-du-Pont. On the west side of the Mer-deret, however, the bulk of the 82nd was scattered in small, isolated pockets, surrounded, fighting for survival rather than seizing objectives. Communication between units was almost nonexistent. General Ridgway feared that his division might be destroyed before it could consolidate and before the 4th Infantry reached it.

To the east, toward the beaches, the 101st had opened the causeways and linked up with the seaborne American troops. Many of its men were unaccounted for; of the 6,600 troopers of the 101st who had dropped into Normandy during the night, only 2,500 were fighting together in some kind of organized unit at the end of the day. Some of its units, like Colonel Johnson's at La Barquette and Captain Shettle's at the lower Douve bridges, were isolated and vulnerable, but the 101st had accomplished its main mission, opening the way inland for the 4th Infantry.

The casualty rate cannot be stated with accuracy; the airborne records for Normandy do not distinguish between D-Day losses and those suffered in the ensuing weeks. It was perhaps 10 percent, which was much lower than Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory had feared and predicted, but incredibly high for one day of combat.

It would almost seem to have been too high a price, except that, thanks to the airborne, the 4th Division got ashore and inland with an absolute minimum of casualties. That was the payoff for the largest night drop of paratroopers ever made.

Leigh-Mallory had urged Eisenhower to cancel the air drop and bring the airborne divisions into the beaches as follow-up troops. Eisenhower had refused and he was surely right. Without the airborne fighting behind the German lines, the 4th Infantry would, probably, have gotten ashore and over the sand dunes without too much difficulty, as the German defenders on the shoreline were too few and of poor quality and so were badly battered by the Marauders. But getting across the causeways over the flooded area back from the dunes would have been costly, perhaps impossible, without the airborne.

The 101st had accomplished two critical missions; its men had taken the exits from the rear, and they had knocked out German cannon at Brecourt Manor, Holdy, and other places, cannon that could have been used with deadly effectiveness against the infantry and landing craft.

General Marshall had urged Eisenhower to drop the airborne much further inland, as much as sixty kilometers from the beach. Eisenhower had refused to do so. He had reasoned that lightly armed paratroopers far behind German lines would have been more a liability than a help, isolated and vulnerable, unable to act aggressively. The experience of the 82nd Airborne west of the Merderet would seem to show that Eisenhower was right.

17

VISITORS TO HELL

The 116th Regiment at Omaha

If the Germans were going to stop the invasion anywhere, it would be at Omaha Beach. It was an obvious landing site, the onlv sand beach between the mouth of the Douve to the west and Ar-romanches to the east, a distance of almost forty kilometers. On both ends of Omaha the cliffs were more or less perpendicular.

The sand at Omaha Beach is golden in color, firm and fine, perfect for sunbathing and picnicking and digging, but in extent the beach is constricted. It is slightly crescent-shaped, about ten kilometers long overall. At low tide, there is a stretch of firm sand of 300 to 400 meters in distance. At high tide, the distance from the waterline to the one- to three-meter bank of shingle (small round stones) is but a few meters.

In 1944 the shingle, now mostly gone, was impassable to vehicles. On the western third of the beach, beyond the shingle, there was a part-wood, part-masonry seawall from one to four meters in height (now gone). Inland of the seawall there was a paved, promenade beach road, then a V-shaped antitank ditch as much as two meters deep, then a flat swampy area, then a steep bluff that ascended thirty meters or more. A man could climb the bluff, but a vehicle could not. The grass-covered slopes appeared to be featureless when viewed from any distance, but in fact they contained many small folds or irregularities that proved to be a critical physical feature of the battlefield.