D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (51 page)

There were five small "draws" or ravines that sloped gently up to the tableland above the beach. A paved road led off the beach at exit D-l to Vierville; at Les Moulins (exit D-3) a dirt road led up to St.-Laurent; the third draw, exit E-l, had only a path leading up to the tableland; the fourth draw, E-3, had a dirt road leading to Colleville; the last draw had a dirt path at exit F-l.

No tactician could have devised a better defensive situation. A narrow, enclosed battlefield, with no possibility of outflanking it; many natural obstacles for the attacker to overcome; an ideal place to build fixed fortifications and a trench system on the slope of the bluff and on the high ground looking down on a wide, open killing field for any infantry trying to cross no-man's-land.

The Allied planners hated the idea of assaulting Omaha Beach, but it had to be done. This was as obvious to Rommel as to Eisenhower. Both commanders recognized that if the Allies invaded in Normandy, they would have to include Omaha Beach in the landing sites; otherwise the gap between Utah and the British beaches would be too great.

The waters offshore were heavily mined, so too the beaches, the promenade (which also had concertina wire along its length), and the bluff. Rommel had placed more beach obstacles here than at Utah. He had twelve strong points holding 88s, 75s, and mortars. He had dozens of Tobruks and machine-gun pillboxes, supported by an extensive trench system.

Everything the Germans had learned in World War I about how to stop a frontal assault by infantry Rommel put to work at Omaha. He laid out the firing positions at angles to the beach to cover the tidal flat and beach shelf with crossing fire, plunging fire, and grazing fire, from all types of weapons. He prepared artillery positions along the cliffs at either end of the beach, capable of delivering enfilade fire from 88s all across Omaha. The trench system included underground quarters and magazines connected by tunnels. The strong points were concentrated near the entrances to the draws, which were further protected by large cement roadblocks. The larger artillery pieces were protected to the seaward by concrete wing walls. There was not one inch of the beach that had not been presighted for both grazing and plunging fire.

Watching the American landing craft approach, the German defenders could hardly believe their eyes. "Holy smoke—here they are!" Lieutenant Frerking declared. "But that's not possible, that's

not possible." He put down his binoculars and rushed to his command post in a bunker near Vierville.

"Landing craft on our left, off Vierville, making for the beach," Cpl. Hein Severloh in
Widerstandsnesten
62 called out. "They must be crazy," Sergeant Krone declared. "Are they going to swim ashore? Right under our muzzles?"

The colonel of the artillery regiment passed down a strict order: "Hold your fire until the enemy is coming up to the water-line."

All along the bluff, German soldiers watched the landing craft approach, their fingers on the triggers of machine guns, rifles, artillery fuses, or holding mortar rounds. In bunker 62, Frerking was at the telephone, giving the range to gunners a couple of kilometers inland: "Target Dora, all guns, range four-eight-five-zero, basic direction 20 plus, impact fuse."
¹

Capt. Robert Walker of HQ Company, 116th Regiment, 29th Division, later described the defenses in front of Vierville: "The cliff-like rjdge was covered with well-concealed foxholes and many semipermanent bunkers. The bunkers were practically un-noticeable from the front. Their firing openings were toward the flank so that they could bring flanking crossfire to the beach as well as all the way up the slope of the bluff. The bunkers had diagrams of fields of fire, and these were framed under glass and mounted on the walls beside the firing platforms."
²

A. J. Liebling, who covered the invasion for the
New Yorker,
climbed the bluff a few days after D-Day. "The trenches were deep, narrow, and so convoluted that an attacking force at any point could be fired on from several directions," he wrote. "Important knots in the system, like the command post and mortar emplacements, were of concrete. The command post was sunk at least twenty-five feet into the ground and was faced with brick on the inside. The garrison had slept in underground bombproofs, with timbered ceilings and wooden floors." To Liebling, it looked like "a regular Maginot Line."
³

Four things gave the Allies the notion that they could successfully assault this all-but-impregnable position. First, Allied intelligence said that the fortifications and trenches were manned by the 716th Infantry Division, a low-quality unit made up of Poles

and Russians with poor morale. At Omaha, intelligence reckoned that there was only one battalion of about 800 troops to man the defenses.

Second, the B-17s assigned to the air bombardment would hit the beach with everything they had, destroying or at least neutralizing the bunkers and creating craters on the beach and bluff that would be usable as foxholes for the infantry. Third, the naval bombardment, culminating with the LCT(R)s' rockets, would finish off anything left alive and moving after the B-17s finished. The infantry from the 29th and 1st divisions going into Omaha were told that their problems would begin when they got to the top of the bluff and started to move inland toward their D-Day objectives.

The fourth cause for confidence that the job would be done was that 40,000 men with 3,500 motorized vehicles were scheduled to land at Omaha on D-Day.

In the event, none of the above worked. The intelligence was wrong; instead of the contemptible 716th Division, the quite-capable 352nd Division was in place. Instead of one German battalion to cover the beach, there were three. The cloud cover and late arrival caused the B-17s to delay their release until they were as much as five kilometers inland; not a single bomb fell on the beach or bluff. The naval bombardment was too brief and generally inaccurate, and in any case it concentrated on the big fortifications above the bluff. Finally, most of the rockets fell short, most of them landing in the surf, killing thousands of fish but no Germans.

Captain Walker, on an LCI, recalled that just before H-Hour, "I took a look toward the shore and my heart took a dive. I couldn't believe how peaceful, how untouched, and how tranquil the scene was. The terrain was green. All buildings and houses were intact. The church steeples were proudly and defiantly standing in place.* 'Where,' I yelled to no one in particular, 'is the damned Air Corps?' "
⁴

The Overlord plan for Omaha was elaborate and precise. It had the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division (attached to the 1st Division for this day only) going in on the right (west), supported

* At the pre-assault briefing, Walker had been told, "This mock-up shows the land behind the beach as green, but it won't look that way on D-Day. The pulverizing from the bombing, naval shells, and rockets will turn it brown. And don't depend on those village church steeples as landmarks, because all buildings will be flattened."

by C Company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. The 16th Regiment of the 1st Division would go in on the left. It would be a linear attack, with the two regiments going in by companies abreast. There were eight sectors, from right to left named Charlie, Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red, Easy Green, Easy Red, Fox Green, and Fox Red. The 116th's sectors ran from Charlie to Easy Green.

The first waves would consist of two battalions from each of the regiments, landing in a column of companies, with the third battalion coming in behind. Assault teams would cover every inch of beach, firing M-ls, .30-caliber machine guns, BARs, bazookas, 60mm mortars, and flamethrowers. Ahead of the assault teams would be DD tanks, Navy underwater demolition teams, and Army engineers. Each assault team and the supporting units had specific tasks to perform, all geared to opening the exits. As the infantry suppressed whatever fire the Germans could bring to bear, the demolition teams would blow the obstacles and mark the paths through them with flags, so that as the tide came in the coxswains would know where it was safe to go.

Next would come the following waves of landing craft, bringing in reinforcements on a tight, strict schedule designed to put firepower ranging from M-ls to 105mm howitzers into the battle exactly when needed, plus more tanks, trucks, jeeps, medical units, traffic-control people, headquarters, communication units— all the physical support and administrative control required by two overstrength divisions of infantry conducting an all-out offensive.

By H plus 120 minutes the vehicles would be driving up the opened draws to the top of the bluff and starting to move inland toward their D-Day objectives, first of all the villages of Vierville, St.-Laurent, and Colleville, then heading west toward Pointe-du-Hoc or south to take Trevieres, eight kilometers from Omaha.
⁵

Eisenhower's little aphorism that plans are everything before the battle, useless once it is joined, was certainly the case at Omaha. Nothing worked according to the plan, which was indeed useless the moment the Germans opened fire on the assault forces, and even before.

With the exception of Company A, 116th, no unit landed where it was supposed to. Half of E Company was more than a kilometer off target, the other half more than two kilometers to the east of its assigned sector. This was a consequence of winds and tide. A northwest wind of ten to eighteen knots created waves of

three to four feet, sometimes as much as six feet, which pushed the landing craft from right to left. So did the tidal current, which with the rising tide (dead low tide at Omaha was 0525) ran at a velocity of 2.7 knots.

By H-Hour, not only were the boats out of position, but the men in them were cramped, seasick, miserable. Most had climbed down their rope nets into the craft four hours or more earlier. The waves came crashing over the gunwales. Every LCVP and LCA (landing craft assault, the British version of the Higgins boat) shipped water. In most of them, the pumps could not carry the load, so the troops had to bail with their helmets.

At least ten of the 200 boats in the first wave swamped; most of the troops were picked up later by Coast Guard rescue craft, often after hours in the water; many drowned. Another disheartening sight to the men in the surviving boats was the glimpse of GIs struggling in life preservers and on rafts, personnel from the foundered DD tanks.
⁶

In general, the men of the first wave were exhausted and confused even before the battle was joined. Still, the misery caused by the spray hitting them in the face with each wave and by their seasickness was such that they were eager to hit the beach, feeling that nothing could be worse than riding on those damned Higgins boats. The only comforting thing was those tremendous naval shells zooming over their heads—but even they were hitting the top of the bluff or further inland, not the beach or the slope. At H minus five minutes the fire lifted.

Chief Electrician's Mate Alfred Sears was in the last LCVP of sixteen in the first wave. Going in, the ensign had told him "all the German strong points will be knocked out by the time we hit the beach." Sears went on, "We were so confident of this, that on the way in most of my men and I were sitting on top of the engine room decking of the landing craft, enjoying the show, fascinated by the barrage from the rocket ships. About one thousand rockets shattered the beach directly where we were to land. It looked pretty good."

Lt. Joe Smith was a Navy beachmaster. His job was to put up flags to guide the landing craft from A Company, 116th Regiment. His Higgins boat may have been the first to hit the beach. "The Germans let us alone on the beach. We didn't know why, we could see the Germans up there looking down on us; it was a weird

feeling. We were right in front of a German 88 gun emplacement, but fortunately for us they were set to cover down the beach and not toward the sea, so they could not see us."

A Higgins boat carrying an assault team from A Company came in behind Smith. The men in it figured that what they had been told to expect had come true: the air and naval bombardments had wiped out the opposition. The ramp went down.

"Target Dora—fire!" Lieutenant Frerking shouted into the telephone. When the battery opened fire, eager German gunners throughout the area pulled their triggers. To Frerking's left there were three MG-42 positions; to his front a fortified mortar position; on the forward slopes of the bluff infantrymen in trenches. They exploded into action.
⁷

"We hit the sandbar," Electrician's Mate Sears recalled, "dropped the ramp, and then all hell poured loose on us. The soldiers iVi the boat received a hail of machine-gun bullets. The Army lieutenant was immediately killed, shot through the head."
⁸

In the lead Company A boat, LCA 1015, Capt. Taylor Fellers and every one of his men were killed before the ramp went down. It just vaporized. No one ever learned whether it was the result of hitting a mine or getting hit by an 88.
⁹

"They put their ramp down," Navy beachmaster Lt. Joe Smith said of what he saw, "and a German machine gun or two opened up and you could see the sand kick up right in front of the boat. No one moved. The coxswain stood up and yelled and for some reason everything was quiet for an instant and you could hear him as clear as a bell, he said, 'For Christ's sake, fellas, get out! I've got to go get another load.' "
¹⁰

All across the beach, the German machine guns were hurling fire of monstrous proportions on the hapless Americans. (One gunner with Lieutenant Frerking at strong point 62 fired 12,000 rounds that morning.) Because of the misplaced landings, the GIs were bunched together, with large gaps between groups, up to a kilometer in length, which allowed the Germans to concentrate their fire. As the Higgins boats and larger LCIs approached the beach, the German artillery fired at will, from the Tobruks and fortifications up the draws and on top of the bluff and from the emplacements on the beach.