D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (54 page)

"The Germans were raking the whole area with machine-gun fire. I held onto one of those poles until I could get my breath, then moved to another one. I finally got within about fifty yards of the shore. Now the tide was in full, it almost reached the road."

W
⁷
hen Peters reached the beach "I was loaded so heavy with water and sand that I could just stagger about." He got behind a tank; it got hit by an 88. Shrapnel wounded the man beside him and hit Peters in the cheek. He was lucky; he was one of the few survivors from LCI 92.
²⁵

Capt. Robert Walker of HQ Company was on LCI 91, just behind LCI 92. (LCI 94, the one "Popeye" the skipper decided not to take in on that sector, was just to the left of LCIs 91 and 92.) As it approached the beach, LCI 91 began taking rifle and machine-gun fire. Maneuvering through the obstacles, the LCI got caught on one of the pilings and set off the Teller mine. The explosion tore off the starboard landing ramp.

The skipper tried to back off. Walker moved to the port-side

ramp, only to find it engulfed in flames. A man carrying a flamethrower had been hit by a bullet; another bullet had set the jellied contents of his fuel tank on fire. Screaming in agony, he dove into the sea. "I could see that even the soles of his boots were on fire." Men around him also burned; Walker saw a couple of riflemen "with horrendous drooping face blisters."

The skipper came running to the front deck, waving his arms and yelling "Everybody over the side." Walker jumped into water about eight feet deep. He was carrying so much equipment that despite two Mae Wests he could not stay afloat. He dropped his rifle, then his helmet, then his musette bag, which enabled him to swim to where he could touch bottom.

"Here I was on Omaha Beach. Instead of being a fierce, well-trained, fighting infantry warrior, I was an exhausted, almost helpless, unarmed survivor of a shipwreck." When he got to waist-deep water he got on his knees and crawled the rest of the way. Working his way forward to the seawall, he saw the body of Captain Zappacosta. At the seawall, "I saw dozens of soldiers, mostly wounded. The wounds were ghastly to see."

(Forty-nine years later, Walker recorded that the scene brought to his mind Tennyson's lines in "The Charge of the Light Brigade," especially "Cannon to right of them/Cannon to left of them/Cannon in front of them/Volley'd and thunder'd." He added that so far as he could tell every GI knew the lines, "Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die," even if the soldiers did not know the source. Those on Omaha Beach who had committed the poem to memory surely muttered to themselves, "Some one had blunder'd.")

Walker came to Cota's conclusion. Any place was better than this; the plan was
kaput;
he couldn't go back; he set out on his own to climb the bluff. He picked up an M-l and a helmet from a dead soldier and moved out. "I was alone and completely on my own."
²⁶

Maj. Sidney Bingham (USMA 1940) was CO of 2nd Battalion, 116th. When he reached the shingle he was without radio, aide, or runner. His S-3 was dead, his HQ Company commander wounded, his E Company commander dead, his F Company commander wounded, his H Company commander killed, "and in E Company there were some fifty-five killed out of a total of something just over 200 who landed."

Bingham was overwhelmed by a feeling of "complete futil-

ity. Here I was, the battalion commander, unable for the most part to influence action or do what I knew had to be done." He set out to organize a leaderless group from F Company and get it moving up the bluff.

By this time, around 0745, unknown others were doing the same, whether NCOs or junior officers or, in some cases, privates. Staying on the beach meant certain death; retreat was not possible; someone had to lead; men took the burden on themselves and did. Bingham put it this way: "The individual and small-unit initiative carried the day. Very little, if any, credit can be accorded company, battalion, or regimental commanders for their tactical prowess and/or their coordination of the action."

Bingham did an analysis of what went wrong for the first and second waves. Among other factors, he said, the men were in the Higgins boats far too long. "Seasickness occasioned by the three or four hours in LCVPs played havoc with any idealism that may have been present. It markedly decreased the combat effectiveness of the command."

In addition, "The individual loads carried were in my view greatly excessive, hindered mobility, and in some cases caused death by drowning." In his view, "If the enemy had shown any sort of enthusiasm and moved toward us, they could have run us right back into the Channel without any trouble."

From June 6, 1944, on to 1990, Bingham carried with him an unjustified self-criticism: "I've often felt very ashamed of the fact that I was so completely inadequate as a leader on the beach on that frightful day." That is the way a good battalion commander feels when he is leading not much more than a squad—but Bingham got that squad over the shingle and into an attack against the enemy, which was exactly the right thing to do, and the only thing he could do under the circumstances.
²⁷

The Germans did not counterattack for a number of reasons, some of them good ones. First, they were not present in sufficient strength. General Kraiss had but two of his infantry battalions and one artillery battalion on the scene, about 2,000 men, or less than 250 per kilometer. Second, he was slow to react. Not until 0735 did he call up his division reserve,
Kampfgruppe Meyer
(named for the CO of the 915th Regiment of Kraiss's 352nd Division), and then he decided to commit only a single battalion, which did not arrive until midday. He was acting on a false assumption:

that his men had stopped the invasion at Omaha. Third, the German infantrymen were not trained for assaults, only to hold their positions and keep firing.

One German private who was manning an MG 42 on top of the bluff put it this way, in a 1964 radio interview: "It was the first time I shoot at living men. I don't remember exactly how it was: the only thing I know is that I went to my machine gun and I shoot, I shoot, I shoot."
²⁸

The sacrifice of good men that morning was just appalling. Capt. Walter Schilling of D Company, who had given a magnificent briefing to his magnificently trained men, was in the lead boat in the third wave. He was as good a company CO as there was in the U.S. Army. The company was coming into a section of the beach that had no one on it; there was no fire; Schilling remarked to Pvt. George Kobe, "See, I told you it was going to be easy." Moments later, before the ramp went down, Schilling was killed by a shell.
²⁹

Lt. William Gardner was the company executive officer, a West Point graduate described by Sgt. John Robert Slaughter as "young, articulate, handsome, tough, and aggressive. He possessed all the qualities to become a high-ranking officer in the Army."
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The ramp went down on his boat some 150 meters from shore. The men got off without loss. Gardner ordered them to spread out and keep low. He was killed by machine-gun fire before he made the shore.

Sgt. Slaughter's boat was bracketed by German artillery fire. At 100 meters from shore, the British coxswain said he had to lower the ramp and everyone should get out quickly. Sgt. Willard Norfleet told him to keep going: "These men have heavy equipment and you
will
take them all the way in."

The coxswain begged, "But we'll
all
be killed!"

Norfleet unholstered his .45 Colt pistol, put it to the sailor's head and ordered, "All the way in!" The coxswain proceeded.

Sergeant Slaughter, up at the front of the boat, was thinking, If this boat don't hurry up and get us in, I'm going to die from seasickness. The boat hit a sandbar and stopped.

"I watched the movie
The Longest Day"
Slaughter recalled, "and they came charging off those boats and across the beach like banshees but that isn't the way it happened. You came off the craft, you hit the water, and if you didn't get down in it you were going to get shot."

The incoming fire was horrendous. "This turned the boys into men," Slaughter commented. "Some would be very brave men, others would soon be dead men, but all of those who survived would be frightened men. Some wet their britches, others cried unashamedly, and many just had to find it within themselves to get the job done." In a fine tribute to Captain Shilling, Slaughter concluded, "This is where the discipline and training took over."

Slaughter made his way toward shore. "There were dead men floating in the water and there were live men acting dead, letting the tide take them in." Most of Company D was in the water a full hour, working forward. Once he reached shore, for Slaughter "getting across the beach to the shingle became an obsession." He made it. "The first thing I did was to take off my assault jacket and spread my raincoat so I could clean my rifle. It was then I saw bullet holes in my raincoat. I lit my first cigarette [they were wrapped in plastic]. I had to rest and compose myself because I became weak in my knees.

"Colonel Canham came by with his right arm in a sling and a .45 Colt in his left hand. He was yelling and screaming for the officers to get the men off the beach. 'Get the hell off this damn beach and go kill some Germans.' There was an officer taking refuge from an enemy mortar barrage in a pillbox. Right in front of me Colonel Canham screamed, 'Get your ass out of there and show some leadership.' " To another lieutenant he roared, "Get these men off their dead asses and over that wall."
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This was the critical moment in the battle. It was an ultimate test: could a democracy produce young men tough enough to take charge, to lead? As Pvt. Carl Weast put it, "It was simple fear that stopped us at that shingle and we lay there and we got butchered by rocket fire and by mortars for no damn reason other than the fact that there was nobody there to lead us off that goddamn beach. Like I say, hey man, I did my job, but somebody had to lead me."
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Sgt. William Lewis remembered cowering behind the shingle. Pvt. Larry Rote piled in on top of Lewis. He asked, "Is that you shaking, Sarge?"

"Yeah, damn right!"

"My God," Rote said. "I thought it was me!" Lewis commented, "Rote was shaking all right."

They huddled together with some other men, "just trying to

stay alive. There was nothing we could do except keep our butts down. Others took cover behind the wall."

All across Omaha, the men who had made it to the shingle hid behind it. Then Cota, or Canham, or a captain here, a lieutenant there, a sergeant someplace else, began to lead. They would cry out, "Follow me!" and start moving up the bluff.

In Sergeant Lewis's case, "Lt. Leo Van de Voort said, 'Let's go, goddamn, there ain't no use staying here, we're all going to get killed!' The first thing he did was to run up to a gun emplacement and throw a grenade in the embrasure. He returned with five or six prisoners. So then we thought, hell, if he can do that, why can't we. That's how we got off the beach."
³³

That was how most men got off the beach. Pvt. Raymond Howell, an engineer attached to D Company, described his thought process. He took some shrapnel in helmet and hand. "That's when I said, bullshit, if I'm going to die, to hell with it I'm not going to die here. The next bunch of guys that go over that goddamn wall, I'm going with them. If I'm gonna be infantry, I'm gonna be infantry. So I don't know who else, I guess all of us decided well, it is time to start."
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18

UTTER CHAOS REIGNED

The 16th Regiment at Omaha

The 16th Infantry Regiment of the 1st Division (the Big Red One) was the only first-wave assault unit on D-Day with combat experience. It didn't help much. Nothing the 16th had seen in the North Africa (1942) and Sicily (1943) landings compared to what it encountered at Easy Red, Fox Green, and Fox Red on June 6, 1944.

Like the 116th, the 16th landed in a state of confusion, off-target, badly intermingled (except L Company, the only one of the eight assault companies that could be considered a unit as it hit the beach), under intense machine-gun, rifle, mortar, and artillery fire from both flanks and the front. Schedules were screwed up, paths through the obstacles were not cleared, most officers—the first men off the boats—were wounded or killed before they could take even one step on the beach.

The naval gunfire support lifted as the Higgins boats moved in and would not resume until the smoke and haze revealed definite targets or until Navy fire-control officers ashore radioed back specific coordinates (few of those officers made it and those that did had no working radios). Most of the DD tanks had gone down in the Channel; the few that made it were disabled.

As a consequence, the German defenders were able to fire at presited targets from behind their fortifications unimpeded by in-

coming fire. The American infantry struggled ashore with no support whatsoever. Casualties were extremely heavy, especially in the water and in the 200 meters or so of open beach. As with the 116th to the right, for the 16th Regiment first and second waves D-Day was more reminiscent of an infantry charge across no-man's-land at the Somme in World War I than a typical World War II action.

"Our life expectancy was about zero," Pvt. John MacPhee declared. "We were burdened down with too much weight. We were just pack mules. I was very young, in excellent shape. I could walk for miles, endure a great deal of physical hardship, but I was so seasick I thought I would die. In fact, I wished I had. I was totally exhausted."