D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (59 page)

Seaman James Fudge was on one of the two LSTs that had made it to the beach. When the order came to get off, "this is where our ship got in trouble, where our captain panicked. We had dropped our stern anchor. We had not unloaded a thing. The LST to our right got hit with an 88. And what our skipper needed to do was give the order 'Haul in the stern anchor! All back full!' But he said, 'All back full!' and forgot about the anchor. So he backed over his stern anchor cable and fouled the screws."

The LST was helpless in the water, about 500 meters offshore. Eventually, it was off-loaded by a Rhino. Fudge said, "It was quite difficult to unload tanks from the LST to the Rhino. You had to have a crane, it was a terrible time in a somewhat choppy sea to have a barge to unload trucks and tanks without dropping them in the water. But we didn't lose any."

Fudge recalled that "an admiral came by on an LCVP and in front of the whole crew he scolded our skipper for being so thoughtless as to back over his own cable. He had some very insulting things to say to our skipper. Directly. He was a very angry man."

While the LST was being unloaded, Fudge saw a sight that almost every man on Omaha Beach that morning mentioned in his oral history. The incident was later made famous by Cornelius Ryan in
The Longest Day.
At about 0900, zooming in from the British beaches, came two FW-190s. The pilots were Wing Comdr. Josef Priller and Sgt. Heinz Wodarczyk. Ryan recorded that when they

* Six hours later Irwin went back in and got most of his cargo ashore. One sergeant refused to drive his jeep off the ramp; not until D-Day plus one did he go ashore, and then at a British beach.

saw the invasion fleet, Priller's words were "What a show! What a show!" They flew at 150 feet, dodging between the barrage balloons.

Fudge commented, "I can remember standing sort of in awe of them and everyone was trying to fire at them. People were shouting, 'Look, look, a couple of Jerries!' " Every 40mm and 20mm in the fleet blasted away.

So far as Fudge could make out, many of the gunners were hitting the ship next to them, so low were Priller and Wodarczyk flying. No one hit the planes. As Priller and Wodarczyk streaked off into the clouds, one seaman commented, "Jerry or not, the best of luck to you. You've got guts."
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There was one battalion of black soldiers in the initial assault on Omaha, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (Colored). It was a unique outfit attached to the First Army. The troopers brought in barrage balloons on LSTs and LCIs in the third wave and set them up on the beach, to prevent Luftwaffe straffing. (About 1,200 black soldiers landed on Utah on D-Day, all of them truck drivers or port personnel from segregated quartermaster companies.) Black Coast Guard personnel drove Higgins boats and black sailors manned their battle stations on the warships. Overall, however, it was remarkable that so few black servicemen were allowed to participate in the initial attack against the Nazi regime, and a terrible waste considering the contributions of black combat troops in Korea and Vietnam.*

It was the Navy's job to get the men to shore, the tankers and artillerymen's jobs to provide suppressing fire, the infantry-

* In December 1944, during the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower allowed black truck drivers to volunteer for combat infantry posts. Nearly 5,000 did, many of them giving up their stripes for the privilege of fighting for their country. Initially they were segregated into all-black platoons, with white officers. They compiled an outstanding record. A staff officer from the 104th Division remarked on the performance of the black platoons: "Morale: Excellent. Manner of performance: Superior. Men are very eager to close with the enemy and to destroy him. Strict attention to duty, aggressiveness, common sense and judgment under fire has won the admiration of all the men in the company. The colored platoon has a calibre of men equal to any veteran platoon." A few white officers declared that the black troops were too aggressive and occasionally overextended themselves, but when the black units suffered losses and could no longer function as platoons, the survivors were formed into squads and served in white platoons. This was the beginning of integration in the U.S. Army. Mr. James Cook of Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania, provided information on the 320th.

men's job to move out and up, the demolition teams' job to blow gaps in the obstacles, and the engineers' job to blow remaining obstacles, provide traffic control on the beach, blast the exits open, and clear and mark paths through the minefields. For the engineers, as for the others, the first couple of hours on Omaha were full of frustration.

Sgt. Robert Schober was with the 3466 Ordnance Maintenance Company. His unit's job was to dewaterproof vehicles. His tools were crescent wrench, screwdriver, and pliers. The task was simple: tighten fan belts, open battery vents, remove packing from various parts of the engine. When Howell got to the beach, "I felt a ding on the helmet. When I realized it was a bullet, I was no longer scared. I made up my mind that when the next wave of infantry took off for the seawall, I was going too. I did, and dug in when I arrived." He and his buddies stayed there through the morning, because they could not locate any vehicles that needed dewaterproofing.
¹⁹

At least they made it to the wall. Cpl. Robert Miller, a combat engineer with the 6th ESB, did not. He was in an LCT that landed around 0700 on Easy Red. He glanced to his right "and saw another LCT, with the skipper standing at the tower, receive a blow from the dreaded German 88. After the smoke cleared both the skipper and tower had disappeared."

Miller worried about the trucks packed full of dynamite on his LCT taking a hit from an 88, but that turned out to be the wrong worry: the craft was rocked by a blast from an underwater mine. The ramp was jammed, a half-track up front badly damaged, many of the men on board wounded.

"The skipper decided to pull back to dump off the halftrack, transfer the wounded, and repair the ramp. As this was being done a Navy officer in a control craft pulled alongside and raised hell with the skipper, saying we should not be sitting there and to get our a— into the beach where we belonged."

The skipper took the LCT back in and managed to drop the ramp in eight feet of water about 100 meters offshore. He told the engineers, "Go!" Miller's platoon commander objected "in no uncertain terms, reminding the skipper his orders were to run us onto the beach, but the skipper refused to budge."

A jeep drove off. It went underwater but the waterproofing worked and it managed to drive to the shore. The trucks also made it, only to get shot up. The men came next. Miller went in over his

head. He dropped his rifle and demolition charges, jumped up from the Channel floor, got his head above water, and started swimming to the beach.

"It was a very tough swim. The weight of the soaked clothes, boots, gas mask, and steel helmet made it near impossible but I did reach hip-deep water finally and attempted to stand up. I was near exhaustion.

"At last I reached shore and was about fifteen feet up the beach when a big white flash enveloped me. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back looking up at the sky. I tried to get up but could not and reasoned, my God, my legs had been blown off since I had no sensation of movement in them and could not see them for the gas mask on my chest blocked the view. I wrestled around and finally got the gas mask off to one side. I saw my feet sticking up and reached my upper legs with my hands, and felt relieved that they were still there, but could not understand my immobility or lack of sensation."

Miller had been hit in the spinal cord. It was damaged beyond repair. Those first steps he took on Omaha Beach were the last steps he ever took.

A medic dragged him behind a half-track and gave him a shot of morphine. He passed out. When he came too he was at a first-aid station on the beach. He passed out again. When he regained consciousness, he was on an LST. He eventually made it to a hospital in England. Four months later, he was in a stateside hospital. A nurse was washing his hair. "To her and my own astonishment, sand was in the rinse water, sand from Omaha Beach."
²⁰

Sgt. Debbs Peters of the engineers was on an LCI. When the craft was about 300 meters offshore, a shell hit it in the stern, then another midships. "Those of us on deck were caught on fire with flaming fuel oil and we all just rolled overboard." Peters inflated his Mae West and managed to swim to an obstacle to take cover and catch his breath. Then he managed to stand and tried to run to the seawall, "but I was so loaded with water and sand that I could just stagger about." He crouched down behind a burning Sherman tank; almost immediately a shell hit the tank. (That was an experience many men had at Omaha; the urge for shelter sent them to knocked-out tanks, half-tracks, and other vehicles, but it was a mistake, because the tanks were targets for German artillery.)

Peters managed to reach the seawall. There he found Capt.

John McAllister and Maj. Robert Steward. "We agreed that we should get out of there if we expected to live and Major Steward told me to go ahead and find the mines." Peters had no equipment for such a search other than his trench knife, but he went ahead anyway.

"I jumped up on the road and went across, fell down into a ditch, up again, through a brier patch, then up against the bluff." He climbed carefully, probing for mines with his knife, leaving a white tape behind to mark the route. Near the top of the bluff he started taking machine-gun fire. Bullets ripped open his musette bag and one put a hole in his helmet. He tossed a grenade in the direction of the pillbox and the firing ceased. He had done his job, and more.
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Pvt. John Zmudzinski of the 5th ESB came in at 0730 on an LCI. "Our job was supposed to be to bring in our heavy equipment and cut the roads through the beach and bring the cranes and bulldozers in." Zmudzinski got ashore without getting hit. On the beach he saw some men freeze and just lie there. Beside them, he saw "a GI just lying there calmly taking his M-l apart and cleaning the sand out of it, he didn't seem to be excited at all."

At the seawall, Zmudzinski threw himself down beside his CO, Capt. Louis Drnovich, an Ail-American football player at the University of Southern California in 1939. "He was trying to get things moving. He sent me down the beach to see if one of our bulldozers got in. I came back and told him nothing that heavy was getting in at that time. There was a half-track part way up to the exit road and Captain Drnovich sent me there to see what was holding him up. I went and hid behind it; it was all shot up and under heavy fire. When I got back to report, Captain Drnovich was gone."

Drnovich had gone back to the beach and climbed into a knocked- out tank to see if he could get the cannon firing. As he was making the attempt, he was hit and killed.

At the seawall, Zmudzinski found that he was protected from machine-gun fire but taking mortar rounds. "It was a matter of Russian roulette. I didn't know whether to stay where I was or go down the beach. It was just a matter of chance, whoever got hit." He saw half-tracks on the beach getting hit "and then one whole LCT loaded with half-tracks catch fire and burn up."
²²

Pvt. Allen McMath was a combat engineer who came in on the third wave. He found swimming difficult but managed to reach

a pole sticking up in the water. "I held on to it for awhile to get my wind. I happened to look up. There on top of that pole was a Teller mine and that scared me so darned bad I took off and headed on in for shore."

A wave hit McMath and tumbled him. He was drifting parallel with the shore when a Higgins boat came straight at him. He tried to grab the front of the boat but there was nothing to hold onto, so he slid under and came up behind. "I still don't know how I missed that prop.* After that ordeal was over I was glad I hadn't caught onto the boat as it was hit soon after it passed over me."

McMath finally made shore. He picked up a rifle and cleaned the blood and sand off it. Then he took some dry socks off a dead soldier and changed his socks.

"I found some cigarettes that were dry and wouldn't have taken any amount of money for them." He moved up to the seawall. He could find no members of his company. Looking around, "there in a foxhole was a kid I had practically lived with most of my civilian life. What a surprise. I crawled into his hole and we had a little chat about how glad we were that we had both made it."
²³

Pvt. Al Littke was a combat engineer who came in with the first wave on an LCM. His initial task was to act as a pack horse; he was to carry demolition charges to the obstacles and drop them there. Then he was to continue to the beach and clear minefields. He draped his demolition charges over one shoulder, his M-l over another, and carried a suitcase with his mine detector in his hand. He jumped off the ramp into knee-deep water, took a few steps, and fell into a runnel.

"I let go of my suitcase and I hit bottom. I pushed myself off; it was a good thing I had my life preserver on. I did a little dog paddle-breast stroke until my knees hit solid ground, then I got up and started to walk in."

When he reached the beach, Littke dropped his demolition charges beside an obstacle, then went on to the seawall. "It was pretty crowded there." Nevertheless, he kept his mind on his job. He fired a clip from his M-l toward the bluff, reloaded, crossed the seawall, and got to the base of the bluff. When he started to move up, "about a foot in front of me little puffs of dirt flew up, about a dozen." He dug a foxhole and waited "for how long I do not know."