D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (63 page)

* In 1991, one of my students remarked, "World War II? Isn't that the one they fought in black and white?"

Capa finally made it to the seawall, where he threw himself to the ground. "I found myself nose to nose with a lieutenant from our last night's poker game. He asked me if I knew what he saw. I told him no and that I didn't think he could see much beyond my head. Til tell you what I see. I see my ma on the front porch, waving my insurance policy.' "

Mortars were landing all around. Capa kept shooting, inserting new rolls of film and shooting some more. He ran low on film. Turning to the beach, he saw an LCI.

"I did not think and I didn't decide it. I just stood up and ran toward the boat." Holding his cameras high above his head, he waded out to the LCI. "I knew that I was running away. I tried to turn but couldn't face the beach and told myself, 'I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.' "

Coast Guardsman Charles Jarreau was on the LCI, picking up wounded men to take back to a hospital ship. He spotted Capa: "Poor fellow, he was there in the water, holding his cameras up to try to keep them dry, trying to catch his breath." Capa called out for help; the skipper told him to come aboard. "He was really grateful to get out. He came aboard. He took pictures on our ship, which appeared in
Life
magazine."
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Capa got back to Portsmouth later that day, then went by train to the developing studios in London. He turned in his film for development. The darkroom assistant was so eager to see the photos that he turned on too much heat while drying the negatives. The emulsions melted and ran down. Of the 106 pictures Capa had taken, only eight were salvaged and they were blurry.

Capa was understandably upset until he realized that the gray, murky photos of men hiding behind beach obstacles or coming ashore from Higgins boats caught the chaos and fear on Omaha Beach exactly. Thanks in part to the overeager developer, Capa had taken some of the most famous photographs of D-Day.
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Hollywood director and producer John Ford was head of a photographic unit for the Office of Strategic Services. On D-Day, he had a team of Coast Guard cameramen working for him. They crossed the Channel on destroyer USS
Plunket,
carrying $1 million worth of camera gear. Twenty years later, Ford talked about his experiences to writer Pete Martin for the
American Legion Magazine.
Ford had brought with him to Omaha Beach his wonderful director's eye; his oral history needs to be quoted at some length.

"When we started," Ford told Martin, "we were the last ship out in our huge convoy. . . . Suddenly our flotilla was switched about . . . which put out
Plunket
in the lead. I am told I expressed some surprise at leading the invasion with my cameras."

Plunket
dropped anchor at 0600 off Omaha Beach. "Things began to happen fast."

Ford saw the first wave go in. "They didn't have a chance.

"Neither did the LCMs bringing in bulldozers and more tanks. They really caught hell. Later I heard that only three bulldozers out of 30 or 40 made it. I also remember seeing landing craft swing out of control and smash against obstacles where they touched off a mine and blew sky high. On a later day, much later, I discovered that it was this very week that the first U.S. shipyards were getting ready to lay off hundreds of men as war-time orders slackened."

The objective of Ford's team was "simple, just take movies of everything on Omaha Beach. Simple, but not easy." Ford offloaded onto a DUKW. Going in, "I remember watching one colored man in a DUKW loaded with supplies. He dropped them on the beach, unloaded, went back for more. I watched, fascinated. Shells landed around him. The Germans were really after him. He avoided every obstacle and just kept going back and forth, back and forth, completely calm. I thought,
By God, if anybody deserves a medal that man does.
I wanted to photograph him, but I was in a relatively safe place at the time so I figured,
The hell with it.
I was willing to admit he was braver than I was."

The infantry also made a vivid impression on Ford: "The discipline and training of those boys who came ashore in the later waves of landing craft, throwing up and groaning with nausea all the way into the beach, was amazing. It showed. They made no mad rush. They quietly took their places and kept moving steadily forward."

When Ford hit the beach, he ran forward and began directing his photographers to selected spots (mainly behind beach obstacles). They began setting up and shooting. "I wouldn't let them stand up. I made them lie behind cover to do their photographing. [Nevertheless] I lost some men. To my mind, those seasick kids were heroes. ... I take my hat off to my Coast Guard kids. They were impressive. They went in first, not to fight, but to photograph.

"My memories of D-Day come in disconnected takes like unassembled shots to be spliced together afterward in a film.

"I was reminded of that line in 'The Red Badge of Courage' about how the soldiers were always busy, always deeply absorbed in their individual combats.

"My staff and I had the job of 'seeing' the whole invasion for the world, but all any one of us saw was his own little area. ... In action, I didn't tell my boys where to aim their cameras. They took whatever they could. . . . There was no panic or running around."

The film went back to London, where it was processed. Most of it was in Kodachrome, which was transferred to black-and-white for release in the newsreels in movie theaters. "My cutting unit. . . worked 24-hour watches, picking out the best part of the film that had been shot. I'm sure it was the biggest cutting job of all time. They worked four-hour shifts—on four, off four. . . . Very little was released to the public then [because] apparently the Government was afraid to show so many American casualties on the screen."
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*

* Not until 1945 did the government release movie or still photos of dead American soldiers. In his 1964 interview with the
American Legion Magazine,
Ford said, "All of it [the D-Day film] still exists today in color in storage in Anacostia near Washington, D.C." Where it was thirty years later the Eisenhower Center has been unable to discover.

21

"WILL YOU TELL ME HOW WE DID THIS?"

The 2nd Ranger Battalion on D-Day Morning

On the afternoon of June 5, Lt. Col. James Earl Rudder, CO of the Ranger Force (2nd and 5th Ranger battalions), paid a visit to companies A, B, and C of the 2nd Battalion on their transport, the
Prince Charles.
He was going to lead companies D, E, and F on an assault at Pointe-du-Hoc, a sheer cliff some forty meters high about seven kilometers west of the right flank of Omaha Beach. A, B, and C were going in at the Charlie sector of Omaha, to the immediate right of Company A of the 116th Regiment.*

Rudder, a 1932 graduate of Texas A&M, where he received a commission in the reserves, had been a college football coach and teacher before going on active duty in 1941. He knew how to give inspirational talks before going into action. On this occasion, he told companies A, B, and C, "Boys, you are going on the beach as the first rangers in this battalion to set foot on French soil. But don't worry about being alone. When D, E, and F take care of Pointe-du-Hoc, we will come down and give you a hand with your objectives. Good luck and may God be with you."
¹

In the event, almost none of this worked out, not for A, B, and C or for D, E, and F. Most of the game plan had to be aban-

* The ranger companies' strength was seventy men each, less than half the size of regular infantry assault companies.

doned even before the action began. C Company was alone when it landed, and virtually alone through the day. D, E, and F companies came in at the wrong time from the wrong direction at Pointe-du-Hoc. Most of the special equipment for scaling the cliff never made it to the shore; much of what did failed to work. When the companies nevertheless made it to the top, they found that their objective, five 155mm cannon capable of dominating both Utah and Omaha beaches, were not in the casemates. Apparently what the rangers had accomplished in one of the most famous and heroic actions of D-Day had gone for naught and the skills and sacrifices of one of the most elite and highly trained forces in the Allied army had been wasted. But in fact what the rangers accomplished at Omaha and at Pointe-du-Hoc was critical to the ultimate success at both American beaches.

Ten years after the event, Colonel Rudder visited the site with his fourteen-year-old son and
Collier's
reporter W. C. Heinz. Looking up at the cliff at Pointe-du-Hoc, he asked, "Will you tell me how we did this? Anybody would be a fool to try this. It was crazy then, and it's crazy now."
²

The plan was for Company C to land on the far right flank of Omaha Beach and follow Company A of the 116th Regiment up the Vierville draw, pass through the village, turn right, and clear out the area between the beach and the coastal road (about a kilometer inland) running from Vierville to Pointe-du-Hoc. In that area the Germans had some twenty pillboxes, bunkers, Tobrucks, and open gun emplacements, plus a radar station. The schedule called for Company C to accomplish its mission in two hours, that is, by 0830. Companies A and B would land at 0730 at Pointe-du-Hoc, if given a signal that Rudder needed them there for reinforcement: if no signal was received (presumably meaning that Rudder's force had failed), they would land at the mouth of the Vierville draw, from which spot they would move to the high ground, turn right, and proceed west on the coastal road to attack Pointe-du-Hoc from the land side.

For ranger companies A, B, and C, in short, everything depended on Company A of the 116th Regiment securing the Vierville draw and the village itself in the initial moments of the assault. But Company A of the 116th was wiped out at the beach. Company C of the rangers came in a few minutes later, at 0645, in an isolated position, at the far western edge of Omaha, just beyond

the Vierville draw; the closest American troops were more than two kilometers to the east at Dog Red.

Going in on the heels of the naval bombardment, before the Germans opened fire, the rangers were in a cocky mood. "It's going to be a cinch," one of them said. "I don't think they know we're coming." Sgt. Donald Scribner recalled the men in his boat singing "Happy Anniversary" to Sgt. Walter Geldon—June 6, 1944, was Geldon's third wedding anniversary.
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They cheered when the LCT(R)s launched their rockets, only to groan when they saw the rockets fall short and harmlessly in the water. Their dismay increased as they realized, in the words of Lt. Gerald Heaney, "there was no one on the beach in front of us and we were going to touch down in a sector that had not been invaded by other American soldiers."

When Heaney's LCA hit a sandbar, the British coxswain called out a cheery "This is as far as I go, Yanks" and lowered the ramp. German machine-gun fire ripped across the boat. The first man out was immediately hit. Heaney saw he had no chance if he went down the ramp, so he jumped over the side.

"All around me men were being killed and wounded. I ran as hard as I could toward shore, and I remember being so exhausted when I reached the shore that it was all I could do to make it to the cliff."
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The CO of C Company, Capt. Ralph Goranson, recalled, "Going across the beach was just like a dream with all the movement of the body and mind just automatic motion." He made it to the shelter at the base of the cliff. To Sgt. Marvin Lutz, crossing the beach was "like a horrible nightmare." Nevertheless, like his CO, he moved automatically—the payoff from the training maneuvers.
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The cliff was sheer, about thirty meters high, just to the west of the Vierville draw. At its base men were out of sight of German machine gunners but still vulnerable to mortar fire and to grenades dropped over the edge by Germans on top. They were concussion grenades, universally called "potato mashers" by the GIs because of their shape. As they came down, Pvt. Michael Gargas called out, "Watch out fellows! Here comes another mashed potato!"
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Sergeant Scribner's boat was hit three times by artillery fire. The first shell tore the ramp completely off the boat, killing the men in front and covering the others with blood. The second hit the port side. Scribner started to climb over the rear starboard side

when he noticed a 60mm mortar lying on the bottom of the craft. He stopped to pick it up when the third shell tore out the starboard side. Somehow he made it into the water.

"I was carrying a radio, my rifle, my grenades, my extra ammunition, my bedroll, all my gear, and I started sinking in the Channel. I didn't think I was ever going to stop going down."

Scribner made it to the shore—he cannot recall how—and tried to run across the beach. "I remember dropping three different times. Each time I did, machine guns burst in front of my face in the sand. I didn't stop because I knew what was coming; I dropped because I was so tired." When he made it to the base of the cliff, "I looked back, and I saw Walter Geldon lying out on the beach with his hand raised up asking for help. Walter never made it. He died on his third wedding anniversary."
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Lt. Sidney Salomon, leading 2nd Platoon of C Company, was first off his boat. He went to the right into chest-deep water as automatic weapons and rifle fire sprayed the debarking rangers. The second man off, Sgt. Oliver Reed, was hit. Salomon reached over and pulled him from under the ramp just as the craft surged forward on a wave. He told Reed to make it the best he could and started wading toward the shore. "By this time, the Germans had zeroed in on the ramp. Ranger after ranger was hit by small-arms fire as they jumped into the water, and in addition mortar shells landed around the craft, making geysers of water."