D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (67 page)

That was the view from above. The view from offshore was similar. The half-tracks, jeeps, and trucks that had survived the difficulties of getting close enough and unloading under artillery fire found themselves on a narrowing strip of sand without any open exits through the impassable shingle embankment. Sailors could see the vehicles immobilized by engine trouble or artillery hits. Those capable of movement were immobilized by the hopeless traffic jam. The vehicles were sitting targets for German artillery and mortar fire.

But even as the landings ceased, individuals and groups were moving off the beach and up the bluff between the Vierville and Les Moulins exits. Others began to follow. They had the support of the destroyers and of the surviving tanks on the beach, but mainly they were on their own.

As always in war, the infantry (in this case including engineers, Coast Guard, artillery observers, Seabees, and other specialists acting as ad hoc infantry) got stuck with war at its cutting edge, where it is at its most shocking, dangerous, and decisive. The most extreme experience a human being can go through is being a combat infantryman, and nowhere in World War II was the combat more extreme than at Omaha in the early morning hours of June 6.

The 116th Regiment and the 5th Ranger Battalion (plus two companies from the 2nd Rangers) experienced war at its most horrible, demanding, and challenging. They were on the right (western) half of the beach. The 116th was a Virginia National Guard outfit, part of an ordinary infantry division. The 5th Ranger Battalion was an elite, all-volunteer force. How they responded to this crisis, with the fate of Omaha Beach and perhaps the invasion as a whole at stake, was testimony to the marvelous job General Marshall and all those old Regular Army officers and noncoms had done

in turning these children of the Depression into first-class fighting men. Pvt. Felix Branham remarked at the end of his oral history, "I've heard people say we were lucky. It wasn't luck. When we landed on Omaha Beach, we were well trained, we had good leaders, and the Lord God Almighty was with us, and that's all I can say."

Branham also observed, "Each one of us had our own little battlefield. It was maybe forty-fifty yards wide. You might talk to a guy that pulled up right beside of me, within fifty feet of me, and he got an entirely different picture of D-Day."
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That was certainly the case on the right flank (and the left flank as well, as will be seen) at Omaha. Going up the bluff was often a lonely experience. Capt. Robert Walker went a third of the way up before he found a dead soldier from the 116th and was able to arm himself with an M-l and protect himself with a helmet.

"At this point I could not see anyone from the 116th and I realized that I was alone and completely on my own." Walker decided to go to the top and proceed to the right, to the regimental assembly point at Vierville. "I passed many dead bodies, all facing forward." Near the top, he heard groans nearby. He investigated; it was a German soldier with a bad wound in his groin.

The German cried out for
wasser.
Walker replied, in German, that his canteen was empty. The German told Walker there was
ein born
(a spring), just over there. Sure enough, Walker found a delightful spring-fed pool with clear water. He filled his canteen and brought water to his enemy. Before continuing his own odys-sey, looking for Germans to kill, Walker returned to the spring, refilled his canteen, went back to the wounded enemy soldier, and filled his canteen cup.

The wounded German was the only soldier from either side Walker saw on his climb up the bluff.
³
His isolation was unusual, possibly unique. Although few men saw any Germans until they got to the top of the bluff, most came up with buddies, in small groups. As soon as they got over the seawall and the flat and began to climb, they discovered they were in the safest place on Omaha Beach. The defilade and smoke from grass fires provided some coverage. Because they were between exits, they were in an area not so heavily defended as the draws. The German trenches were dug at angles to shoot flanking fire at the beach, not directly downward. There were folds and irregularities in the bluff to use to advantage.

Fire support for the advancing Americans, other than their own hand-held weapons, came from tanks and destroyers. The tanks were leading a hard life. They were caught on the sand between high water and the embankment, unable to get over the shingle to the beach flat, open targets for enemy guns. Still, they kept firing. One tank maintained its fire until the rising tide drowned out its cannon.

The 741st Tank Battalion report on D-Day noted: "The tanks continued to fire on targets of opportunity during the infiltration of the infantry, which was moving directly forward, making an assault on the bluff behind the beach. Due to the fact that exit Easy 3, which was to have been used as an exit from the beach by both infantry and tanks, was still in enemy hands and commanded by several artillery pieces, consisting mostly of 88mm guns, the infantry was forced to make their direct approach under the protecting fire of tank weapons."
⁴

Maj. Sidney Bingham, CO of the 2nd Battalion, 116th, said that the tanks "saved the day. They shot the hell out of the Germans, and got the hell shot out of them."
⁵

The same was true of the destroyers. Between them, the tankers and the sailors knocked out pillboxes as targets of opportunity and thus made it possible for the infantry to get up the bluff. But it was the infantry who had to do it.

Someone had to set an example to get the men started. That someone could be a general officer, a colonel, a major, a company commander, a platoon leader, or a squad leader. Medic Cecil Breeden remembered, "When I got to about where the 29th Memorial now stands, Colonel Canham, Colonel [John] Metcalfe, and some other officers had set up a command post. Canham was shot through the hand. I fixed it. A man came along looking for a noncom, saying there was a sniper up there. Metcalfe said that he wasn't a noncom but would he do? They both left going up the hill, bearing to the left."
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*

General Cota was an inspiration. After leading a group to the base of the bluff and almost getting blown away by a barrage of mortar shells, he led a column of men up the bluff. They moved

* Metcalfe commanded the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry. "I first saw him in Vierville, late on D-Day," Capt. John Raaen commented. "I was extremely impressed with his manner, his attitude, his knowledge. He was KIA shortly after D-Day." (Maj. Gen. John Raaen to author, March 12, 1993.)

slowly, following in Cota's footsteps, for fear of mines. Those mines imposed considerable delay in every sector. No one charged up the bluff; the Americans moved up cautiously, in single file.

Cota's group finally reached the top of the bluff above Hamel-au-Pretre (a small group of beach villas blasted away by now), about midway between Vierville and St.-Laurent. Germans in trenches and behind hedgerows immediately brought Cota's force under crossed interlocking bands of machine-gun fire. Cota arranged the men into ad hoc fire and maneuver teams. He had one team lay down a steady stream of covering fire against the German positions and led others in a series of short rushes across the open fields. Dumbfounded by such aggressiveness, the Germans fled. This may have been the first effective American infantry attack in the campaign in northwest Europe.
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Cota came upon the dirt road that ran parallel to the beach. He turned right, toward Vierville. There was very little fire. In Vierville, the Americans met their first French civilians. There was no celebration, hardly an exchange of greetings; mostly, the Frenchmen and Americans stared at each other as the Americans moved through the village. On the west side of Vierville, Cota sent some rangers who had joined him in the direction of Pointe-du-Hoc. They encountered stiff resistance. When their attack bogged down, Cota hastened to the front of the column and assisted the platoon leader in the disposition of his forces.

C Company of the 116th, one of the few to fight intact on D-Day, came into Vierville. The men of the company remembered Cota walking down the narrow main street, twirling a pistol on his index finger like an Old West gunfighter. "Where the hell have you been, boys?" he asked.
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Colonel Canham came up. Cota sent him east, toward St.-Laurent, with orders to help clear the bluff so that others could climb up it. Then Cota, accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant Shea, and four riflemen, prepared to start down the Vierville draw, still held by the Germans.
Texas
was pounding away with her 14-inch guns at the cement roadblock at the mouth of the draw. Shea recalled that "the concussion from the bursts of these guns seemed to make the pavement of the street in Vierville actually rise beneath our feet in a bucking sensation." As Cota set off, Shea remarked that he hoped the firing would lift. Cota said he hoped not, as it would force the Germans to keep their heads down.

But the firing lifted, and Germans in a fortification on the

east side of the draw began firing at Cota's little group. The riflemen responded. Five Germans, dazed from the bombardment, gave up. Cota ordered them to lead the way through the minefields down the draw. The group made it to the beach.

Ten days later, Lieutenant Shea wrote a report of Cota's actions after returning to the beach: "General Cota, though under constant sniper and machine-gun fire from the high ground beyond the beach, progressed eastward along the beach, herding and reorganizing tank units, engineer demolition units, supplies of demolitions, bulldozers, and in general directing units suffering from the initial confusion of landing under fire so that their efforts could be effectively bent toward the establishment of the beachhead."
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Despite the shelling from
Texas,
the concrete wall in front of the draw still blocked the movement of vehicles inland. "Can you blow up that antitank wall at the exit?" Cota asked an engineer colonel. It was fourteen feet thick at the base, twelve feet high, and six feet thick at the top.

"We can, sir, just as soon as the infantry clean out those pillboxes around there," the colonel replied.

"We just came down through there," declared Cota. "There's nothing to speak of there. Get to it!"

But the engineers did not have any TNT. Cota saw a bulldozer down the beach, piled high with explosives. He turned to a group of soldiers huddled at the seawall. "Who drives this thing?" he demanded. No answer. "Well, can anyone drive the damn thing?" Still no answer.

"They need TNT down at the exit," Cota said. "I just came through there from the rear. Nothing but a few riflemen on the cliff, and they're being cleaned up. Hasn't anyone got guts enough to drive it down?" A soldier stepped forward. "That's the stuff!" Cota called out.
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The engineers blew the wall, but by no means did that open the draw. Engineers needed more bulldozers to clear an approach from the beach, to clear the rubble from the wall, to clear the mines, and to fill in the antitank ditch. They got to work.

Cota was accosted by a sailor whose LCT had been destroyed. Brandishing a rifle, he asked, "How in hell do you work one of these? This is just the goddamn thing that I wanted to avoid by joining the Navy—fighting like a goddamn foot soldier." And he started working his way up the bluff.''

Many men moved out on their own. Lt. Henry Seitzler was one of them. Seitzler was a forward observer for the Ninth Air

Force. With no radio, he had no specific assignment. He picked up a rifle and some grenades and became an infantryman. "I remember," he said in his oral history, and then paused. He apologized: "Pardon me if I stop every once in awhile. These things are so very real.

"Even after all these years I can see it again in my mind, just like it was happening right now. I went to the seawall and stuck my head up between machine-gun bursts to see what was going on. I looked right in the eyes of a young American. He was dead. His eyes were wide open. He was blond, crew-cut. I thought about his mother."

Looking back down the beach, Seitzler noticed that "Jerry would deliberately shoot the medics. I think that the hottest place in hell is reserved for the man that would do that." Turning back to face the bluff, Seitzler crossed the seawall and began to make his way to high ground.
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After dragging some wounded GIs off the beach, Pvt. Harry Parley found an opening in the barbed wire. "A few men had already gone through. I could see them picking their way up the slope. As I started up, I saw the white tape marking a safe path through the mines, and I also saw the price paid to mark that path. A couple of GIs had been blown to death and another was being attended to by a medic. As I passed, I could see that both his legs were gone and tourniquets were being applied. In the weeks that followed, I was to see much worse, but that particular memory remains with me still."

As Parley neared the top, a destroyer commenced firing at a pillbox on the crest. "I remember foolishly standing about forty feet below and watching in amazement the power and accuracy of the Navy fire landing just above me. It was like sitting in the very first row of a movie looking up at the screen."

Parley traded his BAR for an M-l with another GI. "He wanted more firepower and I wanted less weight to carry. Finally reaching the top, I found an area entirely devoid of vegetation, marked by shell craters and covered by a maze of trenches, dugouts, and firing positions used by the Germans earlier in the morn-ing."

Parley also saw his first enemy soldiers, two prisoners, hands on head, being passed back down the slope. They were Asians. (In general, the
Ost
soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms tended to surrender as soon as GIs got near them. They were mainly in the trenches.