Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (48 page)

Both Kirk and Bradley knew the old military adage “Never reinforce failure,” and Bradley in particular wondered if instead of sending more soldiers to be slaughtered on Omaha, he and Kirk should direct ensuing waves to one of the other beaches where there was measurable progress. Of course,
such a momentous decision would utterly shatter the carefully scripted invasion plan, and in any case it would be difficult to do, since successive waves of landing craft, only ten or fifteen minutes apart, were already heading shoreward, and recalling them now would only introduce more chaos. Nevertheless, Kirk alerted Moon that some of the Omaha force might be shifted over to Utah, and Moon told his senior beach officer, Captain James Arnold, that “the show on Omaha didn’t go quite according to plan” and that they might have to “take on a little extra burden.” To prepare for that, Moon ordered the LSTs of Force U to move to within four miles of the beach.
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On Jimmy Hall’s flagship, USS
Ancon
, a mile or two inshore of the
Augusta
, both Gerow and Huebner were finding their enforced idleness all but intolerable. The few reports from Omaha Beach came in with agonizing slowness. This was largely due to the fact that three-quarters of the radios belonging to the landing teams had been smashed or water-soaked in the initial landings. Then, too, the radiomen themselves were either dead, wounded, or too busy trying to stay alive to submit regular reports. Desperate for information, Gerow sent his assistant chief of staff, Colonel Benjamin Talley, in a DUKW to investigate. Talley maneuvered back and forth across the beachfront, closing to only five hundred yards off the beach, and reported to Gerow that things were very bad indeed. He confirmed that the men ashore were pinned down by heavy fire from the high ground, and that the beachfront was so congested that the LCTs were milling around like “a herd of cattle.”
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Gerow went up onto the bridge of the
Ancon
and confronted Hall in what the latter described as “a state of alarm.” Wasn’t there something more that could be done? Gerow asked. Hall, the big, lantern-jawed, three-sport athlete who had felt no qualms in lecturing both Savvy Cooke and Freddy Guingand, was unperturbed, or at least he projected a demeanor of unconcern. He explained that the attack was still developing, and even if it had temporarily stalled, the way to fix it was simply to continue with the landings. He assured Gerow that it was all going to work out. Perhaps in an effort to get him off the bridge, Hall told Gerow that he could probably get a better understanding of what was happening ashore by reading the incoming message traffic down in the operations room.
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Navy Captain Lorenzo Sabin, who witnessed their conversation, offered the unsolicited suggestion that perhaps Hall could employ the two remaining rocket-firing LCTs that had been held in reserve. Gerow seized on that idea and urged Hall to do it, but Hall shook his head. The slapdash aiming protocols on the LCT(R)s would put too many Allied soldiers at risk, he said, and was unlikely to do much good anyway. The way to change the tide of battle, Hall repeated, was to continue landing more men and equipment. He assured both Gerow and Sabin that “the enemy was not going to [be able to] stop the landings” and that eventual victory was “only a matter of time.” Sabin thought that “everyone except Admiral Hall seemed to be tense, worried, and disturbed.” For his part, Gerow could not simply wait and do nothing, and he decided to commit the 115th Combat Infantry Team ahead of schedule. While that contributed to the growing American power ashore, it also added to the confusion and congestion on the beach.
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General Huebner, the strict, no-nonsense commander of the 1st Division, which was known as the “Big Red One,” was also on board the
Ancon
, and he was worried, too; after all, those were his men being slaughtered on the beach. Huebner was busy doing what Hall had suggested to Gerow: reading the battle reports in the operations room as they came off the teletype machine on thin strips of paper, much like the tape from a stock ticker. Huebner spread the strips of paper out on a table and read them eagerly. By eight-thirty he concluded that the situation on the Omaha beaches was dire, and he sent his chief of staff, Colonel Stanhope Mason, up to the bridge to express his concern. Once again, Hall adopted a patient, confident demeanor. Mason listened, but he was not the one who needed convincing, and he urged Hall to go down and talk to Huebner. Perhaps in an effort to communicate the seriousness of the moment, Mason hinted that Huebner was considering a withdrawal.

Hall had no intention of leaving the bridge, nor did he have any notion of sanctioning a withdrawal. He reminded Mason that until Huebner established his headquarters ashore, the general did not have the authority to consider a withdrawal, much less order one. Only the naval commander could do that, and Hall had no intention of doing so. “I don’t want to leave the bridge because there’s so much that I can see and do up
here that I can’t do down there,” he told Mason. If General Huebner wanted to talk to him, Hall said, Mason should “go down and bring General Huebner up here.” When Huebner arrived, Hall asserted again that the situation, precarious as it was, was not dire, and he expressed his belief that, in time, the weight of Allied men and matériel would shift the balance of power on the invasion beaches. Hall insisted later that “there was never a time that I had any apprehension that we would not succeed.” Meanwhile, he told Huebner in no uncertain terms: “I’m in command, and I’m not worried.”
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Hall may not have been worried, but fifty miles to the east on the headquarters command ship HMS
Largs
, Ramsay was. The
Largs
was a former French vessel that had been docked in Gibraltar when France fell back in 1940. Taken into the Royal Navy, she had been renamed in honor of Mountbatten’s Scottish estate. Redesigned with advanced communications equipment to serve as a command ship, she had so many antennae and radio wires strung about her that at least one member of the crew thought she looked “like a Monday morning wash line.” It was thanks to all that electronic equipment that Ramsay could monitor all five beaches at once, and on June 6 it was the news from Omaha Beach that alarmed him. Leaving Rear Admiral Talbot to supervise the landings on Sword Beach, Ramsay quit the
Largs
and boarded a British destroyer that carried him over to the American sector, where he summoned Kirk on board.
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Kirk found Ramsay visibly agitated, and, much as Hall had done with Gerow and Huebner, he offered assurances. “We’ll straighten it out,” Kirk told Ramsay, “don’t worry.” In fact, Kirk was much less confident than his words suggested, but he was loath to confess such a thing to a British admiral with whom he had recently exchanged heated words. So he assumed a confident air and assured Ramsay that it was all going to work out. Ramsay was not entirely reassured. He blamed the mess on the “really bad” state of American communications—the product of all those smashed radios. Still, having made his point by coming over to see Kirk, there was little more that he could do. Because they were on a Royal Navy ship, where such things were permitted, the two men indulged in a quick glass of whiskey, then each returned to his post.
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There was no disguising the seriousness of the moment. Despite Hall’s repeated assertions of confidence, the situation ashore was genuinely precarious. Omar Bradley confessed later that he was contemplating “evacuating the beachhead and directing the follow up troops to Utah Beach or the British beaches.” Horrified by the prospect of failure, he asked Kirk if there wasn’t something more the Navy could do to break the bloody stalemate on Omaha Beach.
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In fact, there was.

S
EVERAL OF THE AMERICAN DESTROYERS
that had participated in the early-morning bombardment had pulled off the invasion beaches prior to H-Hour. They did so partly to make room for the landing craft and partly to take up screening positions to seaward. Nevertheless, the destroyer skippers could see for themselves that the situation on Omaha Beach was deteriorating, and even without orders, some of them returned to the beachfront to open fire on the high ground behind the beach. Now, just past eight-thirty, Hall recalled the rest of them, ordering them to “maintain as heavy a volume of fire on beach target[s] as possible.” In support of that, Admiral Bryant radioed a general message from the USS
Texas
: “Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can’t have any more of that! We must stop it!”
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The destroyer captains responded with enthusiasm—indeed, almost too much enthusiasm. Most of the ships were American
Gleaves
-class destroyers that drew more than thirteen feet of water, and the gradual slope of Omaha
Beach made close-in fire support extremely hazardous.
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It was self-evident that if a destroyer grounded in the shallows, the German gunners could blast it to pieces at their leisure. Nevertheless, they now came speeding shoreward at twenty knots or more into water that was both shallow and outside the swept channels. One sailor on an LCT approaching the beach was shocked to see “a destroyer ahead of us with heavy smoke pouring from its stack.” To him, the ship appeared to be out of control and headed directly for the beach.
My God
, he thought,
they’re going to run aground and be disabled right in front of the German artillery
. At the last minute, the destroyer made a sudden hard left, turned its starboard side parallel to the beach, and began “blazing away with every gun it had, point blank at the defensive positions.” The sailor was thrilled to see “puffs of smoke and mounds of dirt” flying “everywhere on the hillside as the destroyer passed swiftly by.”
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More than a dozen Allied destroyers responded to the call that morning, nine of them from Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 18, under the command of U.S. Navy Captain Harry Sanders, who, like King’s planning officer, Charles Cooke, had earned the nickname “Savvy” for his academic brilliance at the Naval Academy. Two of Sanders’s destroyers, USS
Satterlee
(DD-626) and USS
Thompson
(DD-627), along with HMS
Talybont
, supported the U.S. Army Rangers assigned to assault the nearly vertical cliff at Pointe du Hoc, west of Omaha Beach. Two more,
Carmick
(DD-493) and
McCook
(DD-496), joined later by the USS
Harding
(DD-625), took up positions near the center of Omaha Beach, off St. Laurent-sur-Mer, and five others, led by the squadron flagship
Frankford
(DD-497) with Sanders on board, steamed for the eastern end of the beach near Colleville-sur-Mer. Most of them took up positions only eight hundred to a thousand yards off the beach, so close that, as a witness reported, “Germans were hitting them with rifle bullets.” Though gradients varied across the beachfront, at that distance the water depth was only about twelve to eighteen feet. Sanders later speculated that there were moments when the
Frankford
had only a few inches of water under her keel, and Kirk later asserted that “they had their bows against the bottom.” Even if that was not literally true, it suggested the willingness of the destroyer captains to put their ships at risk in an obvious emergency. These dozen or so destroyers constituted only a tiny fraction of the more than five thousand ships that participated in the invasion, but over the ensuing ninety minutes, they turned the tide of battle on Omaha Beach.
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O
MAHA
B
EACH
, 9:00
A.M
., J
UNE
6, 1944

Several destroyers played a key role in what was perhaps the most daunting assignment of the entire invasion: the assault by 225 U.S. Army Rangers under Lieutenant Colonel James A. Rudder on Pointe du Hoc. Atop this promontory west of Omaha Beach, the Germans were believed to have placed several heavy guns that could reach both American beaches. To eliminate this threat, the Rangers would have to land on a narrow rocky beach at the base of the cliff, then scale the nearly vertical cliff with ropes and ladders. They boarded ten Royal Navy landing craft before dawn, but like almost every other vessel that morning, the boats were swept well to the left of their intended landing site by the current, and the coxswains initially aimed their boats not at Pointe du Hoc but Pointe de la Percée, slightly west of Vierville. Recognizing their error at about six-thirty, just as the first landings on Omaha and Utah Beach were taking place, the coxswains sought guidance and direction from one of the tiny (fifty-six-foot) landing control craft off Omaha Beach.

U.S. Navy Lieutenant William Steel commanded the control craft off Charlie Beach that morning, and he was fully engaged in trying to establish order amid the emerging chaos onshore when the group of landing craft carrying Rudder’s men closed on his position. One of the boats eased up to the starboard side of Steel’s little vessel, and a Royal Navy officer stood up with a megaphone in his hand. “I say,” he called out, “can you tell me the way to Pointe du Hoc?” Steel was astonished; the question was delivered with the kind of casual diffidence a tourist might employ “standing on a street in New York City saying, ‘How do you get to Times Square?’” Steel recovered quickly and, consulting the chart, gave the officer a bearing to Pointe du Hoc. The British officer took up the megaphone again: “Thank you very much,” he called out, and with a wave, off they went.
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