The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (13 page)

When they weren’t writing letters and watching movies at camp D-1, the Bedford boys relieved their tension through physical exercise and games of baseball and tackle football. Frank Draper Jr. and Elmere Wright threw curve balls at Hal Baumgarten, who had been a first-rate catcher at college. “Whenever we had spare time, I put a glove on and they pitched to me,” Baumgarten said. Wright was fast. I had to put a double sponge in the glove. He was big too, about six foot three, and he had a large, prominent nose like the guy in the cartoon—Dick Tracy.”
²⁴

John Barnes recalled playing a game organized by Jack Powers, the ex- Ranger, that was meant to instill confidence in one other. “We were to put our trust in our buddies by leaping upon their open arms and bounce down the line. When my turn came, I was so light that I flew in one bounce over the line and landed straight on my head. I was knocked out.”
²⁵

A few days after arriving in the containment camp, section Sergeant Allen Huddleston, now in charge of two squads of machine gunners, practiced unarmed combat with another Bedford boy, Sergeant Robert Goode, a jeep driver in Company A. “The aim was for the other guy to take you down without using a weapon. We both went down and fell badly, breaking my ankle,” Huddleston said.
²⁶
He would sit out the invasion.

Close by the famous
Life
photographer, Robert Capa, entered a similar containment camp, or “sausage.” Capa had volunteered to land in the first wave with the 1st Division’s 16th Infantry. Before long, he recalled, “we were all suffering from the strange sickness known as ‘amphibia.’ Being amphibious troops had only one meaning for us: we would be unhappy in the water before we could be unhappy on the shore. . . . There were different degrees of ‘amphibia’ and those who were scheduled to be the first to reach the beach had it worst.”
²⁷

“Amphibia” affected everyone differently. Some men became serene, having seemingly made their peace with fate. Others regressed, letting off steam as if they were at high school again. One incident caused a few minutes of panic throughout the 116th Infantry’s 1st Battalion. Someone threw a clip of M-1 .30-caliber bullets into a burning barrel. Bedford boys ran for cover as the bullets exploded, ricocheting in all directions. Fortunately, no one was injured, but many men’s nerves were set on edge.

There were many last-minute changes to boat teams. “On May 20, sixteen men were blown up in training in Company B of the 116th Infantry . . . , I was transferred from Company A to Company B to bring them up to strength,” recalled Hal Baumgarten.
²⁸
John Barnes was surprised one morning when Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing came into his tent. Gearing asked Barnes to join his boat team. He needed an assistant to his flamethrower. “Do you have any objections to using this weapon?” Gearing asked. Barnes said he’d give it a go. In a nearby field, he managed to light the fuel spitting from the flamethrower and pointed the jet in the direction of some haystacks. They were quickly ablaze. He then met the other members of his new boat team.
²⁹
They included Bedford boys Harold Wilkes, Charles Fizer, Clyde Powers, and Sergeant Roy Stevens, Gearing’s second in command.

Bob Slaughter had spent several months training with British commandos in the Scottish Highlands. Conditions in the “sausages” were a pleasant surprise. “We ate the best food,” he recalled. “[It was] easy living: go to the range and fire all the ammunition you wanted to, play football, cards, movies—good times. The Red Cross women were there, too. For breakfast you could tell them how you wanted your bacon, and of course they had powdered eggs, and flapjacks or whatever. They gave us lemon meringue pie. We hadn’t seen that since the States.”
³⁰

The “good times” ended when the 1st Battalion’s company commanders were called to a briefing on their specific role in Overlord. The battalion’s four companies, plus a company of Rangers, would land on “Dog Green,” one of eight sectors of a beach codenamed Omaha, somewhere across the channel.

Omaha was one of five beaches targeted by the Allies for D-Day, and by far the most heavily defended. In all, five divisions of men would land on a sixty-one-mile front. The Americans would seize the westernmost beaches—Utah and Omaha—and the Canadians and British would seize Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches to the east. The overall plan for D-Day, “Operation Neptune,” detailing all but the air assault, was three inches thick. Essentially, it entailed loading 185,000 men and 20,000 vehicles onto ships that would cross the channel under cover of darkness. This force would then be landed on the beaches in successive waves after H-Hour, scheduled for 6:30 A.M. on the American beaches, forty minutes after sunrise.

Before the landing craft headed for the beaches, an airborne force of 20,000 would arrive over “drop zones” inland in a thousand transport planes and gliders. These paratroops would secure vital communications, German defensive installations, junctions, and other objectives, thereby aiding the rapid establishment of a beachhead.

Before Allied troops actually stormed the Calvados coastline, a massive bombardment would soften beach defenses. It was widely believed throughout the 29th Division that this would be the heaviest bombing ever made just prior to an assault. On Omaha, from H-30 to H-5, 280 B–24 bombers would drop 1,285 tons of bombs on thirteen target zones that covered every strongpoint in the Germans’ beach defenses. Many generals believed that the Allies’ superiority in air power—the Luftwaffe had been largely crushed by May 1944—would be the decisive advantage of D-Day.

Naval fire would begin forty minutes before touchdown on Omaha. The battleships
Arkansas
and
Texas
would fire from 18,000 yards off shore; from a tenth of that distance, eight destroyers would throw 2,000 rounds at German defensive installations. Various smaller ships would also open fire until just a few minutes before H-Hour. When the first wave of troops was three hundred yards from Omaha, nine LCTs armed with rocket-launchers would fire a thousand rockets at the Germans. If any of the defenders, thought to be inexperienced elements of the German 716th Division, were capable of action after this firestorm, they would surely not put up much resistance.

The invaders would also be aided by specially designed amphibious vehicles. Five minutes before H-Hour, “floating” DD tanks of the 743rd Tank Battalion would swim ashore, having been launched 6,000 yards out to sea, and then provide covering fire from the water’s edge for the first wave. The DD tank was an Anglo-American development that, like the coalition it symbolized, had strengths and weaknesses. Designed to use a propeller to power it from a LST [landing ship tank], the DD was basically a Sherman tank fitted with special exhaust vents and a bulky canvas “skirt,” pneumatically raised, which covered most of the tank and protected it from the seas. The tanks were highly effective in calm waters but tended to swamp with potentially fatal results in heavy seas.

It would not be machines, however, but men who would determine success or failure on D-Day. On Omaha, the 1st Division, commanded by Major General Clarence R. Huebner, would land to the east of Gerhardt’s 29th Division. During D-Day, the 29th Division’s 115th and 116th Regiments would be under Huebner’s control until Gerhardt resumed command of them on the day after the landings. Two companies of specially trained Rangers would attack a series of cliffs, Point du Hoc, marking the far western limit of Omaha Beach. The Americans would, meanwhile, land companies of 200 men in waves of seven boats on each of eight sectors. Company A would land on Dog Green first and spearhead the 116th Infantry’s ground assault. Colonel Charles Canham would command these “Stonewallers” on the beach.

The Bedford boys’ first challenge would be to cross Dog Green at low tide—a journey of five hundred yards dotted with defensive obstacles. With covering fire provided by sixteen DD tanks, the Bedford boys would engage the German defenders concentrated in emplacements and a concrete pillbox at the mouth of a crucial draw codenamed D-1. At the same time, they would provide covering fire for demolition experts from the Special Engineer Task Force who would clear lanes through beach defenses to allow LSTs to deposit thousands more men and vehicles.

The crucial D-1 draw led up 150-foot bluffs to the village of Vierville sur Mer. Once the Bedford boys had secured it, aided by the other companies in the 1st Battalion and Rangers, they would move inland, securing Vierville sur Mer, six hundred yards from the beach, and then liberate their final objective, the town of Isigny, eight miles away.

It was a hugely ambitious plan. For it to succeed, the Bedford boys would have to overcome formidable obstacles.

The Germans knew that the Allies were coming and had prepared accordingly. If Overlord succeeded, their eventual defeat was inevitable. And so, given the enormity of the threat, Hitler turned to his most brilliant general, the maverick “Desert Fox”—Erwin Rommel. “The war will be won or lost on the beaches,” Rommel had declared upon first visiting the beaches in January 1944. “We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy and that’s while he’s in the water, struggling to get ashore. The first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. . . . For the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.”
³¹

Intelligence reports and aerial photographs made clear that Rommel had ordered the placement of ingenious and lethal obstacles along the entire Normandy coastline. A waist-high stake with a mine attached to it, and covered by water at high tide, was Rommel’s own invention. Huge iron crosses covered with limpet mines were scattered across beaches to stop amphibious vehicles and tanks. Tank traps, defensive walls, thickets of barbed wire, and acres of minefields were also spread along the entire coastline from Brittany to the Pas de Calais and beyond.

On Omaha, the most heavily defended sections of the beach bristled with the full range of German mines, traps, and obstacles. Because the only clear exits from the beach, other than by infiltrating up steep bluffs, were four gullies, these areas were the most heavily fortified. At each gully, or draw, the Germans had set up a Stutzpunkt (strongpoint) manned by at least seventy men who operated MG-42 machine guns, mortars, and armor-piercing howitzers.

The most formidable Stutzpunkt was at the base of the Vierville draw, designated as D-1, overlooking Dog Green, where the Bedford boys would land at H-Hour. It was vital that bombing and DD-tank fire neutralize the D-1 Stutzpunkt and especially its MG-42 machine gun nests which had a panoramic view of Dog Green and could provide an arc of continuous fire along three hundred yards of water line.

The MG-42 would kill more Americans than any other weapon in Normandy. It fired three times faster than any American equivalent, was far more durable and easy to maintain, and was so essential to German combat tactics that many German riflemen were loaded down with extra ammunition for the MG-42 rather than for their slow-firing standard issue rifle, the Mauser Karabiner 98k, which was bolt-action, unlike the superior American M-1.

The Bedford boys could fire the M-1 as fast as they could pull the trigger and then slam a new clip of eight rounds into the gun in just a few seconds. But in combat, they would soon realize, it wouldn’t matter that the gun allowed them greater firepower than any German rifleman. In a firefight against German squads armed with MG-42s, a rifle platoon armed only with the M-1 would be cut to ribbons.

During their briefing by 29th Division intelligence experts, Captain Fellers and other officers, including Lieutenant Ray Nance, examined a model replica of Omaha Beach built to scale and set up on a so-called “sand table.” They were not told the date of the invasion. Nor were they told where Omaha was in Normandy, “only that it was in France across the channel.”
³²

The briefing deeply troubled Fellers. According to Nance: “When the company commanders were called and the battalion commander told them where they were going, what they were going to do etc., my company commander, Taylor Fellers, told me later that he said, ‘Colonel [Canham], I can take one Browning automatic rifle and get on that cliff and deny that beach to any infantry group.’ And he wasn’t a fellow who normally talked like that, [but] later he said, ‘Ray, we’ll all be killed!’ ”
³³

Fellers and other skeptics were assured that inexperienced troops of the German 716th Division were holding Omaha. Besides, heavy bombing would quickly decimate these inept defenders and destroy pillboxes and other obstacles. Others were told that “there would be no living things on the beach . . . it would be a piece of cake”
³⁴
and that “the battleships would blow everything off the map—pillboxes, artillery, mortars, and the barbed wire entanglements. Everything would be blasted to smithereens—a pushover.”
³⁵

Several of the 29th Division’s most senior officers shared Fellers’s reservations. Brigadier General Norman Cota, the 29th Division’s assistant commander, would lead the Blue and Gray assault on Omaha. He had studied in great depth various amphibious landing plans and firmly believed that bombing the beach, even in daylight, would be ineffective. The best time to attack, he argued, was at night when the enemy could not see and surprise could be maximized. “The beach is going to be fouled-up in any case,” insisted Cota. “Darkness will not substantially alter the percentage of accuracy in breaching—not enough to offset the handicaps of a daylight assault.”
³⁶
Cota’s views were ignored.

After the officers had been briefed, platoon leaders were assembled and their roles outlined in detail. Roy Stevens studied the sand table with the replica of Omaha for a long time, memorizing every contour, every possible place for cover, and particularly the Germans’ defensive positions. Stevens noted that at low tide there were some three hundred yards of flat sand between the water and the first cover, a sea wall. From training, Stevens knew how long it would take a fully loaded GI, with over sixty pounds on his back, to sprint to the sea wall—about a minute but an eternity if he was constantly under fire. But if the beach was bombed, creating protective craters, the going might not be so tough, especially if DD tanks led the advance and the pillboxes and machine gun nests dotting the flanks of the draw had been bombed effectively.