The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (18 page)

Muscles cramped. Men clung to their buddies desperately, hypothermia setting in. Boats passed but none stopped. Then, as men started to die, as their grips on floating objects and each other grew weaker, they heard the “friendly shout of someone with a Limey voice”
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—Sub-Lieutenant Jimmy Green. As promised, he had returned in LCA 910.

Green and his crew started to pull the men from the water. It was back-breaking work: Some men were twice their normal weight. Green and his crew used their seamen’s knives to cut away leaden packs and soggy kit.

Roy Stevens was jarred awake. He saw Clyde Powers clambering aboard Green’s boat.

“Clyde, can you help me here!” Stevens cried.

“Sure.”
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Powers reached out and slowly hauled Stevens into the craft. For most of the time they had spent in the water, Powers had helped Stevens stay afloat.

Stevens fell to the floor and vomited sea water. He shook and shivered. The next thing he knew, a Brit was removing his assault jacket and Mae West. Another handed out cigarettes. Jimmy Green broke out a carton of 200 Capstan duty-free “fags.” He apologized as he handed them around. “Sorry, chaps, they’re only British, no Camels or Lucky Strike on this boat.”
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LCA 910’s engines gunned. They were heading out into the channel. Many seemed surprised. Others were upset: They were leaving Roy’s brother and their buddies to fight it out alone.
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Under no circumstances, Green said, would they return to the beach. They were in no fit state to fight. They were going back to the
Empire Javelin
.

John Barnes tried to get warm. He recognized two A Company men lying nearby: Russell Pickett, shocked but conscious, and Sergeant Frank Draper Jr., covered in blood.

“Draper was still alive but unconscious,” recalled Pickett. “[The] antitank rifle bullet had gone through his left shoulder and upper arm. You could see his heart beating.”
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Draper was bleeding to death. He had less than an hour to live. “He didn’t get to kill anybody,” his sister Verona later said. “I’m glad of that.”
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“How about the others [in Company A]?” someone asked.
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Green said they had all landed safely on the beach, unaware of what had then happened when the German machine guns opened up.

Around the same time, Company D’s Sergeant Bob Slaughter was approaching Omaha in the fourth wave. A few hundred yards from the beach, he stood up to get a better look at the bluffs, careful to keep his head down: Bullets ricocheted off the boat and whizzed by. There was no sign of the Vierville sur Mer church steeple, the landmark to guide them onto Dog Green. Had it been bombed? Instead, Slaughter saw a fierce brush fire and a pall of black smoke hanging over the bluffs of the Dog White sector of the beach straight ahead. The Germans seemed to be zeroing in on select craft, pouring down every kind of caliber.

The ramp came down. Slaughter froze. The craft bounced up and down in the surf, so violently it was as if he were “riding a bucking bronco.” He rose and fell with the ramp two or three times. The men behind him couldn’t move. He was blocking their exit. Slaughter jumped off to the side, waded ashore then looked back at his landing craft—several buddies from Roanoke had been hit. They were bleeding badly, some flailing around in the water. One man got caught up in the craft’s motor. Slaughter watched him spin “like a top” as he died.

The craft started to pull out to sea. But as it left the beach, ramp still down, it was hit and quickly sank, taking two British sailors with it.

Slaughter could see tanks. A landing craft ablaze. A GI running towards him.

A shot cracked out.

The man went down, stumbling, screaming.

“Medic! Medic!”

A medic rushed over. The Germans got him too, “just drilled him.”
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Slaughter finally got to the sea wall where he tried to catch his breath.

Several hundred yards to Slaughter’s west, Hal Baumgarten was now consumed by rage. It was all so monstrously unjust, so one-sided. He grabbed a dead man’s M-1 carbine and quickly flopped back into the water, pretending to be dead, joining a raft of corpses bobbing towards the sea wall with the incoming tide. Baumgarten finally got to the water line. Then dry sand. But there were still another hundred yards before the wall. From some unknown reserve, he found the strength to crawl to it. To the east, Baumgarten saw a group of men from Company A, lying on the sand, dying from their wounds. He recognized a couple. It broke his heart to watch them, scarcely out of their teens, crying for their mothers, calling for their brothers.

“Medic! Medic!”

But where the hell were the medics? Had they all been slaughtered too?

Baumgarten got up and ran east along the sea wall. He tried to pull the wounded a few feet closer to the wall, out of the path of MG-42 bullets and sniper fire.
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But he could only help a few. There were so many of them. So many young Americans with arms outstretched, only feet from survival.

Baumgarten finally reached the D-1 Vierville draw. A Sherman tank stood at its base. It was knocked out.

The invasion looked like it had failed.
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A V Corps operational report summed up the situation: “Assault units in state of dissolution. Heaviest casualties. Enemy fire preventing leap across beachline. Disembarked units crowded together within narrowest space. Engineers unable to clear passages through minefields or to demolish foreshore obstacles. Armor and vehicles immobilized on the narrow beach.”
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Of the assault units in dissolution, Company A had suffered most. It was now “inert, leaderless . . . a forlorn little rescue party bent upon survival and the saving of lives.”
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Baumgarten spotted a good buddy, Private Robert Garbed of Newport News, Virginia. Garbed was dead, facedown. He too had reached the vital D-1 draw. Along the way, he’d paid the ultimate price, as had 102 others from Company A.

B
Y 7:30 A.M., THE
G
ERMANS
above Dog Green thought they had won the day. They were about to do what Rommel had ordered: Drive the enemy back into the sea. The few Americans still alive were simply target practice. There was no sign of reinforcements.

The commander of the Wilderstansnest (defensive emplacement) 76 telephoned the 352nd Division Headquarters. “At the water’s edge at low tide near St. Laurent and Vierville the enemy is in search of cover behind the coastal obstacles,” he reported. “A great many vehicles—among these ten tanks—stand burning at the beach. The obstacle demolition squads have given up their activity. Debarkation from the landing boats has ceased, the boats keep farther seawards. The fire of our strong points and artillery was well-placed and has inflicted considerable casualties among the enemy. A great many wounded and dead lie on the beach.”
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Meanwhile, an increasingly concerned Brigadier General Norman Cota and Colonel Charles Canham approached Dog White beach, seven hundred yards to the east of the D-1 draw. Their boat carried the 29th Division’s headquarters staff, including Lieutenant Jack Shea, Cota’s aide. Two hundred yards from the shore, they neared a series of timbers set at an angle in the water. Engineers from the 146th Special Underwater Demolition Battalion were supposed to have cleared these deadly obstructions but they had landed over a mile to the east.
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About a third of the timbers had Teller mines attached to them with rusted, barbed wire.

The boat’s coxswain cut the throttle as they prepared to land. A three-knot crosscurrent and the surf swept them against a timber several times, forcing the Teller mine free of the obstacle. To their relief, the mine did not explode. “The coxswain gunned his motor, maneuvered the boat free, and dropped the ramp,” recalled Shea. “Moderate small arms fire was directed at the craft as the ramp was lowered.”
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Cota, Canham, and their staff crossed under fire through three-foot-deep water. Suddenly, they came to a runnel, five feet deep and thirty feet wide. As they waded across it, a Major John Sours, the 116th Infantry’s S-4 intelligence officer, was hit in the chest by machine gun fire and fell face down, dead, in the water.
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The first available cover was a DD tank of C Company, 743rd Tank Battalion. It and seventeen others stood a few yards past the water line. The tanks had landed six minutes before H-Hour and many had already been immobilized. Two of them, in front of the D-1 draw, were on fire. One was C-5, another DD tank of C Company. It had been hit with rounds from an 88mm gun firing from the concrete pillbox at the base of the D-1 draw. Cota and Canham realized the landing of crucial tanks had been a disaster. There was no covering artillery fire from the beach itself, and this left men exposed to emplacements and machine gunners all along the bluffs.
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The Germans were now firing flat-trajectory rounds, watching for where they splashed down and then adjusting their fire. In a couple of minutes, they were able to zero in on landing craft as they ground against the shore. By the time ramps had lowered, most craft were under direct fire. Cota and Canham ran forward and reached the Dog Beach sea wall, five feet high.

The sea wall had small timber fences every fifty yards or so which jutted twenty or thirty feet into the sea. All along it, men formed bedraggled and paralyzed jumbles of several different companies. Engineers cowered next to medics, men from the 2nd and 5th Rangers, and navy personnel. They all shared the same plight. In Lieutenant Shea’s words, they were firmly “pinned down!”
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Cota and Canham crouched behind the sea wall as German Nebel-werfer and mortar fire increased. Most rounds landed in the sand beyond the sea wall but some exploded among the groups of Americans, causing horrific injuries and heart-stopping panic. The Nebelwerfer rounds broke into very large hunks of shrapnel, commonly the size of a shovel blade, which sliced men in two if hit in the stomach or small of the back. The Nebelwerfers were less fatal than the mortars, however, which sprayed far more fragments over a wider area, and caused most of the deaths on Omaha after the MG-42 machine gun.

The longer men stayed behind the sea wall, the greater chance they stood of being blown to pieces. Shortly after H-Hour, squads from Company C had made their way up the bluffs of Dog White by way of a path marked clearly on their officers’ invasion maps. Somehow, the men still pinned down behind the sea wall would also have to find a way off Dog Beach if they were going to live.

But time was running out. Medics were already overwhelmed by the extent of the slaughter, working furiously with limited supplies—often just bandages and morphine spikes and a few capsules of sulfa. Everywhere men lay with severe head and stomach wounds. The limbless died quickly from blood loss unless comrades applied tourniquets, which many did, using strips of rope, belts, and even torn pieces of uniform. Intestines and internal organs had to be pushed back into men struck dumb by terror. There were so many wounded, so many severe cases of trauma, noted Shea, that “gaping head and belly wounds were bandaged with the same rapid efficiency that was dealt to the more minor wounds.”
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Lieutenant Ray Nance had lost all sense of time as he lay bleeding on the shingle below the sea wall near the Vierville D-1 draw. At some point, he spotted what looked like a German panzer tank. It seemed as if the battle had been lost: The Germans had counterattacked and were driving the 116th Infantry back into the water.

“This thing is a failure,” Nance thought. “They’re mopping us up.”
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But then the sun caught the side of the tank. Nance saw the “prettiest white star” placed on all American vehicles. It was a Sherman. He stared at the star. Looking at it made him feel better.
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Then, all of a sudden, a navy medic wearing green overalls was leaning over him. Nance was soaked and covered in oil and grease. The medic looked immaculate, dry as a bone. He knelt at Nance’s side and started to examine him. He had been in combat before. That was clear from the way he handled himself under fire.

“This is worse than Salerno,” he told Nance.

The medic gave Nance a shot of morphine, opened up his hobnailed boot and dressed his heel wound. At some point, Nance had also been shot in the hand and again in his foot. He was one of the very lucky. He had “million-dollar” wounds serious enough to put him out of the war but not life-threatening.

“Good luck,” said the navy medic.

Then he was gone. Wounded men around Nance hadn’t seen him: Nance was delirious—the man was a figment of his imagination. But Nance knew he was real. He just knew it. Heaven-sent, the medic had saved him and moved on. Only God knew where.
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Nance looked around, the morphine starting to kick in. He saw two dead men lying face up. He recognized both. One was an officer from D Company. Suddenly, he was aware of another man beside him: Cecil Breeden.

Breeden checked Nance’s dressings and said he had seen the bodies of Captain Fellers, John Schenk, and John Wilkes. All of them had probably been killed by machine-gun fire within minutes of arriving on the beach.
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As far as Breeden knew, Nance was the only living officer from Company A and therefore in command of what was left of it.

Meanwhile, Cota and Canham were moving from one group of men to another, urging them to arm themselves with whatever weapons they could scavenge and then get up and off the beach. Suddenly, Canham was shot through the left wrist. He continued along the beach, toting a Colt .45 in his good hand, blood gushing from his wound.

“Medic!”

Cecil Breeden arrived, wrapped a bandage around Canham’s wrist and then quickly moved on. Cota suggested Canham be evacuated. Canham refused and set off along the sea wall, looking for a gully, a weak point, anywhere to get up to the bluffs. His bodyguard followed closely behind, reloading Canham’s Colt .45 every few minutes.

Behind the sea wall at the base of the D-1 draw, Hal Baumgarten looked east and saw a figure, back straight, walking along the beach, “an angel of mercy,”
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bending down here and there to comfort the dying and patch up others. . . . When Cecil Breeden finally got to Baumgarten, he handed him twelve sulfa tablets and told him to drink some water. He was badly dehydrated. Shells and mortar rounds began to land all around them. Breeden leaned over, seemingly oblivious to the heavy fire, and put a pressure bandage on Baumgarten’s face.

Baumgarten tried to pull Breeden down, out of the line of fire, but he slapped his hand away.

“You’re hurt now,” said Breeden. “When I get it, you can take care of me.”
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In Baumgarten’s eyes, Breeden was “probably the single greatest hero of D-Day.”
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Breeden would survive the war, accompanying Company A all the way to Germany, and would not receive a scratch. Despite long and concerted efforts by many survivors, notably Baumgarten, Breeden died without receiving a military honor in recognition of his heroism on Omaha Beach—a heroism that sustained hope among those who were a breath from dying.

According to a subsequent report by the United States Army Medical Department, because of the “actions and example of men like the medic Breeden, [Company A] survivors found the will to rescue many of the wounded from the advancing tide and move off the beach to a sheltered position where the remnants of the company rallied. Were it not for Breeden all of them might well have died on the beach.”
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“Every man was a hero, [I] never saw a coward,” Breeden later said with typical self-effacement. “When I found Baumgarten, he had his cheek about over his ear. I patched him up and went on my way. I glanced now and then at the boys trying to take that damned pillbox [at the base of the draw]. As I remember, it took six or more to do it. As far as I know, none of them lived. I couldn’t tell you who any of them were. I was just too busy to know what was going on around me.”
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Breeden left Baumgarten at about 8:15 A.M. All along Dog Green, men were starting to organize, terror and determination on their faces. They included “Big Bill” Presley, Master Sergeant of B Company.
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Bree-den saw Presley walking along the beach, seemingly oblivious to the bullets and shrapnel hissing all around.

“What are you doing?” asked Breeden.

“Looking for a damn rifle that will work,” said Presley, pointing up to the bluffs. Some of his men had moved past the sea wall.

“Get down or you’ll get hit,” Presley ordered.

“What the hell are you talking about?” replied Breeden. “You’re a damn sight bigger target than me.”

Presley grinned and walked on. Before long, he came back, toting an M-1 carbine, waved at Breeden, and then joined his men.
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By 8:30 A.M., approximately five thousand troops had been landed on the 6,500 yards of Omaha Beach. Out at sea, naval commanders realized something had gone terribly wrong. According to the Overlord plan, the 1st and 29th Divisions should be inland by now. But when observers peered through binoculars and telescopes, they saw wave after wave of soldiers jammed together on the beach. Along the surf line lay a gruesome jetsam of dead men, body parts, and vast quantities of equipment essential to forcing exits from the beach: TNT packages, boxes of ammunition, wire-cutters, and countless Bangalore torpedoes. The loss of communications equipment was especially grave. Three out of four radios among the 116th Infantry battalions were useless.
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Realizing that covering fire was essential, given that most of the amphibious tanks were out of action or sunk, U.S. Navy and British Royal Navy commanders brought their boats as close to the shore as possible, a couple actually scraping the sea bed, and trained their five-inch guns on the bluffs. But where were they to fire? Only a couple of the men fighting for their lives along the sea wall had radios to direct the ships’ salvos. Nonetheless, the warships opened up. At one point, desperate men had to use flag signals to stop a heavy barrage of their sector. But for most men, such as Bob Slaughter, the shelling was a much-needed boost to morale.

Since coming ashore, Slaughter had crouched down behind the sea wall. Suddenly, he saw several officers moving towards him. Slaughter recognized Canham, his arm in a sling, a Colt .45 in his good hand.
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“They’re murdering us here!” Canham shouted. “Let’s move inland and get murdered!”

“Who the hell is that son of a bitch?” asked one GI.
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Every Stonewaller would know before the day was out, for Canham seemed to roam everywhere. “We’d have shot him in training,” recalled Company A’s Russell Pickett. “But once the fighting started, he was a true soldier.”
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Few veterans disagree that Canham was the most outstanding regimental commander on D-Day.

Brigadier General Norman Cota was just as brave and inspirational. He also gave men hope when there was none. Some found the will to fight on simply by looking at him as he strode about defiantly, back straight, chewing his unlit cigar, mumbling ditties to himself when he wasn’t cursing the Germans.

Hal Baumgarten would never forget seeing Cota’s rangy figure approach him that morning. It was as if he was immortal; from the outset, officers had been first to be picked off by snipers. “He was coming from the west with a major, had a pistol in one hand, and the fellows were all yelling for him to get down. He looked very similar to the actor Robert Mitchum with his slanted eyebrows. He was very, very brave.”
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