The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (14 page)

In those trenches were the Germans driven from their fixed positions by the bombardment. Their leader was Lt. Arthur Jahnke. He looked out to sea and was amazed. “Here was a truly lunatic sight,” he recalled. “I wondered if I were hallucinating as a result of the bombardment.” What he saw was a DD tank.  “Amphibious tanks! This must be the Allies’ secret weapon.” He decided to bring his own secret weapon into action, only to discover that his Goliaths* would not function-the bombardment had destroyed the radio controls.

Miniature tanks loaded with explosives

“It looks as though God and the world have forsaken us,” Jahnke said to the runner by his side. “What’s happened to our airmen?” At that instant, Sgt. Malvin Pike of E Company was coming in on a Higgins boat.  He had a scare: “My position was in the right rear of the boat and I could hear the bullets splitting the air over our heads and I looked back and all I could see was two hands on the wheel and a hand on each .50-caliber machine gun, which the Navy guys were firing. I said to my platoon leader, Lieutenant Rebarcheck, ‘These guys aren’t even looking where they are going or shooting.’ About that time the coxswain stood up and looked at the beach and then ducked back down.  The machine gunners were doing the same and we just prayed they would get us on the beach.”

The boat hit a sandbar two hundred meters from the shore. (The water was shallower off exit 2 than at exit 3, which was why the Navy had insisted on going in at exit 3.) The coxswain said it was time for the infantry to go, that he was getting out of there.

Lieutenant Rebarcheck responded, “You are not going to drown these men. Give her another try.” The coxswain backed off the bar, went 30 meters to the left, tried to go in, and hit the bar again. Rebarcheck said, “OK, let’s go,” but then the ramp got stuck.

“The hell with this,” Rebarcheck called out. He jumped over the side; his men followed.

“I jumped out in waist-deep water,” Sergeant Pike recalled. “We had 200 feet to go to shore and you couldn’t run, you could just kind of push forward. We finally made it to the edge of the water, then we had 200 yards of open beach to cross, through the obstacles. But fortunately most of the Germans were not able to fight, they were all shook up from the bombing and the shelling and the rockets and most of them just wanted to surrender.” Capt. Howard Lees, commander of E Company, led his men over the seawall to the top of the dunes. “What we saw,” Sergeant Pike remembered, “was nothing like what we saw on the sand table back in England. We said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like what they showed us.’ “ Roosevelt joined them, walking calmly up to their position, using his cane (he had had a heart attack), wearing a wool knit hat (he hated helmets), ignoring the fire. About this time (0640) the Germans to the north in the fortifications at Les-Dunes-de-Varreville began shooting at 2nd Battalion with 88mm cannon and machine guns, but not accurately. Roosevelt and Lees conferred, studied their maps, and realized they were at the wrong place.  Roosevelt returned to the beach. By now the first Sherman tanks had landed and were returning the German fire. Commodore James Arnold, the navy control officer for Utah, was just landing with the third wave. “German 88s were pounding the beachhead,” he recalled. “Two U.S. tanks were drawn up at the high-water line pumping back. I tried to run to get into the lee of these tanks. I realize now why the infantry likes to have tanks along in a skirmish. They offer a world of security to a man in open terrain who may have a terribly empty sensation in his guts.” Arnold found a shell hole and made it his temporary headquarters.  “An army officer wearing the single star of a brigadier jumped into my ‘headquarters’ to duck the blast of an 88.

“ ‘Sonsabuzzards,’ he muttered, as we untangled sufficiently to look at each other. ‘I’m Teddy Roosevelt. You’re Arnold of the Navy. I remember you at the briefing at Plymouth.’ “ Roosevelt was joined by the two battalion commanders of the 8th Infantry, Lt.  Cols. Conrad Simmons and Carlton MacNeely. As they studied the map, Col. James Van Fleet, CO of the regiment, came wading ashore. He had landed with the fourth wave, carrying the 237th and 299th ECBs.

“Van,” Roosevelt exclaimed, “we’re not where we were supposed to be.” He pointed to a building on the beach. It was supposed to be to the left. “Now it’s to our right. I figure we are more than a mile further south.” Van Fleet reflected that ironically they were at the exact spot he had wanted the navy to land his regiment, but the navy had insisted it was impossible because the water was too shallow.

“We faced an immediate and important decision,” Van Fleet wrote. “Should we try to shift our entire landing force more than a mile down the beach, and follow our original plan? Or should we proceed across the causeways immediately opposite where we had landed?” Already men were crossing the seawall and dunes in front of the officers, while navy demolition men and engineers were blowing up obstacles behind them.

Roosevelt became a legend for reportedly saying at this point, “We’ll start the war from right here.” According to Van Fleet that was not the way it happened.  In an unpublished memoir, Van Fleet wrote: “I made the decision. ‘Go straight inland,’ I ordered. ‘We’ve caught the enemy at a weak point, so let’s take advantage of it.’ “ The important point was not who made the decision but that it was made without opposition or time-consuming argument. It was the right decision and showed the flexibility of the high command. Simmons and MacNeely immediately set about clearing the German beach opposition, preparing to seize the eastern ends of exits 1 and 2, then cross the causeways to drive west. First, however, they needed to get their men through the seawall and over the dunes.  Lt. Elliot Richardson was CO of a medic detachment that landed with the fourth wave. “I waded ashore with my guys. There were occasional shell bursts on the beach but it didn’t amount to much as most of the German guns had been put out of action. I walked up to the top of the dune and looked around. There was this barbed wire area and a wounded officer who had stepped on an antipersonnel mine calling for help.”

Richardson held a brief debate with himself. It was obviously dangerous to go into the area. Nevertheless, “I decided that I should go. I walked in toward him, putting each foot down carefully, and picked him up and carried him back.” Richardson’s men got the wounded officer on a stretcher and carried him down to an aid station on the beach.

“That was my baptism,” Richardson said. “It was the sort of behavior I expected of myself.”

Capt. George Mabry, S-3 (operations officer) of 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, crossed the dunes and found himself with several members of G Company caught in a minefield. Three men stepped on S-mines. Colonel Van Fleet described what happened: “Mabry had a choice: to withdraw to the beach or go after the enemy.  Each alternative meant crossing the minefield. Mabry chose to charge. Firing as he ran, Mabry charged twenty-five yards to an enemy foxhole. Those Germans who resisted, he killed; the others surrendered. Next he gathered a handful of G Company men, sent for two tanks, and assaulted a large pillbox guarding the causeway at exit 1.”

Sergeant Pike of E Company joined Mabry’s group. As Mabry led the men across the causeway, headed toward Pouppeville, he caught up with Lieutenant Tighe of the 70th Tank Battalion. Tighe had lost three tanks to land mines but was moving cautiously ahead with his remaining two Shermans. Mabry put infantry in front and pushed on, urging speed because they were so exposed on the causeway and were taking mortar fire, simultaneously urging caution because of the mines.  They came to a bridge over a culvert and figured it must be prepared for demolition; further, the scouts reported that they had seen some Germans duck into the culvert.

Mabry sent troops out into the flooded fields to pinch in on both sides of the culvert. The Germans surrendered without putting up a fight. Mabry had them disconnect the charges, then sent the prisoners back to the beach and pushed on.  After the guards put the prisoners into a landing craft, to be taken back to the USSBayfield for interrogation, they reported to Van Fleet. It was 0940. Van Fleet radioed General Barton onBayfield, “I am ashore with Colonel Simmons and General Roosevelt, advancing steadily.” As new waves of landing craft came in, Van Fleet and Roosevelt sent them through the holes in the seawall with orders to move inland. Already the biggest problem they faced was congestion on the beach. There were too many troops and vehicles, not enough openings. Sporadic incoming artillery fire and the ubiquitous mines made the traffic jam horrendous. Still, at 1045, Van Fleet was able to radio Barton, “Everything is going OK.” The beach area was comparatively secure, the reserve battalions were coming ashore.

Mabry pushed forward on the causeway. He kept cautioning his scouts. “You know,” he said to Sergeant Pike, “the paratroopers are supposed to have taken this town Pouppeville, but they may not have. Let’s not shoot any of our paratroopers.” Pike said OK.

The scouts got to the western edge of the flooded area. “We could see the bushes and a few trees where the causeway ended,” Pike recalled, “and then I saw a helmet and then it disappeared, and I told Captain Mabry that I saw a helmet up there behind those bushes and he said, ‘Could you tell if it was American or German?’ and I said, ‘I didn’t see enough, I don’t know, sir.’ “ The men on the far end of the causeway shot off an orange flare. “And these two guys stood up and the first thing we saw was the American flag on their shoulder and it was two paratroopers. They said, ‘4th Division?’ and we said, ‘Yes.’ “ Lt. Eugene Brierre of the 101st was one of the two paratroopers. He greeted Pike and asked, “Who is in charge here?” Mabry came up and replied, “I am.” Brierre said, “Well, General Taylor is right back here in Pouppeville and wants to meet you.”

It was 1110. The linkup between the 101st and 4th Divisions had been achieved.

Exit 1 was in American hands.

Mabry talked to Taylor, who said he was moving out to accomplish further objectives, then proceeded through Pouppeville in the direction of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. There were forty or so dead German soldiers in Pouppeville, testimony to the fight the 101st had been engaged in. Near Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Lt. Louis Nixon of Easy Company, 506th, 101st asked Mabry for a bit of help from the two tanks; Mabry detached them and they went to work. Then it was on to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, where the Mabry force helped the paratroopers secure the town.

The 4th Division and attached units were pouring ashore. Their main problem was with the sea, not the Germans. The waves were pitching the landing craft around, coming over the gunwales to hit the troops smack in the face, making many of the men so miserable they could not wait to get off. “The boats were going around like little bugs jockeying for position,” Pvt. Ralph Della-Volpe recalled. “I had had an extra, extra big breakfast thinking it would help, but I lost it.” So did many others. Seaman Marvin Perrett, an eighteen-year-old coast guardsman from New Orleans, was coxswain on a New Orleans-built Higgins boat. The thirty members of the 12th Regiment of the 4th Division he was carrying ashore had turned their heads toward him to avoid the spray. He could see concern and fear on their faces. Just in front of him stood a chaplain. Perrett was concentrating on keeping his place in the advancing line. The chaplain upchucked his breakfast, the wind caught it, and Perrett’s face was covered with undigested eggs, coffee, and bits of bacon.

One of Perrett’s crew dipped a bucket in the Channel and threw the water over his face. “How’s that, skipper?” he asked.

“That was great,” Perrett replied. “Do it again.” The crew member did, and the infantrymen broke into laughter. “It just took the tension right away,” Perrett said.

Sgt. John Beck of the 87th Mortar Battalion had taken seasickness pills. They did not work; he threw up anyway. But they had an unintended effect-he fell asleep while going in.

“The explosion of shells awakened me as we approached the coast,” he remembered “My best friend, Sgt. Bob Myers from New Castle, Pa., took a number of those pills and it drove him out of his mind. He didn’t become coherent until the next day. He made the invasion of Normandy and doesn’t remember one thing about it!” Behind the sand dunes at Utah were flooded fields, difficult to cross. Behind the fields the ground rose and small hills dominated the landscape, most of them with a village on it. The American paratroopers had landed all over the area and in many cases had taken the villages, as Easy Company, 506th, 101st had done at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. Other groups of troopers, ranging from three or four men to a platoon-size force, had moved to the beaches, to open the causeways leading through the fields for the incoming 4th Division.  Capt. L. “Legs” Johnson led a patrol of paratroopers down the causeway to the beach. He saw German soldiers in one of the batteries waving a white flag. “They were underground, part of the coastal defense group, and they were relatively older men, really not very good soldiers. We accepted their terms of surrender, allowing them to come up only in small groups. We enclosed them with barbed wire fencing, their own barbed wire, and they were pretty well shocked when they learned that there were a lot more of them than there were of us-there were at least fifty of those guys.”

Johnson took his helmet off, set it down, lay on the ground with his helmet as a headrest, “really taking it sort of easy, waiting for the 4th Infantry Division to come up.” At about 1100 the infantry were there, “and it was really sort of amusing, because we were on the beach with our faces all blackened, and these guys would come up in their boats and crash down in front of us and man, when they came off those boats, they were ready for action. We quickly hollered to them and pointed to our American flags.”

Inland by about a kilometer from St.-Martin-de-Varreville there was a group of buildings holding a German coastal-artillery barracks, known to the Americans from its map signification as WXYZ. Lt. Col. Patrick Cassidy, commanding the 1st Battalion of the 502nd, short of men and with a variety of missions to perform, sent Sgt. Harrison Summers of West Virginia with fifteen men to capture the barracks. That was not much of a force to take on a full-strength German company, but it was all Cassidy could spare.