The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (16 page)

By 0640 only one officer from A Company was alive, Lt. E. Ray Nance, and he had been hit in the heel and the belly. Every sergeant was either dead or wounded.  On one boat, when the ramp was dropped every man in the thirty-man assault team was killed before any of them could get out.

Pvt. George Roach was an assistant flamethrower. He weighed 125 pounds. He carried over a hundred pounds of gear ashore, including his M-1 rifle, ammunition, hand grenades, a five-gallon drum of flamethrower fluid, and assorted wrenches and a cylinder of nitrogen.

“We went down the ramp and the casualty rate was very bad. We couldn’t determine where the fire was coming from, whether from the top of the bluff or from the summer beach-type homes on the shore. I just dropped myself into the sand and took my rifle and fired it at this house and Sergeant Wilkes asked, ‘What are you firing at?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ “ The only other live member of his assault team Roach could see was Pvt. Gil Murdoch. The two men were lying together behind an obstacle. Murdoch had lost his glasses and could not see. “Can you swim?” Roach asked.  “No.”

“Well, look, we can’t stay here, there’s nobody around here that seems to have any idea of what to do. Let’s go back in the water and come in with the tide.” They fell back and got behind a knocked-out tank. Both men were slightly wounded. The tide covered them and they hung onto the tank. Roach started to swim to shore; a coxswain from a Higgins boat picked him up about halfway in.  “He pulled me on board, it was around 1030. And I promptly fell asleep.” Roach eventually got up to the seawall, where he helped the medics. The following day, he caught up with what remained of his company. “I met General [Norman] Cota and I had a brief conversation with him. He asked me what company I was with and I told him and he just shook his head. A Company was just out of action. When we got together, there were eight of us left from Company A ready for duty.”

(Cota asked Roach what he was going to do when the war was over. “Someday I’d like to go to college and graduate,” Roach replied. “I’d like to go to Fordham.” Five years to the day later, Roach did graduate from Fordham. “Over the years,” he said in 1990, “I don’t think there has been a day that has gone by that I haven’t thought of those men who didn’t make it.”) Sgt. Lee Polek’s landing craft was about to swamp as it approached the shore.  Everyone was bailing with helmets. “We yelled to the crew to take us in, we would rather fight than drown. As the ramp dropped we were hit by machine-gun and rifle fire. I yelled to get ready to swim and fight. We were getting direct fire right into our craft. My three squad leaders in front and others were hit.  Some men climbed over the side. Two sailors got hit. I got off in water only ankle deep, tried to run but the water was suddenly up to my hips. I crawled to hide behind a steel beach obstacle. Bullets hit off it, others hit more of my men. Got up to the beach to crawl behind the shingle and a few of my men joined me. I took a head count and there was only eleven of us left, from the thirty on the craft. As the tide came in we took turns running out to the water’s edge to drag wounded men to cover. Some of the wounded were hit again while on the beach. More men crowding up and crowding up. More people being hit by shellfire.  People trying to help each other.

“While we were huddled there, I told [Pvt.] Jim Hickey that I would like to live to be forty years old and work forty hours a week and make a dollar an hour (when I joined up I was making thirty-seven-and-a-half cents an hour). I felt, boy, I would really have it made at $40 a week.  “Jim Hickey still calls me from New York on June 6 to ask, ‘Hey, Sarge, are you making forty bucks per yet?’ “ A Company had hardly fired a weapon. Almost certainly it had not killed any Germans. It had expected to move up the Vierville draw and be on top of the bluff by 0730, but at 0730 its handful of survivors were huddled up against the seawall, virtually without weapons. It had lost 96 percent of its effective strength.

But its sacrifice was not in vain. The men had brought in rifles, BARs (Browning automatic rifles), grenades, TNT charges, machine guns, mortars and mortar rounds, flamethrowers, rations, and other equipment. This was now strewn across the sand at Dog Green. The weapons and equipment would make a life-or-death difference to the following waves of infantry, coming in at higher tide and having to abandon everything to make their way to shore.  F Company, 116th, supposed to come in at Dog Red, landed near its target, astride the boundary between Dog Red and Easy Green. But G Company, supposed to be to the right of F at Dog White, drifted far left, so the two companies came in together, directly opposite the heavy fortifications at Les Moulins. There was a kilometer or so gap to each side of the intermixed companies, which allowed the German defenders to concentrate their fire.  For the men of F and G Companies, the two hundred meters or more journey from the Higgins boats to the shingle was the longest and most hazardous trip they had ever experienced, or ever would. The lieutenant commanding the assault team on Sgt. Harry Bare’s boat was killed as the ramp went down. “As ranking noncom,” Bare related, “I tried to get my men off the boat and make it somehow to get under the seawall. We waded to the sand and threw ourselves down and the men were frozen, unable to move. My radioman had his head blown off three yards from me. The beach was covered with bodies, men with no legs, no arms-God it was awful.”

As what was left of A, F, G, and E Companies of the 116th huddled behind obstacles or the shingle, the following waves began to come in: B and H Companies at 0700; D at 0710; C, K, I, and M at 0720. Not one came in on target.  The coxswains were trying to dodge obstacles and incoming shells, while the smoke drifted in and out and obscured the landmarks and what few marker flags there were on the beach.

On the command boat for B Company, the CO, Capt. Ettore Zappacosta, heard the British coxswain cry out, “We can’t go in there. We can’t see the landmarks. We must pull off.”

Zappacosta pulled his Colt .45 and ordered, “By God, you’ll take this boat straight in.”

The coxswain did. When the ramp dropped, Zappacosta was first off. He was immediately hit. Medic Thomas Kenser saw him bleeding from hip and shoulder.  Kenser, still on the ramp, shouted, “Try to make it in! I’m coming.” But the captain was already dead. Before Kenser could jump off the ramp he was shot dead. Every man in the boat save one (Pvt. Robert Sales) was either killed or wounded before reaching the beach.

Nineteen-year-old Pvt. Harold Baumgarten of B Company got a bullet through the top of his helmet while jumping from the ramp, then another hit the receiver of his M-1 as he carried it at port arms. He waded through the waist-deep water as his buddies fell alongside him.

“I saw Pvt. Robert Ditmar of Fairfield, Connecticut, hold his chest and heard him yell, ‘I’m hit, I’m hit!’ I hit the ground and watched him as he continued to go forward about ten more yards. He tripped over an obstacle and, as he fell, his body made a complete turn and he lay sprawled on the damp sand with his head facing the Germans, his face looking skyward. He was yelling, ‘Mother, Mom.’ “Sgt. Clarence ‘Pilgrim’ Robertson had a gaping wound in the upper-right corner of his forehead. He was walking crazily in the water. Then I saw him get down on his knees and start praying with his rosary beads. At this moment, the Germans cut him in half with their deadly crossfire.”

Baumgarten had drawn a Star of David on the back of his field jacket, with “The Bronx, New York” written on it-that would let Hitler know who he was. He was behind an obstacle. He saw the reflection from the helmet of one of the German riflemen on the bluff “and took aim and later on I found out I got a bull’s-eye on him.” That was the only shot he fired because his damaged rifle broke in two when he pulled the trigger.

Shells were bursting about him. “I raised my head to curse the Germans when an 88 shell exploded about twenty yards in front of me, hitting me in my left cheek. It felt like being hit with a baseball bat, only the results were much worse. My upper jaw was shattered, the left cheek blown open. My upper lip was cut in half. The roof of my mouth was cut up and teeth and gums were laying all over my mouth. Blood poured freely from the gaping wound.”

The tide was coming in. Baumgarten washed his face with the cold, dirty Channel

water and managed not to pass out. The water was rising about an inch a minute

(between 0630 and 0800 the tide rose eight feet) so he had to get moving or

drown. He took another hit, from a bullet, in the leg. He moved forward in a

dead man’s float with each wave of the incoming tide. He finally reached the

seawall where a medic dressed his wounds. Mortars were coming in, “and I grabbed

the medic by the shirt to pull him down. He hit my hand away and said, ‘You’re

injured now. When I get hurt you can take care of me.’ “ *

Baumgarten was wounded five times that day, the last time by a bullet in his right knee as he was being carried on a stretcher to the beach for evacuation.  He went on to medical school and became a practicing physician. He concluded his oral history, “Happily, in recent years when I’ve been back to Normandy, especially on Sept. 17, 1988, when we dedicated a monument to the 29th Division in Vierville, I noted that the French people really appreciated us freeing them from the Germans, so it made it all worthwhile.” Sgt. Benjamin McKinney was a combat engineer attached to C Company. When his ramp dropped, “I was so seasick I didn’t care if a bullet hit me between the eyes and got me out of my misery.” As he jumped off the ramp, “rifle and machine-gun fire hit it like rain falling.” Ahead, “it looked as if all the first wave were dead on the beach.” He got to the shingle. He and Sergeant Storms saw a pillbox holding a machine gun and a rifleman about thirty meters to the right, spraying the beach with their weapons. Storms and McKinney crawled toward the position. McKinney threw hand grenades as Storms put rifle fire into it. Two Germans jumped out; Storms killed them. The 116th was starting to fight back.

Capt. Robert Walker was on LCI (landing craft, infantry) 91. As it approached the beach, the craft began taking rifle and machine-gun fire. Maneuvering through the obstacles, the craft got caught on one of the pilings and set off the Teller mine. The explosion tore off the starboard landing ramp.  The skipper tried to back off. Walker moved to the port-side ramp, only to find it engulfed in flames. A man carrying a flame-thrower had been hit by a bullet; another bullet had set the jellied contents of his fuel tank on fire. Screaming in agony, he dove into the sea. “I could see that even the soles of his boots were on fire.” Men around him also burned; Walker saw a couple of riflemen “with horrendous drooping face blisters.”

The skipper came running to the front deck, waving his arms and yelling, “Everybody over the side.” Walker jumped into water about eight feet deep. He was carrying so much equipment that despite two Mae Wests he could not stay afloat. He dropped his rifle, then his helmet, then his musette bag, which enabled him to swim to where he could touch bottom.  “Here I was on Omaha Beach. Instead of being a fierce, well-trained, fighting infantry warrior, I was an exhausted, almost helpless, unarmed survivor of a shipwreck.” When he got to waist-deep water he got on his knees and crawled the rest of the way. Working his way forward to the seawall, he saw the body of Captain Zappacosta. At the seawall, “I saw dozens of soldiers, mostly wounded.  The wounds were ghastly to see.”

(Forty-nine years later, Walker recorded that the scene brought to his mind Tennyson’s lines in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” especially “Cannon to right of them/Cannon to left of them/Cannon in front of them/Volley’d and thunder’d.” He added that so far as he could tell every GI knew the lines, “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die,” even if the soldiers did not know the source. Those on Omaha Beach who had committed the poem to memory surely muttered to themselves, “Some one had blunder’d.”) Walker came to Cota’s conclusion. Anyplace was better than this; the plan was kaput; he couldn’t go back; he set out on his own to climb the bluff. He picked up an M-1 and a helmet from a dead soldier and moved out. “I was alone and completely on my own.”

Maj. Sidney Bingham (USMA 1940) was CO of 2nd Battalion, 116th. When he reached the shingle he was without radio, aide, or runner. His S-3 was dead, his HQ Company commander wounded, his E Company commander dead, his F Company commander wounded, his H Company commander killed, “and in E Company there were some fifty-five killed out of a total of something just over two hundred who landed.” Bingham was overwhelmed by a feeling of “complete futility. Here I was, the battalion commander, unable for the most part to influence action or do what I knew had to be done.” He set out to organize a leaderless group from F Company and get it moving up the bluff.

By this time, around 0745, unknown others were doing the same, whether NCOs or junior officers or, in some cases, privates. Staying on the beach meant certain death; retreat was not possible; someone had to lead; men took the burden on themselves and did. Bingham put it this way: “The individual and small-unit initiative carried the day. Very little, if any, credit can be accorded company, battalion, or regimental commanders for their tactical prowess and/or their coordination of the action.”

Bingham did an analysis of what went wrong for the first and second waves. Among other factors, he said, the men were in the Higgins boats far too long.  “Seasickness occasioned by the three or four hours in LCVPs played havoc with any idealism that may have been present. It markedly decreased the combat effectiveness of the command.”

In addition, “The individual loads carried were in my view greatly excessive, hindered mobility, and in some cases caused death by drowning.” In his view, “If the enemy had shown any sort of enthusiasm and moved toward us, they could have run us right back into the Channel without any trouble.” From June 6, 1944, on to 1990, Bingham carried with him an unjustified self-criticism: “I’ve often felt very ashamed of the fact that I was so completely inadequate as a leader on the beach on that frightful day.” That is the way a good battalion commander feels when he is leading not much more than a squad-but Bingham got that squad over the shingle and into an attack against the enemy, which was exactly the right thing to do, and the only thing he could do under the circumstances.