The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (21 page)

Lieutenant Vermeer said he could “still distinctly remember when it got to be twelve o’clock that night, because the 7th of June was my birthday. I felt that if I made it until midnight, I would survive the rest of the ordeal. It seemed like some of the fear left at that time.”

The rangers took heavy casualties. A number of them were taken prisoner. By the end of the battle only fifty of the more than two hundred rangers who had landed were still capable of fighting. But they never lost Pointe-du-Hoc.  Later, writers commented that it had all been a waste, since the guns had been withdrawn from the fortified area around Pointe-du-Hoc. That is wrong. Those guns were in working condition before Sergeant Lomell got to them. They had an abundance of ammunition. They were in range (they could lob their huge shells 25,000 meters) of the biggest targets in the world, the 5,000-plus ships in the Channel and the thousands of troops and equipment on Utah and Omaha Beaches.  Lieutenant Eikner was absolutely correct when he concluded his oral history, “Had we not been there we felt quite sure that those guns would have been put into operation and they would have brought much death and destruction down on our men on the beaches and our ships at sea. But by 0900 on D-Day morning the big guns had been put out of commission and the paved highway had been cut and we had roadblocks denying its use to the enemy. So by 0900 our mission was accomplished. The rangers at Pointe-du-Hoc were the first American forces on D-Day to accomplish their mission and we are proud of that.”

9 -      The British and Canadian Beaches

FOR THE BRITISH 3rd Infantry Division at Sword Beach, the critical point was five kilometers inland, at the Orne Canal and Orne River bridges. The British 6th Airborne Division had landed during the night to the east of the Orne waterways; the landings at Sword Beach extended only to the mouth of the river; if there were to be contact between the 3rd and 6th Divisions, it had to be over the Orne bridges. Maj. John Howard’s Ox and Bucks had captured both bridges right after midnight. By 0026, his concern shifted from the offense to the defense. He could expect a German counterattack at any time. He was not concerned about the safety of the river bridge because British paratroopers were scheduled to begin landing around Ranville within a half hour, and they could take care of protecting that bridge. But to the front of the canal bridge, toward the west, he had no help at all-and a countryside jammed with German troops, German tanks, German trucks. Howard sent a runner over to the river bridge, with orders for Lt. Dennis Fox to bring his platoon over to the canal bridge. When Fox arrived, Howard intended to push his platoon forward to the T-junction, as the lead platoon.

Howard knew that it would take Fox some time to call his men in from their firing positions, for Lt. Tod Sweeney to take over, and for Fox to march the quarter mile from one bridge to the other. But he could already hear tanks starting up in Le Port. They headed south along the road to Benouville. To Howard’s immense relief, the tanks did not turn at the T-junction and come down toward the bridge, but instead continued on into Benouville. He surmised that the commanders of the garrisons in the two villages were conferring. Howard knew that the tanks would be back.

Tanks coming down the T-junction were by far his greatest worry. With their machine guns and cannon, German tanks could easily drive D Company away from the bridges. To stop tanks, he had only the Piat guns, one per platoon, and the Gammon bombs. Pvt. Wally Parr came back to the CP from the west end of the bridge to report that he had heard tanks, and to announce that he was going back to the glider for the Piat. “Good man,” Howard said.  Parr went down the embankment, climbed into the glider, and “I couldn’t see a bloody thing, could I? There was no flashlight. I started scrambling around and at last I found the Piat.” Parr picked it up, tripped over some ammunition, sprawled, got up again, and discovered the barrel of the Piat had bent. The gun was useless. Parr threw it down, grabbed some ammunition, and returned to the CP to tell Howard that the Piat was kaput.

Howard yelled at one of Lt. Sandy Smith’s men to go to his glider and get that Piat. S. Sgt. Jim Wallwork trudged by, loaded like a packhorse, carrying ammunition up to the forward platoons. Howard looked at Wallwork’s blood-covered face and thought, That’s a strange color camouflage to be wearing at night. To Wallwork, he said, “You look like a bloody red Indian.” Wallwork explained about his cuts-by this time, Wallwork thought he had lost his eye-and went about his business.

At 0130, Howard could hear tanks approaching. He was desperate to establish radio communication with Fox, but could not. Then he saw a tank swing slowly, ever so slowly, toward the bridge, its great cannon sniffing the air like the trunk of some prehistoric monster. “And it wasn’t long before we could see a couple of them about twenty-five yards apart moving very, very slowly, quite obviously not knowing what to expect when they got down to the bridges.” Everything was now at stake and hung in the balance. If the Germans retook the canal bridge they would then drive on to overwhelm Sweeney’s platoon at the river bridge. There they could set up a defensive perimeter, bolstered by tanks, so strong that the 6th Airborne Division would find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to break through. In that case, the division would be isolated, without antitank weapons to fight off Luck’s armor. It sounds overly dramatic to say that the fate of the more than ten thousand fighting men of the 6th Airborne depended on the outcome of the forthcoming battle at the bridge, but we know from what happened to the 1st Airborne that September at Arnhem that this was in fact exactly the case.

Beyond the possible loss of the 6th Airborne, it stretches matters only slightly to state that the fate of the invasion as a whole was at risk on John Howard’s bridge. We have the testimony of Luck himself on this subject. He contends that if those bridges had been available to him, he could have crossed the Orne waterways and thrown his regiment into the late-afternoon D-Day counterattack.  That attack, by the 192nd Regiment of 21st Panzer, almost reached the beaches.  Luck feels that had his regiment also been in that attack, 21st Panzer would have surely driven to the beaches. A panzer division loose on the beaches, amidst all the unloading going on, could have produced havoc with unimaginable results.

Enough speculation. The point has been made-a great deal was at stake up there at the T-junction. Fittingly, as so much was at stake, the battle at the bridge at 0130 on D-Day provided a fair test of the British and German armies of World War II. Each side had advantages and disadvanatages. Howard’s opponents were the company commanders in Benouville and Le Port. Like Howard, they had been training for more than a year for this moment. They had been caught by surprise, but the troops at the bridge had been their worst troops, not much of a loss. In Benouville, the 1st Panzer Engineering Company of the 716th Infantry Division, and in Le Port, the 2nd Engineers, were slightly better quality troops. The whole German military tradition, reinforced by orders, compelled them to launch an immediate counterattack. They had the platoons to do it with and the armored vehicles. What they did not have was a sure sense of the situation because they kept getting conflicting reports.

Howard was commanding British troops, every one of them from the United Kingdom and every man among them a volunteer who was superbly trained. They were vastly superior to their opponents. Except for Fox and the crippled Smith, Howard was without officers, but he personally enjoyed one great advantage over the German commanders. He was in his element in the middle of the night-fresh, alert, capable of making snap decisions, getting accurate reports from his equally fresh and alert men. The German commanders were confused, getting conflicting reports, tired, and sleepy. Howard had placed his platoons exactly where he had planned to put them, with three on the west side to meet the first attacks, two in reserve on the east side (including the sappers), and one at the river bridge. Howard had seen to it that his antitank capability was exactly where he had planned to put it, right up at the T-junction. By way of contrast, the German commanders were groping, hardly sure of where their own platoons were, unable to decide what to do.

But, as noted, the Germans had the great advantage of badly outgunning Howard.  They had a half-dozen tanks to his zero. They had two dozen trucks, and a platoon to fill each one, to Howard’s six platoons and no trucks. They had artillery, a battery of 88mms, while Howard had none. Howard did not even have Gammon bombs. Hand-thrown grenades were of little or no use against a tank because they usually bounced off and exploded harmlessly in the air. Bren and Sten guns were absolutely useless against a buttoned-down tank. The only weapon Howard had to stop those tanks was Sgt. Wagger Thornton’s Piat gun. That gun, and the fact that he had trained D Company for precisely this moment, the first contact with tanks. He felt confident that Thornton was at the top of his form, totally alert, not the least bothered by the darkness or the hour, and that Thornton was fully proficient in the use of a Piat, that he knew precisely where he should hit the lead tank to knock it out.

Others were not quite so confident. Sandy Smith recalled “hearing this bloody thing, feeling a sense of absolute terror, saying, ‘My God, what the hell am I going to do with these tanks coming down the road?’ “ Billy Gray, who had taken up a position in an unoccupied German gun pit, remembered: “Then the tank came down the road. We thought that was it, you know, no way were we going to stop a tank. It was about twenty yards away from us, because we were up on this little hillock, but it did give a sort of field of fire straight up the road. We fired up the road at anything we could see moving.”

Gray was tempted to fire at the tank. Most men in their first hour of combat would have done so. But, Gray said, paying a tribute to his training, “I didn’t fire at the tank.” Gray, along with all Howard’s men on the west side of the bridge, held fire. They did not, in short, reveal their positions, thus luring the tanks into the killing zone.

Howard had expected the tanks to be preceded by an infantry reconnaissance patrol-that was the way he would have done it-but the Germans had neglected to do so. Their infantry platoons were following the two tanks. So the tanks rolled forward, ever so slowly, the tankers unaware that they had already crossed the front line.

The first Allied company in the invasion was about to meet the first German counterattack. It all came down to Thornton and the German tankers. The tankers’ visibility was such that they could not see Thornton, half buried as he was under that pile of equipment. Thornton was about thirty yards from the T-junction, and, he says today, “I don’t mind admitting it, I was shaking like a bloody leaf!” He could hear the tank coming toward him. He fingered his Piat.  “The Piat actually is a load of rubbish, really,” Thornton says. “The range is around about fifty yards and no more. You’re a dead loss if you try to go farther. Even fifty yards is stretching it, very much so. Another thing is that you must never, never miss. If you do, you’ve had it, because by the time you reload the thing and cock it, which is a bloody chore on its own, everything’s gone, you’re done. It’s indoctrinated into your brain that you mustn’t miss.” Thornton had taken his position as close to the T-junction as he could get because he wanted to shoot at the shortest possible distance. “And sure enough, in about three minutes, this bloody great thing appears. I was more hearing it than seeing it, in the dark; it was rattling away there, and it turned out to be a Mark IV tank coming along pretty slowly, and they hung around for a few seconds to figure out where they were. Only had two of the bombs with me. Told myself, ‘You mustn’t miss.’ Anyhow, although I was shaking, I took an aim and bang, off it went.”

The tank had just turned at the T-junction. “I hit him round about right bang in the middle. I made sure I had him right in the middle. I was so excited and so shaking I had to move back a bit.”

Then all hell broke loose. The explosion from the Piat bomb penetrated the tank, setting off the machine-gun clips, which started setting off grenades, which started setting off shells. As Glenn Gray points out in his bookThe Warriors, one of the great appeals of war is the visual display of a battlefield, with red, green, or orange tracers skimming about, explosions going off here and there, flares lighting up portions of the sky. But few warriors have ever had the opportunity to see such a display as that at the T-junction on D-Day.  The din, the light show, could be heard and seen by paratroopers many kilometers from the bridge. Indeed, it provided an orientation and thus got them moving in the right direction.

When the tank went off, Fox took protection behind a wall. He explained, “You couldn’t go very far because whizbang a bullet or shell went straight past you, but finally it died down, and incredibly we heard this man crying out. Ole Tommy Klare couldn’t stand it any longer and he went straight out up to the tank and it was blazing away and he found the driver had got out of the tank still conscious, was laying beside it, but both legs were gone. He had been hit in the knees getting out, and Klare, who was always kind, he was an immensely strong fellow-back in barracks he once broke a man’s jaws by just one blow for getting on his nerves-and Tommy hunched this poor old German on his back and took him to the first-aid post. I thought it was useless of course, but, in fact, I believe the man lived.” He did, but only for a few more hours. He turned out to be the commander of the 1st Panzer Engineering Company.  The fireworks show went on and on-all told it lasted for more than an hour-and it helped convince the German company commanders that the British were present in great strength. Indeed, the lieutenant in the second tank withdrew to Benouville, where he reported that the British had six-pounder antitank guns at the bridge. The German officers decided that they would have to wait until dawn and a clarification of the situation before launching another counterattack.  John Howard had won the battle of the night.

Through the night the lead tank smoldered, right across the T-junction, thus blocking movement between Benouville and Le Port, and between Caen and the coast. An argument can therefore be made that Sergeant Thornton had pulled off the single most important shot of D-Day because the Germans badly needed that road. Thornton himself is impatient with any such talk. When I had completed my interview with him, and had shut off the tape recorder, he remarked: “Whatever you do in this book, don’t go making me into a bloody hero.” To which I could only think to reply, “Sergeant Thornton, I don’t make heroes. I only write about them.”