War Stories III (31 page)

506th Parachute Infantry Regiment,
101 st Airborne Division
Cotentin Peninsula, France
6 June 1944

In February of '43, I was a brand-new resident at Bellevue Hospital, and decided to volunteer for service before I got drafted. I volunteered for the paratroops because I thought it would be more exciting than the Army Air Force. It was certainly exciting.

After initial training at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, then parachute training at Fort Benning, Georgia, we formed up as a Parachute Infantry Regiment shipped out of New York for England on 5 September 1943.

We trained in England from then until D-Day, doing field exercises, training, and five or six practice parachute jumps. On field exercises we'd
head out at night and march thirty-five miles or so—and it was good that we did—it kept us in shape.

While we were in England all our mail was censored. My mother was a widow and worried about me as her only child. She thought I ought to have my head examined for joining the paratroopers.

About a week before D-Day, our battalion was sent by train down to an airfield near Exeter, on the south coast of England, where we were put behind barbed wire enclosure. No one could come or go. That's when we were briefed on where we were going right down to the smallest detail, with maps, aerial photos, and sand tables. Each unit was assigned a mission and various objectives.

The battalion I jumped with was supposed to seize two bridges across the Douve River and stop the Germans from bringing their armor against Utah Beach. They told us we'd only be in combat for a week. That turned into six weeks.

At about five o'clock on the afternoon of the fifth, General Maxwell Taylor, the Division Commander, told us that we were going that night. Our battalion commander gave us a pep talk, said a prayer, and we broke up to pack our gear and draw our parachutes. We got down to the C-47s at about seven o'clock and spent the next few hours getting buckled up, arranging our jump equipment and boarding the planes. Like everyone else, I was carrying about 100 pounds of equipment—in my case, medical gear, food, water, and a canteen of medical alcohol.

We took off about ten-thirty at night and circled awhile, so that the twenty-four C-47s carrying our battalion could get into formation and then head south over the Channel. The weather was okay that night, and a lot of the men were sleeping, some smoked cigarettes, and of course, most of us were pretty scared.

It was a quiet flight until we hit the coast of Normandy. Then, all hell broke loose. The anti-aircraft and small arms fire from the ground was tremendous.

Our planes were supposed to stay in formation at an elevation of 500 feet, but these pilots were green and started to take evasive action by flying
in all different directions. And instead of slowing down when they approached our drop zones, they speeded up. And, we were being thrown all around the plane while we were flying over this flak. After a half hour of this we were all very anxious to get out.

The jump master is supposed to turn on a red light when the pilot tells him we're approaching the drop zone—so that we can stand up and hook up our static lines and then turn on a green light as the signal to jump. Well in this case it seemed like there was less than a minute between the red and green lights and we went out at between 400 and 500 feet going very fast. It occurred to me that I was one of the “old men” on that jump. My birthday was June 1—I was twenty-eight years old.

When I came out of the plane, there was a terrific opening shock as the parachute popped open because we're going so fast and carrying so much equipment. The ground fire was so bad that I pulled up my feet to dodge the tracer bullets coming up. It was an inferno beneath us and in the thirty seconds or so it took to hit the ground, I thought I was going to get killed right off the bat.

I landed in a flooded field about two miles from where our drop zone was supposed to be. Some of the guys were dropped as much as twelve miles from where they were supposed to land. I came down in water up to my hips—in an area that the Germans had flooded since our last aerial photographs had been taken.

I was worried about drowning—and then about being spotted by the Germans. I was in such a hurry to get out of my chute, that I cut my hand with my trench knife. After wading around for a few minutes dragging my wet equipment, I found three other men from my outfit.

We headed toward a fire in the distance, thinking it was a burning plane—but it turned out to be Germans and they opened fire on us. We all flopped back into the water and got separated. I spent the next three days trying to get back to where my battalion was supposed to be holding these two bridges—but I had to cross this elevated road that ran between Cherbourg and Carentan. There was a lot of German traffic on it and I
had to hide out, using my little “cricket” clicker—which all of us had—hoping to link up with anyone from my unit.

On the morning of the third day, the 4th Division broke through to where I was and I finally got linked up with about 115 of our men who had made it to the bridges we were to hold. That's all that made it out of 700 men in the battalion.

Our casualties were very high. Our battalion commander and executive officer were both killed on the jump. All four of our company commanders and all four first sergeants were either killed or captured. The other medical officer was captured. So, it was a very bad situation.

We were further away from the beach than anybody and we had landed right in the midst of a German Parachute Division. Then we were attacked by Panzer Grenadiers. If General Bradley hadn't reinforced us with some tanks from 2nd Armor Division, none of us would have made it back. At the end of the tank-infantry fight, “Bloody Gulch” was littered with American and German wounded and dead.

After we were relieved at Carentan, we moved back down to the beach, loaded on an LST, and returned to England. There we re-fitted, got replacements, and trained some more. Our next combat operation was the daylight jump into Holland for Operation Market Garden in September. We also fought at Bastogne during the “Battle of the Bulge” in December. We took a lot of casualties in all of those battles.

•
0100
U.S. and Royal Navy warships in the van of the Allied armada called all hands to General Quarters as a flotilla of tiny minesweepers began clearing sea lanes into the invasion beaches.

•
0200
The first Allied bombers took off from bases in England to pound targets around the beachheads.

•
0300
Thousands of British and American troops aboard Horsa and Waco gliders began descending on fields and roads up to ten miles inland to reinforce the paratroopers.

•
0309
One of the few German radars that was still operable detected the invasion fleet off Le Havre. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, comfortable in the chateau he occupied at Saint-Germain outside of Paris, declined recommendations by his staff to start moving Panzers toward Normandy.

•
0330
Agents of the French resistance “
Centurie
” network were at work cutting both civilian and German military telephone and telegraph lines, sowing confusion among various levels of command in the Wehrmacht.

•
0400
Word was passed aboard the thousands of Allied ships now gathered off the assault beaches: “Prepare to land the landing force,” the signal for 150,000 British, Canadian, and American men to start moving to their disembarkation stations and their landing craft.

•
0515
The battleships
Texas
,
Nevada
—a Pearl Harbor survivor—and
Arkansas
opened up on Omaha and Utah beaches from 11,000 yards offshore. Joining the old battlewagons closer in, the heavy cruisers
Tuscaloosa
,
Quincy,
and
Augusta
—along with more than two dozen destroyers and gunboats—began blasting German fortifications emplacements ashore.

•
0530
The naval bombardment paused for fifteen minutes for waves of heavy bombers to pass overhead for the only scheduled air strike on the beach defenses. Unfortunately, because of the cloud cover, most of the 4,400 bombs dropped on Utah beach by 276 B-26 bombers fell short and into the water. At Omaha beach it was even worse. Not a single one of the 480 B-24 Liberators dispatched on the mission hit even close to the beach or the coastal defenses. All the bombs fell well inland.

•
0630
H-hour on the American beaches—the men of E Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, 4th Division, landing on Utah beach became the first U.S. soldiers to come ashore at Normandy. Though the wind and tide had pushed them almost a mile south of their target, they encountered little opposition. By nightfall, more than 21,000 troops, 1,700 vehicles, and 2,000 tons of supplies would be ashore on Utah—at a cost of fewer than 200 casualties.

US Navy Combat Demolition Unit #46
Omaha Beach, Normandy, France
6 June 1944

A Navy lieutenant commander named Draper Kauffman convinced the Navy to form up our Combat Demolition Units. We nicknamed our team the “Tough Potatoes”—five men and an officer who were together because we wanted to be, not because we were ordered or assigned. At twenty-four, I was the “old man.” We had great
esprit de corps
and knew each other and our jobs well. We had been well trained for combat reconnaissance and demolition work. When we finished our training in Virginia, all eleven Combat Demolition units shipped to England in December 1943.

We trained in Wales and in different parts of the Bristol Channel and English Channel in all kinds of terrain and different kinds of beaches and obstacles. Because we didn't know where we might end up, we trained for a little bit of everything.

About two months before D-Day, we were given the intelligence on the different landing sites and invasion beachheads for Normandy—though the maps and charts didn't have labels as to location.

The Omaha beachhead was a crescent-shaped curve about five miles long and 300 yards wide at mean low tide. It has a twenty-six-foot tide and the Germans had placed mines and obstacles at different tide levels—from low to high tide—to rip or blow the bottom out of landing craft or amphibious ships no matter when they came in.

Our job was to blow a fifty-yard path
through
those mined obstacles, all the way up to the high water mark, and mark it with buoys so that that the landing forces coming behind us could get ashore without hitting a mine. After the mines were cleared, we were to go in and remove booby traps on the beach. And after the beachhead was established, we were supposed to clear the ravines above the beach so that the troops could get off the beach quickly.

Our rubber boat hit the beach at mean low tide. Our explosives were made up of packs specially designed to detonate mines and flatten obstacles like the Belgian Gates that the Germans had built. We also had Bangalore torpedoes to blast through barbed wire and mine fields on the exits from the beach.

We were supposed to do all this during darkness but we were delayed getting to the beach and the Germans saw us coming. Even before we landed, their mortars knocked out some of our boats with direct hits. When we got ashore it was in a shower of machine-gun fire. They had every inch of that beach zeroed in for crossfire. The cliffs about a half-mile behind the beach were about 100 to 150 feet high and they had concrete gun emplacements inside the cliffs, firing down.

On our right and left they had their 88s—mounted in concrete pillboxes to fire down the beach. The velocity of an 88 mm projectile is so high that it would hit or go past before you heard the gun fire. As we got to shallow water we jumped out to haul our rubber boat up on the beach and a shell hit and killed my officer and two of our men. We never heard it coming.

Those of us who were left got about a third of the way up the beach, fighting strong crosscurrents. The demolition units on my right were pretty badly shot up and began to drift down to us. We took shelter as best
we could behind the obstacles that the Germans had constructed in the water and did succeed in blowing a partial gap.

We had two units completely wiped out when direct mortar hits on their boats detonated their demolition charge and killed everybody. Within that first hour we had over 50 percent casualties.

When I finally reached the high water mark at the beach, the Germans lobbed a mortar in and hit the top of an embankment, and caved it in, covering three soldiers. Without thinking, I rushed over and dug their heads out with my hands and helped them get out, not realizing I was exposing myself to machine-gun fire. That's when I got wounded.

In order to help the soldiers get off the beach, two of our Navy destroyers came into the shallows, and fired their 5-inch guns point blank into the German gun emplacements on the cliff. They used their 40 mm guns to help clear the ravines and knock out the German machine guns and mortars.

I spent the night of D-Day in a foxhole I dug out on the beach. Lots of ration cans floated ashore with the tide, so we had plenty of food. I got off the beach the fourth day because I had started passing blood from a shell concussion. I had made the mistake of going down to a hospital ship for some medication to stop the internal bleeding. And they slapped a tag on me, threw me on a litter and took me back to England. About two days in the hospital there, I started badgering the nurses and trying to donate blood—because I heard they give you three ounces of Scotch if you donate blood. They said, “Get out of here! You don't have enough blood to spare, and you're driving the nurses crazy.”

So I went back to our base. A few weeks later they put what was left of us on a transport ship and transferred us back to New York so we could get rested up to go to the Pacific theater.