by Ray Lambert
The front ramp rattled.
Bullets?
The noise of war—the explosions, the waves, the diesels—crescendoed.
Our boat stopped abruptly.
Go!
Go!
As the ramp dropped ahead of me I pushed over it into the water, jumping off the side. I expected the waves to hit my knees but felt them hard on my chest, pounding even my shoulders, trying to push me back.
Something hit my right arm—a shell fragment probably, or a bullet smaller than a machine gun’s. It went through my elbow, making a clean tunnel where once there had been skin and muscle.
Doesn’t hurt. Don’t stop.
I ducked and began moving awkwardly through the high water, the mud and sand below sucking at my feet.
I need to get to dry land.
Move! Faster!
The hardest thing about combat is the noise.
War sounds like nothing you’re used to in civilian life. The landing craft’s engines had shielded some of the shrieks and the awful explosions. Now I heard them fully, and felt the reverberations in my spine.
Bullets and shells rained across the deep surf. The water percolated, as if the earth were furious with us—not just us, but all of mankind.
The noise of war does more than deafen you. It’s worse than shock, more physical than something thumping against your chest. It pounds your bones, rumbling through your organs, counter-beating your heart. Your skull vibrates. You feel the noise as if it’s inside you, a demonic parasite pushing at every inch of skin to get out.
I kept moving. Stopping was not an option. It wasn’t a case of being brave or even thinking about what my job was. Stopping was dying. There wasn’t free will or even a possibility of making a decision; I just moved to the beach. That’s what I was doing.
Stopping was dying.
As I moved forward, I began focusing on a machine gun up on the bluff ahead, a little to my left. It became almost a landmark, its flashes like a beacon.
A deadly one.
Curved slightly. Not aimed at me.
Stopping was dying.
There was another machine gun on the right, some distance away. Between them, they had our sector of the beach well covered. They ground away, spitting lead at the men swarming from the boats.
There must have been other gunners on that hill, along with spotters and snipers, but the machine guns are what stand out now as I look back. The awful size of their bullets; the quick tap as the gunner touched the trigger; the holes they made in the bodies of the men I’d known and taken care of for years.
I hit a deep stretch and slipped under the water, hoping that would make it harder for anyone targeting me. The bottom rose abruptly; no longer ducking, I avoided a pair of obstructions, kept my balance somehow, pumped my legs to get more speed, any speed.
I still had that machine gun on my left. There were landing craft behind me, to both sides, men running and crawling.
A body floated nearby. The first I’d come across, or at least the first I realized was a body.
I stopped to help, but the soldier was clearly dead, facedown, torso ripped apart like a paper doll.
There were live guys moving, others floating. Those were the ones I had to care for.
I made it to the beach, dropped my pack, and got my wits about me, focusing on my job, not myself. A guy about fifty yards from me struggled in the water. His arms were up; he was yelling as a wave crashed over his shoulders.
Why didn’t he just move?
I half ran, half swam to him. I grabbed and tugged, unsure why he was paralyzed.
He remained fixed there.
He’s hung up in barbed wire!
There was a run of barbed wire along the bottom of the approach right where he was. His life preserver and pack had snagged in the barbs.
I grabbed hold of him again and pushed, trying to maneuver up as well as forward.
That didn’t work. I held my breath and ducked beneath the waves, fumbling with a hung-up strap until I was out of breath.
Didn’t work.
I took a gulp of air and ducked back down.
How can I free him?
I have to free him!
He wouldn’t come loose. Finally, I went down again, and this time realized the solution—if the life preserver wouldn’t come loose from the barbed wire, he had to come loose from the life preserver.
I pulled that and his pack off.
Gasping for air, I tugged him away. We moved toward the sand and pebbles at the shoreline, toward the raging gunfire.
There were dozens of men on the shore now, most ducking but a few firing.
The guy I’d pulled out had lost his rifle. I pointed him toward the shore as we got closer.
“Grab a gun—there’s plenty,” I told him. “Find your company or just join in.”
He must have understood, though I can’t say how he would have even heard my words in that roar. He pushed toward shore as I turned around to see who else I should help.
Visions of Hell
We talk about Omaha Beach and think about it as a broad expanse of sand, but I spent much of my time that morning in water several feet deep. That was where a lot of the wounded were. The Germans had the area well mapped for their guns. The obstructions were mined. And the ground under the water was very uneven; the depth changed within steps. With your heavy gear, even if you weren’t shot or hit by a shell, you could easily get in trouble well before touching dry sand.
The entire area was studded with obstructions; from a distance it looked like a young orchard in winter, each tree with its branches shorn off and a mine or two placed at the top. It wasn’t safe to use them as cover, and not just because many were mined or relatively narrow. The Germans on the hills above had practiced using them as targets, sighting weapons on them.
The tide kept coming in, which meant there was less and less actual beach as the minutes passed. Any spit of dry land was deadly, nearly bare of protection, and well measured by the mortars and artillery behind the bluff, to say nothing of the machine guns and riflemen we could see.
* * *
A lot of the guys had so much equipment on that they couldn’t stay upright once in the water. The life preservers were belts you put around your midsection. While they did supply buoyancy, they also threw you off balance in the water, especially if you weren’t used to them.
The guys with the worst problems often had on two belts. Weighed down with all their extra gear, it probably seemed like a good idea to add an extra life preserver to counterbalance it. But what that did was tip them like a seesaw when they got in the water. Their upper bodies had all the weight; their bottom halves were lighter. The belts ended up helping to hold their heads under. Even one belt could be a problem if you lost your balance suddenly and became disoriented.
I saw a man like that and pushed over to him. Someone else came near and together we got him upright, got the life preserver off or cut loose, and pushed him toward the dry beach.
Bodies bobbed with the tide. A wounded man crawled up out of the surf, collapsed, turned over, and stared upward, a vacant look in his eyes. A group of four men ran from a boat toward the beach. One fell to the ground, shot. A moment later, a second one fell. The first stumbled to his feet and went on; the second never moved, not under his own power, not in this lifetime.
I went back into the water, helping a couple of other guys in the surf. I came across one who’d been wounded already and pulled him into shallow enough water where I could get an idea of how bad the wound was. He was lucky—relatively. It wasn’t that bad. I got him onto land and went back.
Bandaging was tough with the water lapping at you. The soldier would be wet, the bandages would be wet, you’d be wet. I’d tuck the wrappings around the wounds as much as possible, wrapping an arm or leg or even a chest, and hope it stayed until we could get him more care.
Transfusions here were next to impossible. Things were just too wet and the gunfire too steady. The best hope in th
ose first minutes was simply to save a person from drowning and bleeding out, get him some shelter, and then hope things improved quickly so we could give further care or get him evacuated.
Many of the guys who were wounded right off the boats stopped at the edge of the water, just on the dry land, too exhausted to move any farther. That made them easy targets. Worse, with the tide coming in, they were soon in danger of drowning or being swept away. I started moving among them, and came across a fellow with a badly damaged left arm. Every time a wave came in, his arm would swing up; he’d grab it with his right arm as it swept back.
I pulled him onto the dry sand.
The only thing holding that arm on was skin. I rolled out enough bandage to tie it to his chest. Then I dragged him up along the pebbles, gave him a shot of morphine, and went back into the water.
The next guy I helped was wounded too bad to fight, but he was able to move toward shore on his own power. I helped him, looking for someplace to send him that might be a little safer than the surf. I spotted a rock—really a stubble of concrete left from some sort of fortification—nearby. It was a good bit from the water, at least at that point, and while it was only a few feet wide and probably half that high, it was the only shelter I could see anywhere nearby. I pointed him in that direction, then left to help others.
By now, the second assault wave was coming in. It was a replay of what we had gone through. I pulled guys in, sending some of the walking wounded toward that rock—only to realize that the machine gun directly above it was zeroing in on that area, tearing apart anyone who wasn’t fully protected.
This must be what hell looks like.
WN62
Ahead of me on the beach, Lieutenant John Spalding was leading E Company in the direction of the machine gun on the left I’d used as a marker. Their target was Widerstandsnest (Resistance Nest) 62, a strong point on the hill that not only had a good line of sight to the beach but also protected the key exit on that side.
Spalding and his men found their path upward blocked by heavy gunfire. They detoured, backtracking slightly and finding a way to cut through a nearby ravine that hugged the hillside, making it impossible for the gunners above to see or target them. Threading a path through a series of mines, they were stopped by fresh gunfire from above the ridge. One of the GIs got up and fired a bazooka shell at the nest; the rocket missed.
They reorganized. As covering fire from a Browning sprayed the position, the men charged upward.
They found a single man at the weapon, hands up, trying to surrender.
He turned out to be Polish, a prisoner of war impressed into the German army. Company E’s first sergeant, Philip Streczyk, who’d grown up in a Polish neighborhood in East Brunswick, New Jersey, was able to translate enough of what he was saying to realize there were other Poles with the man above, and that they, too, wanted to surrender.
Dubiously, the company moved up. The man had been telling the truth. The area around WN62 was now in their control.
* * *
I don’t know for an absolute fact that WN62 and the guns in that area included the machine gun peppering the rock on the beach where our guys were taking shelter. I do know that the firing there stopped. If Spalding, Streczyk, and the rest of E Company weren’t responsible, then I’m just as thankful for whoever else did the job.
Taking out that one set of guns didn’t make the beach a safe haven. We were still getting pounded by artillery and mortars, machine guns and rifles elsewhere on the bluffs. The other machine gun I’d spotted earlier was still peppering the right side of our sector. Men were still falling in the water, dying even as I gripped their shoulders to help pull them ashore.
I hadn’t seen any of my other guys until finally I spotted Meyers with a clump of infantrymen from his company. They were firing up at the bluff, trying to move through the barbed wire and other obstructions.
There were more machine guns scattered above. They’d pause, maybe to reload or because their barrels were hot and needed to cool down. The gunners would pick up rifles and use them, joining whatever other men were there with them.
A lot of guys were shot in the head, I guess by sharpshooters manning the cliff. Corpses—men I’d have recognized less than twenty-four hours before—floated in the water or lay scattered on the beach. Some were the engineers who’d come to blow up the obstacles. Medics had gone with them, but been cut down before they could do their work. Not a single engineer that I saw had been treated for his wounds.
Guys would sink, weighed down by their gear. Legs floated up from the bottom.
I kept going in and out. More boats. More people near drowning.
My right arm had been bleeding from whatever hit me when I landed. It got so I could hardly use the arm, even though I couldn’t feel pain.
Adrenaline.
Get the guys out of the water.
We hadn’t planned on this, running in and out of the water, helping men manage the last hundred yards or whatever to land. You especially don’t plan to treat someone in the water, or at least we didn’t. We assumed we’d be on the dry land.
But whatever you plan doesn’t matter. And there was no way I was going to set up an aid station on this section of the beach, not yet. The firepower was too great. The best I could do was that big rock.
Grab that guy. He’s alive.
The pebbles on the beach would shatter when the shells hit. The splinters would bruise as they cut, as if you were hit by a baseball bat that punched a jagged hole at the center of the wound.
I ducked away from one of those pebble showers and saw a small area on the left or east side of the beachhead, a jumble of concrete and rocks—the ruins of a jetty maybe. There was shelter, at least more than the flat, open spots directly where we’d landed.
Five or six guys were already there. It was a better spot than my rock.
Send them there.
I’d been on the beach maybe twenty minutes; that’s a guess, and not really an educated one.
A few minutes later, as I was heading toward someone with a red cross on his helmet, a shell hit nearby. I got slammed on the left side when it exploded. What hit me was a mystery, certainly then and even now. My uniform was ripped open; the flesh looked as if it had been pulverized and simply given way, exposing the tissue beneath.
Fragmentation of something. A helmet, I thought.
A boat blew up behind me. Maybe from that.
Left thigh, just above the knee, back of the leg.
Pain.
Pain!
I tore my pant leg enough to examine the wound. I worked up a tourniquet above it.
Tight.
Back in the water, I went to the nearest GI.
He was dead. I pushed him into the land and looked for someone else to help.
The cold water, I think, helped control or at least clean my wounds, but the pain was so great I had to reach into my med kit and take out one of the morphine-filled syringes.
I pushed the needle into my arm. I was beyond exhaustion. It was just a matter of time now before I gave out.
I kept going until I saw Ray Lepore, one of the medics who’d been on the landing craft with me, near the big rock. He was there with Meyers; they were going back and forth, really working, getting guys to shelter there, then working on them.
The spot on the left was better. I decided to tell them what to do, have them take over for me if—no, when—I became too weak. Which would be soon. Very soon.
You couldn’t hear much except the explosions. You’d yell and gesture, communicating that way, but it wasn’t anything close to normal conversation. It was caveman level, pointing and somehow knowing what the other person was trying to say.
Lepore grabbed a guy from the water who’d been hit in the chest. He could walk; we ushered him toward the big rock below the machine gun nest on the left.
“What can we do for him?” screamed Lepore.
Before I could come up with something, my medic and friend fell agai
nst me. His helmet spun to the ground, a foot away. A sniper’s bullet had gone straight through, killing him instantly.
Nine
Beyond Despair
Resilience
If despair was possible, it would have taken me then.
Why didn’t it?
Ask that question of every man on that beach at that hour. Get a thousand different answers, each true for each, all true for all.
Duty. Courage. Fear.
Will.
Everything I had been through, from the Depression to my father’s injury to my boyhood to my work experiences, to cutting trees to doing laundry, to joining the army, to Africa, to Sicily, to Tunisia, to Troina—not only had they brought me here, but they pushed me on, urging me to do more than I was capable of doing, able to withstand incredible pain and desperation.
To be who I was and what I was, a medic, a man assigned to help other men.
I got up and dragged Lepore’s body six or eight feet up away from the water. Then I went back to work.
The Nature of Chaos
Gradually, the nature of the chaos surrounding me changed. It was still a mad jumble of noise, fear, and explosions, of boats coming in, mortar shells landing, of screams, exploding rocks, tears, courage, and sacrifice. But slowly these things clumped themselves into patterns. It was as if an invisible carpenter’s chalk line had been snapped down for things to arrange themselves along. I began to understand the madness.
Men jumped from the boats in similar ways, again and again; they fell in different places but with the same wounds. Officers screamed the same words into the wind, then led charges that cut familiar paths.
The one constant was the noise, a mélange of screams, curses, and prayers that added timbre to the thundering explosions, the pop and snap of bullets, the whistle of passing shells. Boat engines, the pounding surf, even the wind—the sounds were amplified by adrenaline and heaving lungs. You wanted it to stop, but it was the one thing you knew must never stop, for if the beach grew quiet, it meant you’d been killed.
It’s impossible for me to put an exact time on any of what happened on the beach. As near as I can calculate, this must have been past 7:30 A.M.; whether it was closer to 8 or 8:30 or even past 9, I have no idea.