by Ray Lambert
By now, the regimental medical team headed by Dr. Tegtmeyer had come in. Realizing that our bit of the beach could not provide enough protection for a regimental aid station, they moved east, hoping for a place out of the worst of the gunfire. They eventually found a pillbox that had been knocked out; that became our first aid station, a few hundred yards from the rock and a little beyond the area I’d spotted earlier.
Those few hundred yards must have felt like a thousand miles to the walking wounded we sent that way, and even farther to the stretcher bearers. But it was the only thing to do.
By the third wave in, we were making progress, but it was difficult to tell from where I was, as the defenders were still killing our guys as they came in. G Company—my brother’s—had a boat where every man on it was killed before they got out.
Every man.
Fortunately, my brother Bill was on another craft. But he, too, got hit shortly after landing, and by now was lying near the edge of the surf. Though we were maybe less than a hundred yards from each other as I scrambled and stumbled back and forth, I had no idea that he had been hit.
The leader of G Company, Captain Dawson, was climbing the ridge near the machine gun I’d used as a landmark on the right. Initially stuck by barbed wire in front of a ditch or tank trap, Dawson’s team blew a hole through with a Bangalore torpedo, then worked their way up until Dawson, at one point, found himself stymied by another machine gun. He backtracked, went around, and got under the gunner.
Two grenades silenced the gun. The rest of the defenses there would soon be neutralized, opening an exit from the beach. But while the Germans had now lost key defenses on the hill, there were more scattered around, and plenty of artillery behind the bluff. Shells and gunfire continued to rain down on us.
At du Hoc, the Rangers had begun climbing the cliffs in front of the massive gun emplacements. When they reached the top, they engaged a small force there. In close fighting, they killed a number of men in the trenches, and got others to surrender after locking down the only exit from the bunker.
It turned out that the big guns weren’t at the top of the cliff, or in a position to fire at all. The battery had been undergoing renovations. The Germans were changing the open gun emplacements to covered ones, and had taken the guns off their pedestals. The Rangers found them in a field nearby and quickly destroyed them. Then they returned to mop up a neighboring defensive site.
* * *
To the east of Pointe du Hoc on “Easy Green,” another group of Rangers and the 116th Regiment were ashore after a confused landing that saw only one boat hit the right spot. Battered by gunfire and forced to wade or swim a hundred yards or more to shore, many of the men lost their weapons. Once on land, many found protection at a seawall, temporarily paralyzed by the heavy gunfire.
More landing craft came in, but the landings remained scattered throughout the morning. Slowly, and under constant fire, the 116th began to organize. An attack on one of the draws that led to an exit at the west end of the beach was too light to succeed; the troops regrouped.
Nearly all of the DD tanks that were to come in on Omaha had floundered. Most of our 105-millimeter howitzers, which could have provided considerable firepower ashore, hadn’t made it either. With one exception, every gun of the 111th Field Battery sank offshore. The losses in the 7th Field Artillery Battalion and the 58th Armored Field Artillery Battalion weren’t quite as bad, but we still lacked significant artillery on the beach.
* * *
Aboard the command ship Augusta, General Omar Bradley and his staff were becoming concerned. Reports from Omaha were sparse, a bad sign in itself. And as each minute passed, it became clearer and clearer that the landing’s first objectives were not being met.
General Bradley would soon face a gut-wrenching decision: Should he give up on the landing, withdraw, and concentrate on Utah, where things seemed to be going considerably better? Or should he carry on with Omaha, doubling down with whatever reserves he could muster?
Either way, a lot more men were going to die. Each one would be on his conscience for the rest of his life.
* * *
Working my way across the beach, I found a man with a badly wounded arm. He was conscious, but bleeding so badly that I knew he was going to die.
I picked him up anyway, got him out of the water and over near the rock.
He looked at me with the question everyone asked.
“You’re going to be okay,” I lied.
I put him down and went on with my work.
The Ramp
More boats were coming in; it must have been the fourth wave arriving by now.
I waded out, knowing what was going to happen, hoping things might be getting easier. A few yards away I saw a man out in the water; alive or dead, I couldn’t tell. I went out to him and found him breathing. He was alive, wounded but not so seriously. But he looked too spent to swim.
The water might have been four feet deep. I got him with my left arm, hooking it around his.
While I’d been checking on him, a landing craft had raced over in our direction. Facing the beach, I didn’t see it. Just as we started to move toward land, that landing craft dropped its ramp directly on us.
We went straight to the bottom, pummeled by hundreds of pounds of metal, then held there, pinned against the sand and rocks.
I’m going to die.
This is how I’m going to die.
I knew I was going to drown. I fought, but how do you fight some 26,000 pounds of steel, oak, and men?
The difference between life and death on that beach was slimmer than a hair. We’ll never know how many guys survived because of some fluke of fate or twist in the wind. By the same token, we can’t guess how many died for the same reason.
As I struggled below the water, pinned and hopeless, pushing against one of my own boats, a miracle happened:
The ramp went back up.
Free!
I suddenly shot to the surface, gulping for air.
The guy I’d come to save was still hooked on my arm. I leaned forward, hurting so bad that I sank to my hands and knees and crawled my way to the beach, dragging the GI with me. The fourth and fifth vertebrae of my back had been broken; I didn’t know the details, but I sure knew the pain.
Meyers met me.
“I’m not going to be able to go any further!” I shouted. I told him to keep taking men to the rock, and to send the walking wounded to the aid station.
Then I passed out.
Ten
Deliverance
Every Man a Hero
My fate then could have been the fate of so many others at that precise moment. Suffering from the loss of blood, back broken, leg torn open, and a hole in my arm, I could have easily slipped from unconsciousness to death.
Why I didn’t is part mystery and part easy to explain. The easy half was my men—the medics around me saved me as I had saved others, checking my wounds, making sure I was stable, sheltering me from more calamity.
The mystery is everything else.
Especially this: why did the ramp on the LCVT pull back up and release me from the bottom?
Had it stayed down for only a few seconds more, I surely would have drowned, as would the man I’d come to save. That was a moment of fate. It passed in an instant, without time to be examined or questioned. It passed then, but remains present with me now, present always, an inscrutable fact I return to contemplate again and again.
Why did the ramp go back up?
Maybe the landing craft had come in at the wrong place on the beach. Dropping the ramp gave the men aboard a clear line of sight, they alerted the coxswain, and he backed out.
Maybe the ramp and boat swung with the waves or the wind, and that freed me. Maybe I owe my salvation to Nature rather than a man.
Maybe it was luck, good and bad mixed together. Maybe it has no meaning, just the interplay of chance. But I’ve come to believe God had a hand in it. For whatever reason, I was meant to surv
ive that day. I was meant to do other things after storming the beach and helping my men.
I’m still working on what all those things may be.
* * *
I never found out what happened to the other fellow. But that’s true of everyone else I helped on that beach that morning.
Surely, our paths have crossed. I’ve met them, and they’ve met me at the division and regiment reunions, at other events, maybe even in the supermarket. But the madness of those hours on the beach makes it impossible for us to recognize each other. I don’t think you would even recognize your own grandma coming in, let alone recognize her years later as the person you helped.
There was so much gunfire, there were so many explosions, so many wounds. Men speak of being saved, but can’t identify their savior.
And that’s all right. In a way, it’s better. Every medic who did his job that day was a savior; every man a hero.
Gaining Control
I have no idea how long I lay unconscious. It was at least an hour, probably several hours.
A lot happened during that time.
First to me. Someone pulled me in behind the rock and made sure I was no longer bleeding too badly from my wounds. He wrapped my wounds, took care to protect me. Then he ran off to help someone else.
Meanwhile, small groups of GIs had managed to get off the beach and were slowly eliminating the enemy machine gun nests and other defenses on the bluff. But it was hard to tell from the beach. Smoke and confusion permeated the battlefield; you couldn’t see enough of what was happening to tell exactly what was going on.
Back on the Augusta, where General Bradley and his staff were overseeing the operation, the first reports from Omaha were dire. Then things got even worse—no reports came back. As the morning went on, Bradley began to fear the worst. He had limited resources and reserves; throwing them into a hopeless battle could easily doom not just the overall invasion, but the conquest of Germany itself.
On the other hand, pulling out might doom the invasion as well. And it certainly would doom the men that would have to be left behind.
Desperate for an assessment he could trust, Bradley turned to one of his aides, Captain Chet Hansen. He told him to take a PT boat into the beach area and report back.
A bit like being told to drive over to Hell and see if Satan was still around.
Hansen did just that. The little boat ducked around exploding shells and got close enough to see that GIs were climbing through the bluff. Things might not be going according to plan, but they were going.
Hansen reported back. The battle at Omaha Beach continued.
* * *
The German force we faced at the water’s edge was the 352nd Division. Intelligence had predicted we’d go up against only a regiment, not a division, and an overstretched one at that. With a few exceptions, the Germans were ably led and well trained. The crisscrossing defenses, the well-placed guns on the bluff, the coordination of the artillery and mortars behind the front line, all made Easy Red a killing zone.
1st Division persevered. After they took out strongpoints I’d used as landmarks in my mind in the first hour, the men with Captain Dawson and Lieutenant Spalding of the 2nd Battalion secured the hillside around them. Others followed. NCOs and lieutenants, squad leaders and platoon heads took the initiative to gather forces and lead them onward. In many instances, the men they led were not the ones ordinarily assigned to them. But they were making the most of the situation, acting out of native courage and training.
After a temporary halt in the landings as the beachhead got crowded around 0830, more reinforcements began arriving. Tanks now, and vehicles, as well as men and gear. The Germans in the middle of our front called for their own reinforcements; they were unavailable. Continuing to engage the Germans with everything from hand grenades to shells launched from battleships that weighed over eighty tons, we wore the Nazis down.
By 1130, the naval gunfire, fresh troops, and heavier weapons forced the Germans at the beach exit near Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer to surrender. To the left of the machine gun I’d marked on the eastern end of the sector when we came in, this was a clear path off the beach.
Once open, troops began pouring through. The momentum of the battle dramatically shifted; the 16th Infantry Regiment had taken the fight inland.
* * *
Omaha wasn’t the only place Americans were making progress after some initial rounds of confusion.
Over on Utah Beach, our former assistant division commander General Ted Roosevelt was among the men who had been deposited as far as two thousand yards from their objective. This bit of bad luck had two bright spots:
One, the sizeable contingent of soldiers happened to land away from the main German force, which made for an easy landing.
Two, Roosevelt was not the sort of leader to stand around and fret over bad fortune.
At that moment, he was the only American general not only at Utah but on any French soil. He had not only volunteered but insisted on accompanying his troops, winning reluctant permission after making a nuisance of himself. And he hadn’t done that to get stuck in the wrong place miles from their objectives.
Stomping around the beach in his trademark wool cap—the general disliked helmets—Roosevelt gathered the commanders who’d come in with him and plotted strategy. They could have gone back out to sea and gotten to the right place. Or . . .
“We’ll fight from here,” the general is supposed to have said. And they did.
Following his lead, the men cleared two paths off the beach, marched through flooded fields, and headed toward a key road onshore, achieving their objective with light resistance from the Germans.
Roosevelt’s exploits that day were recognized with the Medal of Honor.
Meanwhile, other landings along Utah brought in more troops, these in the right spot, or at least closer to their targets. By the time I fell unconscious, the beach had been largely cleared of obstacles. Landing craft rolled in with almost no enemy fire to worry about.
The Utah landings had been a late addition to the D-Day plan, added by Eisenhower because of the strategic importance of the harbor at the top of the peninsula. While weeks of heavy fighting awaited the units that came ashore, on this day the landings were a spectacular success—not bloodless, but with lighter casualties than realistically expected.
* * *
Far to our east on Sword Beach, successful operations by the British 6th Airborne Division had put bridges over the Orne River and Caen Canal in Allied hands. The paratroopers, some of whom had landed by glider, managed to destroy the bridges inland at Dives River and neutralize the German battery at Merville. They paid horribly for their success at the battery, but this allowed the British landing forces to advance. Seven of the eight paths off the water area were quickly cleared; despite heavy fighting, British units went inland quickly and hooked up with the paratroopers.
Things would become slower and tougher the farther they went. An attempt to hook up with the Canadians at Juno to their west stalled; later on, the British faced a serious counterattack from the 21st Panzer Division. The attack was the most ferocious coordinated counter by the Germans that day. The British managed to withstand it, eventually forcing the enemy tanks to withdraw.
On Juno, the Canadian 3rd Division fought through the German 716th Infantry; by ten o’clock Canadian reserves were on land, moving toward the train tracks connecting Caen and Bayeux. In the hours that followed, Canadian troops were within three miles of Caen.
DD tanks—landed conventionally in shallow water because of the rough seas—arrived in numbers at Gold Beach and played a significant role in the fight. But there, too, the weather and the usual fog of war, as well as the German defenders, played havoc with the assault in the very early going.
The tanks had trouble navigating in the muddy sand. And while some of the key big guns in the area had been hit by naval gunfire, the first wave found that much of the German defenses had largely survived the heavy bombardm
ent.
Minefields were an obstacle—but also a chance to get through defenses. “Flail tanks”—Sherman tanks with what looked like large carpet sweepers attached to their front ends—cleared paths through the mines. A tank would move to the edge of the field, then start the carpet sweeper. Forty heavy chains attached to the roller out front would spin or flail, beating the ground and igniting the mines at a safe distance from the tank.
The tanks moved slowly, less than two miles an hour, and the chains had to be replaced after little more than a dozen mines were exploded. The vehicles kicked up enough dust to rival a sandstorm, and there was always a chance that a powerful mine might injure the crew. But the nine-foot-wide paths they cleared were safe for infantry to travel through. And the American-made Shermans had not given up their 75-millimeter cannons; these, too, were put to good use against the German strongpoints.
Fighting their way off the beaches with the help of the tanks, by mid-morning the British forces were well on their way to establishing a foothold roughly five miles deep in occupied France. On the right flank, the 47th Royal Commandos sprinted off the beach soon after landing and were heading in our direction, aiming to take Port-en-Bessin and hook up with Omaha. Unfortunately, they were to find the village well defended, stalling the hookup.
So Many Heroes
These brief descriptions, and even the vast libraries of books on D-Day, can’t come close to describing what happened on the beach that day. There were so many acts of heroism, of men exposing themselves to enemy gunfire to advance, sacrificing themselves to help others—each one is a library of its own.
A dozen Medals of Honor were awarded for action that day; while that may be the largest number for a single engagement, it is a tiny fraction of the men who deserved one. The vast majority of heroes went unrewarded, at least officially.