Richardson held a brief debate with himself. It was obviously dangerous to go into the area. Nevertheless, “I decided that I should go. I walked in toward him, putting each foot down carefully and picked him up and carried him back.” Richardson’s men got the wounded officer on a stretcher and carried him down to an aid station on the beach.
“That was my baptism,” Richardson said. “It was the sort of behavior I expected of myself.”13
• •
Capt. George Mabry, S-3 of 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, crossed the dunes and found himself with several members of G Company caught in a minefield. Three men stepped on S-mines. Colonel Van Fleet described what happened: “Mabry had a choice: to withdraw to the beach or go after the enemy. Each alternative meant crossing the minefield. Mabry chose to charge. Firing as he ran, Mabry charged twenty-five yards to an enemy foxhole. Those Germans who resisted, he killed; the others surrendered. Next he gathered a handful of G Company men, sent for two tanks, and assaulted a large pillbox guarding the causeway at exit l.”14
Sergeant Pike of E Company joined Mabry’s group. As Mabry led the men across the causeway, headed toward Pouppeville, he caught up with Lieutenant Tighe of the 70th Tank Battalion. Tighe had lost three tanks to land mines but was moving cautiously ahead with his remaining two Shermans. Mabry put infantry in front and pushed on, urging speed because they were so exposed on the causeway and were taking mortar fire, simultaneously urging caution because of the mines. They came to a bridge over a culvert and figured it must be prepared for demolition; further, the scouts reported that they had seen some Germans duck into the culvert.
Mabry sent troops out into the flooded fields to pinch in on both sides of the culvert. The Germans surrendered without putting up a fight. Mabry had them disconnect the charges, then sent the prisoners back to the beach and pushed on.15
After the guards put the prisoners into a landing craft, to be taken back to the Bayfield for interrogation, they reported to Van Fleet. It was 0940. Van Fleet radioed General Barton on Bayfield, “I am ashore with Colonel Simmons and General Roosevelt, advancing steadily.” As new waves of landing craft came in, Van Fleet and Roosevelt sent them through the holes in the seawall with orders to move inland. Already the biggest problem they faced was congestion on the beach. There were too many troops and vehicles, not enough openings. Sporadic incoming artillery fire and the ubiquitous mines made the traffic jam horrendous. Still, at 1045 Van Fleet was able to radio Barton, “Everything is going OK.” The beach area was comparatively secure, the reserve battalions were coming ashore.16
Mabry pushed forward on the causeway. He kept cautioning his scouts. “You know,” he said to Sergeant Pike, “the paratroopers are supposed to have taken this town Pouppeville, but they may not have. Let’s not shoot any of our paratroopers.” Pike said OK.
The scouts got to the western edge of the flooded area. “We could see the bushes and a few trees where the causeway ended,” Pike recalled, “and then I saw a helmet and then it disappeared, and I told Captain Mabry that I saw a helmet up there behind those bushes and he said, ‘Could you tell if it was American or German?’ and I said, ‘I didn’t see enough, I don’t know, sir.’ ”
The men on the far end of the causeway shot off an orange flare. “And these two guys stood up and the first thing we saw was the American flag on their shoulder and it was two paratroopers. They said, ‘4th Division?’ and we said, ‘Yes.’ ”17
Lt. Eugene Brierre of the 101st was one of the two paratroopers. He greeted Pike and asked, “Who is in charge here?” Mabry came up and replied, “I am.”
Brierre said, “Well, General Taylor is right back here in Pouppeville and wants to meet you.”
It was 1110. The linkup between the 101st and 4th divisions had been achieved. Exit 1 was in American hands.18
Mabry talked to Taylor, who said he was moving out to accomplish further objectives, then proceeded through Pouppeville in the direction of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. There were forty or so dead German soldiers in Pouppeville, testimony to the fight the 101st had been engaged in. Near Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Lt. Louis Nixon of the 101st asked Mabry for a bit of help from the two tanks; Mabry detached them and they went to work (for the results, see page 304). Then it was on to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, where the Mabry force helped the paratroopers secure the town.
• •
The 4th Division and attached units were pouring ashore. Their main problem was with the sea, not the Germans. The waves were pitching the landing craft around, coming over the gunwales to hit the troops smack in the face, making many of the men so miserable they could not wait to get off. “The boats were going around like little bugs jockeying for position,” Pvt. Ralph Della-Volpe recalled. “I had had an extra, extra big breakfast thinking it would help, but I lost it.”19
So did many others. Marvin Perrett, an eighteen-year-old Coast Guardsman from New Orleans, was coxswain on a New Orleans-built Higgins boat. The thirty members of the 12th Regiment of the 4th Division he was carrying ashore had turned their heads toward him to avoid the spray. He could see concern and fear on their faces. Just in front of him stood a chaplain. Perrett was concentrating on keeping his place in the advancing line. The chaplain upchucked his breakfast, the wind caught it, and Perrett’s face was covered with undigested eggs, coffee, and bits of bacon.
One of Perrett’s crew dipped a bucket in the Channel and threw the water over his face. “How’s that, skipper?”, he asked.
“That was great,” Perrett replied. “Do it again.” The crew member did, and the infantrymen broke into laughter. “It just took the tension right away,” Perrett said.20
Sgt. John Beck of the 87th Mortar Battalion had taken seasickness pills. They did not work; he threw up anyway. But they had an unintended effect—he fell asleep while going in.
“The explosion of shells awakened me as we approached the coast,” he remembered. “My best friend, Sgt. Bob Myers from New Castle, Pa., took a number of those pills and it drove him out of his mind. He didn’t become coherent until the next day. He made the invasion of Normandy and doesn’t remember one thing about it!”21
(Who decided to hand out those pills is one of the mysteries of D-Day. They were also given to the airborne troopers, many of whom complained later that the only effect they had was to make them drowsy. They had not been used in any of the practice runs, many of which had been in water as rough as on June 6.)
As the flat-bottomed, square-bowed landing craft slammed into the waves, one anonymous green-faced GI summed up the feelings of all his buddies: “That s.o.b. Higgins—he hasn’t got nothing to be proud of, inventing this boat!”22
• •
Col. Russell “Red” Reeder was CO of the 12th Infantry, scheduled to land at 1030. For the first four hours of the invasion, therefore, he was watching from an LCI six kilometers out, not seeing much because of the smoke and haze. “The hands on my watch would not move,” he wrote. “The time from six thirty until we landed at ten thirty was the longest four hours I ever spent.” The 12th was supposed to land north of the 8th, but the coxswains followed the orders from Roosevelt to bring the follow-up waves in behind the 8th Regiment, which put the 12th two kilometers south of where it expected to be.
“It don’t matter,” Colonel Reeder declared when he discovered the error. “We know where to go!”
Reeder led his men through a hole in the seawall to the top of the dune, where he saw Roosevelt.
“Red, the causeways leading inland are all clogged up,” Roosevelt yelled. “Look at it! A procession of jeeps and not a wheel turning.” To Reeder, “Roosevelt looked tired and the cane he leaned on heightened the impression.”23
Reeder’s immediate objective was St.-Martin-de-Varreville, where he hoped to effect a linkup with the 82nd Airborne. Off to his right was exit 4, the one his regiment had been scheduled to use, but the east end of exit 2 had not been secured and was coming under fire from German artillery to the north, the battery of four 155mm cannon at
St.-Marcouf. He could move his regiment right to the causeway, then use it to cross the flooded fields. But if he did that, his men would be exposed and under observation. Using causeway 2 was out of the question; it was jammed with jeeps, tanks, trucks, and troops. His option was to cross the inundated area to reach St.-Martin-de-Varreville.
Reeder made his decision. “We are going through the flooded area,” he yelled. He saw Lt. Col. Charles “Chuck” Jackson, CO of his 1st Battalion, and gave him an arm signal. Jackson had just made the same judgment and set off immediately.24
Sgt. Clifford Sorenson was with Jackson. He recalled that “aerial reconnaissance had estimated that the flooded area was maybe ankle deep, except in the irrigation ditches, which they estimated to be about eighteen inches deep. Well, they made a big mistake. That flooded area was in some places up to your waist and the irrigation ditches were over your head. Some brave souls would swim across the irrigation ditches and throw toggle ropes back and haul the rest of us across. So much for aerial reconnaissance.”
The battalion marched through the inundated fields for nearly two kilometers. “And we waded and waded and waded,” Sorenson said. “An occasional sniper shot would be fired and didn’t hit anybody. We were mostly interested in keeping from drowning because the bottom was slick and the footing tricky. You could slip down and maybe drown with all that equipment.
“I was so angry. The Navy had tried to drown me at the beach, and now the Army was trying to drown me in the flooded area. I was more mad at our side than I was at the Germans, because the Germans hadn’t done anything to me yet.”25
It took time, three to four hours or more, to get across, but it was accomplished without loss. When the battalion reached the high ground, Reeder signaled Jackson to turn right and proceed to St.-Martin-de-Varreville. He did. The battalion reached a crossroads, where it received some artillery fire that sent the men scattering for cover. General Roosevelt came up; he had hitched a ride on the hood of a jeep that had brought him in on causeway 2. Roosevelt spotted Colonel Jackson.
“Well, Chuck, how are things going?” he asked. Jackson explained the situation.
“Let’s go up to the front,” Roosevelt suggested.
“We are at the front,” Jackson replied. “See those two men [about 50 meters away]. They are the leading scouts of Company A.”
“Let’s go talk to them,” Roosevelt said. They did, got the scouts moving, and the battalion followed.26 By late afternoon, the 8th Infantry and its supporting regiment, the 22nd, had hooked up with the 82nd Airborne at St.-Martin-de-Varreville and St.-Germain-de-Varreville. There they bivouacked for the night, somewhat short of their D-Day objective but pleased to be inland and in contact with the 82nd.
The 12th Infantry, meanwhile, had reached its D-Day objective. Captain Mabry had moved the lead elements through Ste.-Marie-du-Mont to take up an overnight position north of Les Forges. Company K sent a reconnaissance platoon forward to Chef-du-Pont to establish contact with the 82nd Airborne, so by dusk the 12th was in contact with both paratroop divisions.
• •
That so much had been accomplished by the attacking battalions was due in part to the support of the Navy warships. Forward observers had accompanied the 4th Division men inland and whenever they ran into enemy artillery or tanks called back to the battleships and cruisers for suppressing fire. Spotter planes did the same. The Navy poured it on.
Lt. Ross Olsen was a gunnery officer on the Nevada. “I recall that our 5-inch guns fired so much that the paint peeled off the guns and all that was left showing was the blue steel. We also had to halt the guns for awhile to clear the deck of empty shell casings. Normally these were saved for reloading but this day they were dumped over the side as they were hindering the movement of the gun turrets.”
On one occasion, Nevada got a target that required all its guns, the 14-inch as well as the 5-inch, to fire almost straight ahead. When Nevada unleashed the volley, it cost Olsen his hearing in his right ear and 50 percent of his left; he has worn hearing aids ever since. “The shelling also destroyed the twenty-six-foot motor whaleboat on the boat deck, knocked the door off the mess hall, peeled all the insulation material off the mess hall bulkhead, and broke almost every light bulb in the overhead fixtures on the port-side.”27
Badly wounded men, German as well as American, were being brought out to the big ships by the returning landing craft. Pharmacist Mate Vincent del Giudice was on the Bayfield. He was busy all day, tending to many men, but two stuck especially in his mind. One was a Mexican-American GI who had the terrible experience of stepping on two S-mines simultaneously. German medics had treated him by putting tourniquets on both legs and both arms, but they had been driven off by an American patrol and left him in the field. He was picked up by some GI stretcher-bearers and transported back to the Bayfield, but they had failed to remove the tourniquets and gangrene had set in.
Del Giudice assisted in amputating one leg below the knee, the other above, and both arms. The soldier also had abdominal wounds which Del Giudice debrided.
“It was a sad sight,” Del Giudice said. “The man did not complain. He had a look of resignation on him. He came out of his anesthesia, looked at his four stumps, closed his eyes and went back to sleep.”
Later, Del Giudice tended a wounded German corporal, “tall, thin, a rather handsome chap with blond hair. He had been wounded on his right hand and all five fingers were dangling and his hand and fingers were blackened.” Del Giudice amputated his fingers with scissors, put sulfa powder on his hand, “and for my effort I got a smile and a ’danke schön!’ ”28
• •
Lieutenant Jahnke was in an improvised dugout on the dunes, firing with his rifle at the incoming Americans. A tank spotted him and blasted the dugout with its 75 mm cannon. Jahnke was buried alive. He felt someone dragging him out. It was a GI.
Jahnke had won an Iron Cross on the Eastern Front. His instinct was to get away—anything rather than captivity. He saw a machine pistol on the ground and dove for it. The American pushed it aside and in a calm voice said, “Take it easy, German.”
The GI sent Jahnke, hands clasped over his head, to a POW enclosure on the beach. There Jahnke was wounded again by shrapnel from an in-coming German shell.29
• •
Seabee Orval Wakefield was up by the seawall. He said that “by middle afternoon the beach had changed from nothing but obstacles to a small city. It was apparent that we NCD units had done our job well because as far as I could see to one side the beach was all the way opened, there was nothing holding the landing craft back. We figured our day was well spent, even though no one ever knew who we were.
“We were being questioned. ‘Who are you guys? What do you do?’ The coxswains didn’t like us because we always had so many explosives with us. When we were inland, the Army officers wanted to know what is the Navy doing in here.”
An Army medical officer spotted Wakefield’s team and said he needed volunteers to carry wounded men down to the shore for evacuation to a hospital ship. “He said, ‘Are you guys going to just sit here or are you going to volunteer?’ We didn’t think much about that idea, we had just come off the hot end of the demolition wire but finally we did volunteer to do it for him. We carried the wounded down to the shore. German shells were still coming in.”
By this time, Wakefield noted, “it was no longer a rush of men coming ashore, it was a rush of vehicles.” Then he saw a never-to-be-forgotten sight: “All of a sudden it seemed like a cloud started from the horizon over the ocean and it came toward us and by the time it got to us it extended clean back to the horizon. Gliders were coming, to be turned loose inland.”30
Reinforcements were pouring in from the sea and from the air. Utah Beach was secure. In the morning, the Americans would move out to cut the base of the Cotentin, to take Cherbourg, to get on with the job of winning the war so they could go home.
At dusk, Wakefield “had my most important thought that day.” Wading i
nto chest-deep water at first light that morning, “I found that my legs would hardly hold me up. I thought I was a coward.” Then he had discovered that his sea bags with their explosives had filled with water and he was carrying well over 100 pounds. He had used his knife to cut the bags and dump the water, then moved on to do his job. “When I had thought for a moment that I wasn’t going to be able to do it, that I was a coward, and then found out that I could do it, you can’t imagine how great a feeling that was. Just finding out, yes, I could do what I had volunteered to do.”
• •
Overall, casualties were astonishingly light. The 8th and 22nd regiments had only twelve men killed, another 106 wounded. For the 12th Regiment, the figure was sixty-nine casualties. Nearly all were caused by mines, either sea or land, mostly those devilish S-mines. The 4th Division had taken heavier losses in training (in the disaster at Slapton Sands, it lost almost twenty times as many men as it did on June 6).
Equally astonishing was the speed with which the 4th Division and its attached units got ashore. This was thanks to the organization, training, and skill of all those involved, whether Army, Navy, Army Air Force, or Coast Guard. They overcame logistical problems that seemed insurmountable. On D-Day, in fifteen hours, the Americans put ashore at Utah more than 20,000 troops and 1,700 motorized vehicles. General Jodl had estimated that it would take the Allies six or seven days to put three divisions into France. At Utah alone, counting the airborne divisions, the Americans had done it in one day.
D-Day was a smashing success for the 4th Division and its attached units. Nearly all objectives were attained even though the plan had to be abandoned before the first assault waves hit the beach. By nightfall, the division was ready to move out at first light on June 7 for its next mission, taking Montebourg and then moving on to Cherbourg. It went on to fight battles far more costly than the one it won on the Cotentin beach on June 6, distinguishing itself throughout the campaign in northwest Europe, especially in taking Cherbourg, in holding the German counteroffensive at Mortain, in the liberation of Paris, in the Hürtgen Forest, and in the Battle of the Bulge.31
The Men of World War II Page 72