The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  • •

  Turnbull’s heroic stand allowed Krause and Vandervoort to concentrate on an even stronger counterattack from the 795th Regiment south of Ste.-Mère-Église. It was as big a counterattack as the Germans mounted on D-Day, and it was supported by 88mm guns firing from high ground south of the village.

  “The impact of the shells threw up mounds of dirt and mud,” Private Fitzgerald recalled. “The ground trembled and my eardrums felt as if they would burst. Dirt was filling my shirt and was getting into my eyes and mouth. Those 88s became a legend. It was said that there were more soldiers converted to Christianity by the 88 than by Peter and Paul combined.

  “When the firing finally stopped, it was midafternoon. We still held the town and there was talk of tanks coming up from the beaches to help us. I could not hold a razor steady enough to shave for the next few days.

  “Up until now, I had been mentally on the defensive. My introduction to combat had been a shocker but it was beginning to wear off. I found myself pissed off at the Germans, the dirt, the noise, and the idea of being pushed back.”40

  Others felt the same. When Colonel Krause sent I Company to strike at the enemy flank, it moved out aggressively. It caught a German convoy in the open and with bazookas and Gammon bombs destroyed some tanks. The accompanying German infantry withdrew under a hail of fire. “With the last light of day,” Fitzgerald said, “the last German attack came to a halt.”41

  Reinforcements came in by glider. They tried to land all around Ste.-Mère-Église, but the pilots were taking small-arms fire from the surrounding Germans and in any case the fields were too short and the hedgerows too high. Every glider seemed to end up crashing into a hedgerow.

  “I was standing in a ditch when a glider suddenly came crashing through some trees,” Lieutenant Coyle remembered. “I had not seen it coming and of course could not hear it as it made no sound. I just had time to drop face down in the ditch when the glider hit, crashed across the road, and came to rest with its wing over me. I had to crawl on my stomach the length of the wing to get out from under.”42

  Sergeant Sampson dove to the ground as a glider crashed into a hedgerow. “The tail end of the glider was sticking up at a forty-five-degree angle. I went to see if I couldn’t help. As I came up, a hole started to appear on the right side of the glider. The men were kicking out an exit. Like bees out of a hive, they came out of that hole, jumped on the ground, ran for the trees and disappeared. I tried to tell them they were in friendly country, but they passed me as if I wasn’t even there.”

  During the night, the Germans were firing flares, shooting rifles, mortars, and occasionally 88s at Ste.-Mère-Église, yelling out orders and threats at the Americans. “They seemed to be so sure of themselves,” Sampson said. “A barrage would hit us, and then they would open up with their machine pistols, yelling as if to attack. Then it would quiet down and then burst out anew. I snuggled up close to my mortar and caressed the barrel. How I wanted to fire it. But we were too intermingled; I might have hit some of our own men.

  “The enemy never came on. Maybe they thought with all their yelling and firing we would give our positions away by running. I wondered what had happened at the beaches. The infantry should have been with us by now.

  “Many things ran through my mind. I was afraid the invasion had been a failure. I was thinking of my country and the people we were trying to help. I was almost certain I would never see daylight again. I can’t say I was afraid. I just wanted a chance to take as many Jerries with me as possible. I wanted them to come where I could see them. I wanted to see a pile of them in front of me before they got me. It would have been so much easier dying that way.”43

  • •

  Ste.-Mère-Église was secure, if barely. The official history records this as “the most significant operation of the 82d Airborne Division on D-Day.”44 Another victory for the 82nd had been won by Captain Creek at Chef-du-Pont. On the west side of the Merderet, however, the bulk of the 82nd was scattered in small, isolated pockets, surrounded, fighting for survival rather than seizing objectives. Communication between units was almost nonexistent. General Ridgway feared that his division might be destroyed before it could consolidate and before the 4th Infantry reached it.

  To the east, toward the beaches, the 101st had opened the causeways and linked up with the seaborne American troops. Many of its men were unaccounted for; of the 6,600 troopers of the 101st who had dropped into Normandy during the night, only 2,500 were fighting together in some kind of organized unit at the end of the day. Some of its units, like Colonel Johnson’s at La Barquette and Captain Shettle’s at the lower Douve bridges, were isolated and vulnerable, but the 101st had accomplished its main mission, opening the way inland for the 4th Infantry.

  The casualty rate cannot be stated with accuracy; the airborne records for Normandy do not distinguish between D-Day losses and those suffered in the ensuing weeks. It was perhaps 10 percent, which was much lower than Air Vice Marshal Leigh-Mallory had feared and predicted, but incredibly high for one day of combat.

  It would almost seem to have been too high a price, except that, thanks to the airborne, the 4th Division got ashore and inland with an absolute minimum of casualties. That was the payoff for the largest night drop of paratroopers ever made.

  Leigh-Mallory had urged Eisenhower to cancel the air drop and bring the airborne divisions into the beaches as follow-up troops. Eisenhower had refused and he was surely right. Without the airborne fighting behind the German lines, the 4th Infantry would, probably, have gotten ashore and over the sand dunes without too much difficulty, as the German defenders on the shoreline were too few and of poor quality and so were badly battered by the Marauders. But getting across the causeways over the flooded area back from the dunes would have been costly, perhaps impossible, without the airborne.

  The 101st had accomplished two critical missions; its men had taken the exits from the rear, and they had knocked out German cannon at Brecourt Manor, Holdy, and other places, cannon that could have been used with deadly effectiveness against the infantry and landing craft.

  General Marshall had urged Eisenhower to drop the airborne much further inland, as much as sixty kilometers from the beach. Eisenhower had refused to do so. He had reasoned that lightly armed paratroopers far behind German lines would have been more a liability than a help, isolated and vulnerable, unable to act aggressively. The experience of the 82nd Airborne west of the Merderet would seem to show that Eisenhower was right.

  * * *

  I. The Gammon grenade weighed about two pounds and was the size of a softball. It was a plastic explosive, point detonated.

  II. The German grenade, with its long handle, could be thrown much more easily and farther than the American oval-shaped fragmentation grenade. But the amount of metal on the potato masher was not nearly as much as on the fragmentation grenade. Thus, as William Tucker of the 505th PIR put it, the Germans could use the potato masher “as an assault weapon. They could throw it and run right after it. We threw that damn frag grenade, we would run for cover ourselves.”

  17

  VISITORS TO HELL

  The 116th Regiment at Omaha

  IF THE GERMANS were going to stop the invasion anywhere, it would be at Omaha Beach. It was an obvious landing site, the only sand beach between the mouth of the Douve to the west and Arromanches to the east, a distance of almost forty kilometers. On both ends of Omaha the cliffs were more or less perpendicular.

  The sand at Omaha Beach is golden in color, firm and fine, perfect for sunbathing and picnicking and digging, but in extent the beach is constricted. It is slightly crescent-shaped, about ten kilometers long overall. At low tide, there is a stretch of firm sand of 300 to 400 meters in distance. At high tide, the distance from the waterline to the one- to three-meter bank of shingle (small round stones) is but a few meters.

  In 1944 the shingle, now mostly gone, was impassable to vehicles. On the western third of the beach, beyond the sh
ingle, there was a part-wood, part-masonry seawall from one to four meters in height (now gone). Inland of the seawall there was a paved, promenade beach road, then a V-shaped antitank ditch as much as two meters deep, then a flat swampy area, then a steep bluff that ascended thirty meters or more. A man could climb the bluff, but a vehicle could not. The grass-covered slopes appeared to be featureless when viewed from any distance, but in fact they contained many small folds or irregularities that proved to be a critical physical feature of the battlefield.

  There were five small “draws” or ravines that sloped gently up to the tableland above the beach. A paved road led off the beach at exit D-1 to Vierville; at Les Moulins (exit D-3) a dirt road led up to St.-Laurent; the third draw, exit E-1, had only a path leading up to the tableland; the fourth draw, E-3, had a dirt road leading to Colleville; the last draw had a dirt path at exit F-1.

  No tactician could have devised a better defensive situation. A narrow, enclosed battlefield, with no possibility of outflanking it; many natural obstacles for the attacker to overcome; an ideal place to build fixed fortifications and a trench system on the slope of the bluff and on the high ground looking down on a wide, open killing field for any infantry trying to cross no-man’s-land.

  The Allied planners hated the idea of assaulting Omaha Beach, but it had to be done. This was as obvious to Rommel as to Eisenhower. Both commanders recognized that if the Allies invaded in Normandy, they would have to include Omaha Beach in the landing sites; otherwise the gap between Utah and the British beaches would be too great.

  The waters offshore were heavily mined, so too the beaches, the promenade (which also had concertina wire along its length), and the bluff. Rommel had placed more beach obstacles here than at Utah. He had twelve strong points holding 88s, 75s, and mortars. He had dozens of Tobruks and machine-gun pillboxes, supported by an extensive trench system.

  Everything the Germans had learned in World War I about how to stop a frontal assault by infantry Rommel put to work at Omaha. He laid out the firing positions at angles to the beach to cover the tidal flat and beach shelf with crossing fire, plunging fire, and grazing fire, from all types of weapons. He prepared artillery positions along the cliffs at either end of the beach, capable of delivering enfilade fire from 88s all across Omaha. The trench system included underground quarters and magazines connected by tunnels. The strong points were concentrated near the entrances to the draws, which were further protected by large cement roadblocks. The larger artillery pieces were protected to the seaward by concrete wing walls. There was not one inch of the beach that had not been presighted for both grazing and plunging fire.

  • •

  Watching the American landing craft approach, the German defenders could hardly believe their eyes. “Holy smoke—here they are!” Lieutenant Frerking declared. “But that’s not possible, that’s not possible.” He put down his binoculars and rushed to his command post in a bunker near Vierville.

  “Landing craft on our left, off Vierville, making for the beach,” Cpl. Hein Severloh in Widerstandsnesten 62 called out. “They must be crazy,” Sergeant Krone declared. “Are they going to swim ashore? Right under our muzzles?”

  The colonel of the artillery regiment passed down a strict order: “Hold your fire until the enemy is coming up to the waterline.”

  All along the bluff, German soldiers watched the landing craft approach, their fingers on the triggers of machine guns, rifles, artillery fuses, or holding mortar rounds. In bunker 62, Frerking was at the telephone, giving the range to gunners a couple of kilometers inland: “Target Dora, all guns, range four-eight-five-zero, basic direction 20 plus, impact fuse.”1

  • •

  Capt. Robert Walker of HQ Company, 116th Regiment, 29th Division, later described the defenses in front of Vierville: “The cliff-like ridge was covered with well-concealed foxholes and many semipermanent bunkers. The bunkers were practically un-noticeable from the front. Their firing openings were toward the flank so that they could bring flanking crossfire to the beach as well as all the way up the slope of the bluff. The bunkers had diagrams of fields of fire, and these were framed under glass and mounted on the walls beside the firing platforms.”2

  A. J. Liebling, who covered the invasion for the New Yorker, climbed the bluff a few days after D-Day. “The trenches were deep, narrow, and so convoluted that an attacking force at any point could be fired on from several directions,” he wrote. “Important knots in the system, like the command post and mortar emplacements, were of concrete. The command post was sunk at least twenty-five feet into the ground and was faced with brick on the inside. The garrison had slept in underground bombproofs, with timbered ceilings and wooden floors.” To Liebling, it looked like “a regular Maginot Line.”3

  • •

  Four things gave the Allies the notion that they could successfully assault this all-but-impregnable position. First, Allied intelligence said that the fortifications and trenches were manned by the 716th Infantry Division, a low-quality unit made up of Poles and Russians with poor morale. At Omaha, intelligence reckoned that there was only one battalion of about 800 troops to man the defenses.

  Second, the B-17s assigned to the air bombardment would hit the beach with everything they had, destroying or at least neutralizing the bunkers and creating craters on the beach and bluff that would be usable as foxholes for the infantry. Third, the naval bombardment, culminating with the LCT(R)s’ rockets, would finish off anything left alive and moving after the B-17s finished. The infantry from the 29th and 1st divisions going into Omaha were told that their problems would begin when they got to the top of the bluff and started to move inland toward their D-Day objectives.

  The fourth cause for confidence that the job would be done was that 40,000 men with 3,500 motorized vehicles were scheduled to land at Omaha on D-Day.

  In the event, none of the above worked. The intelligence was wrong; instead of the contemptible 716th Division, the quite-capable 352nd Division was in place. Instead of one German battalion to cover the beach, there were three. The cloud cover and late arrival caused the B-17s to delay their release until they were as much as five kilometers inland; not a single bomb fell on the beach or bluff. The naval bombardment was too brief and generally inaccurate, and in any case it concentrated on the big fortifications above the bluff. Finally, most of the rockets fell short, most of them landing in the surf, killing thousands of fish but no Germans.

  Captain Walker, on an LCI, recalled that just before H-Hour, “I took a look toward the shore and my heart took a dive. I couldn’t believe how peaceful, how untouched, and how tranquil the scene was. The terrain was green. All buildings and houses were intact. The church steeples were proudly and defiantly standing in place.I ‘Where,’ I yelled to no one in particular, ‘is the damned Air Corps?’ ”4

  • •

  The Overlord plan for Omaha was elaborate and precise. It had the 116th Regiment of the 29th Division (attached to the 1st Division for this day only) going in on the right (west), supported by C Company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. The 16th Regiment of the 1st Division would go in on the left. It would be a linear attack, with the two regiments going in by companies abreast. There were eight sectors, from right to left named Charlie, Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red, Easy Green, Easy Red, Fox Green, and Fox Red. The 116th’s sectors ran from Charlie to Easy Green.

  The first waves would consist of two battalions from each of the regiments, landing in a column of companies, with the third battalion coming in behind. Assault teams would cover every inch of beach, firing M-1s, .30-caliber machine guns, BARs, bazookas, 60mm mortars, and flamethrowers. Ahead of the assault teams would be DD tanks, Navy underwater demolition teams, and Army engineers. Each assault team and the supporting units had specific tasks to perform, all geared to opening the exits. As the infantry suppressed whatever fire the Germans could bring to bear, the demolition teams would blow the obstacles and mark the paths through them with flags, so that as the tide came in
the coxswains would know where it was safe to go.

  Next would come the following waves of landing craft, bringing in reinforcements on a tight, strict schedule designed to put firepower ranging from M-1s to 105mm howitzers into the battle exactly when needed, plus more tanks, trucks, jeeps, medical units, traffic-control people, headquarters, communication units—all the physical support and administrative control required by two overstrength divisions of infantry conducting an all-out offensive.

  By H plus 120 minutes the vehicles would be driving up the opened draws to the top of the bluff and starting to move inland toward their D-Day objectives, first of all the villages of Vierville, St.-Laurent, and Colleville, then heading west toward Pointe-du-Hoc or south to take Trevières, eight kilometers from Omaha.5

  • •

  Eisenhower’s little aphorism that plans are everything before the battle, useless once it is joined, was certainly the case at Omaha. Nothing worked according to the plan, which was indeed useless the moment the Germans opened fire on the assault forces, and even before.

  With the exception of Company A, 116th, no unit landed where it was supposed to. Half of E Company was more than a kilometer off target, the other half more than two kilometers to the east of its assigned sector. This was a consequence of winds and tide. A northwest wind of ten to eighteen knots created waves of three to four feet, sometimes as much as six feet, which pushed the landing craft from right to left. So did the tidal current, which with the rising tide (dead low tide at Omaha was 0525) ran at a velocity of 2.7 knots.

  By H-Hour, not only were the boats out of position, but the men in them were cramped, seasick, miserable. Most had climbed down their rope nets into the craft four hours or more earlier. The waves came crashing over the gunwales. Every LCVP and LCA (landing craft assault, the British version of the Higgins boat) shipped water. In most of them, the pumps could not carry the load, so the troops had to bail with their helmets.