The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  At least ten of the 200 boats in the first wave swamped; most of the troops were picked up later by Coast Guard rescue craft, often after hours in the water; many drowned. Another disheartening sight to the men in the surviving boats was the glimpse of GIs struggling in life preservers and on rafts, personnel from the foundered DD tanks.6

  In general, the men of the first wave were exhausted and confused even before the battle was joined. Still, the misery caused by the spray hitting them in the face with each wave and by their seasickness was such that they were eager to hit the beach, feeling that nothing could be worse than riding on those damned Higgins boats. The only comforting thing was those tremendous naval shells zooming over their heads—but even they were hitting the top of the bluff or further inland, not the beach or the slope. At H minus five minutes the fire lifted.

  • •

  Chief Electrician’s Mate Alfred Sears was in the last LCVP of sixteen in the first wave. Going in, the ensign had told him “all the German strong points will be knocked out by the time we hit the beach.” Sears went on, “We were so confident of this, that on the way in most of my men and I were sitting on top of the engine room decking of the landing craft, enjoying the show, fascinated by the barrage from the rocket ships. About one thousand rockets shattered the beach directly where we were to land. It looked pretty good.”

  Lt. Joe Smith was a Navy beachmaster. His job was to put up flags to guide the landing craft from A Company, 116th Regiment. His Higgins boat may have been the first to hit the beach. “The Germans let us alone on the beach. We didn’t know why, we could see the Germans up there looking down on us; it was a weird feeling. We were right in front of a German 88 gun emplacement, but fortunately for us they were set to cover down the beach and not toward the sea, so they could not see us.”

  A Higgins boat carrying an assault team from A Company came in behind Smith. The men in it figured that what they had been told to expect had come true: the air and naval bombardments had wiped out the opposition. The ramp went down.

  • •

  “Target Dora—fire!” Lieutenant Frerking shouted into the telephone. When the battery opened fire, eager German gunners throughout the area pulled their triggers. To Frerking’s left there were three MG-42 positions; to his front a fortified mortar position; on the forward slopes of the bluff infantrymen in trenches. They exploded into action.7

  • •

  “We hit the sandbar,” Electrician’s Mate Sears recalled, “dropped the ramp, and then all hell poured loose on us. The soldiers in the boat received a hail of machine-gun bullets. The Army lieutenant was immediately killed, shot through the head.”8

  In the lead Company A boat, LCA 1015, Capt. Taylor Fellers and every one of his men were killed before the ramp went down. It just vaporized. No one ever learned whether it was the result of hitting a mine or getting hit by an 88.9

  “They put their ramp down,” Navy beachmaster Lt. Joe Smith said of what he saw, “and a German machine gun or two opened up and you could see the sand kick up right in front of the boat. No one moved. The coxswain stood up and yelled and for some reason everything was quiet for an instant and you could hear him as clear as a bell, he said, ‘For Christ’s sake, fellas, get out! I’ve got to go get another load.’ ”10

  All across the beach, the German machine guns were hurling fire of monstrous proportions on the hapless Americans. (One gunner with Lieutenant Frerking at strong point 62 fired 12,000 rounds that morning.) Because of the misplaced landings, the GIs were bunched together, with large gaps between groups, up to a kilometer in length, which allowed the Germans to concentrate their fire. As the Higgins boats and larger LCIs approached the beach, the German artillery fired at will, from the Tobruks and fortifications up the draws and on top of the bluff and from the emplacements on the beach.

  Motor Machinist Charles Jarreau, Coast Guard, was on LCI 94. His skipper was an “old man” of thirty-two years, a merchant mariner who did things his own way. His nickname was “Popeye.” He had stashed a supply of J&B scotch aboard and told the cook that his duty that day was to go around to the crew “and keep giving them a drink until they didn’t want anymore or until we ran out; essentially we drank most of the day. Didn’t have any food, but I drank all day and didn’t get the least bit intoxicated. It had absolutely no effect.”

  LCI 94 was in the first wave, right behind the Navy demolition teams and the beach-marking crew. “By this time, it was getting pretty hot. Popeye looked at our sign and said, ‘Hell, I’m not going in there, we’ll never get off that beach.’ So he aborted the run. The rest of the LCIs in our flotilla went in where they were supposed to go and none of them got off the beach. They were all shot up. Which made our skipper go up in our esteem by one hell of a lot.”

  Popeye cruised down the beach about 100 meters, turned toward shore, dropped his stern anchor, and went in at one-third speed until he ran aground twenty meters or so offshore. The ramps went down and the men from the 116th moved down them. As they disembarked, the ship lightened. Popeye had his engines put into reverse, used the small Briggs & Stratton motor to pull on the anchor chain, and backed off. Five men from his twenty-six-man crew were dead, killed by machine-gun fire. Twenty of the 200 infantrymen were killed before they reached the beach.11

  Pvt. John Barnes, Company A, 116th, was in an LCA. As it approached the shore, line abreast with eleven other craft, someone shouted, “Take a look! This is something that you will tell your grandchildren!”

  If we live, Barnes thought.

  Ahead, he could see the single spire of the church at Vierville. A Company was right on target. The LCA roared ahead, breasting the waves. “Suddenly, a swirl of water wrapped around my ankles, and the front of the craft dipped down. The water quickly reached our waist and we shouted to the other boats on each side. They waved in return. Our boat just fell away below me. I squeezed the C02 tube in my life belt. The buckle broke and it popped away. I turned to grab the back of the man behind me. I was going down under. I climbed on his back and pulled myself up in a panic. Heads bobbed up above the water. We could see the other boats moving off toward shore.”

  Some men had wrapped Mae Wests around their weapons and inflated them. Barnes saw a rifle floating by, then a flamethrower with two Mae Wests around it. “I hugged it tight but still seemed to be going down. I couldn’t keep my head above the surface. I tried to pull the release straps on my jacket but I couldn’t move. Lieutenant Gearing grabbed my jacket and used his bayonet to cut the straps and release me from the weight. I was all right now, I could swim.”

  The assault team was about a kilometer offshore. Sergeant Laird wanted to swim in, but Lieutenant Gearing said, “No, we’ll wait and get picked up by some passing boat.” But none would stop; the coxswains’ orders were to go on in and leave the rescue work to others.

  After a bit, “we heard a friendly shout of some Limey voice in one of the LCAs. He stopped, his boat was empty. He helped us to climb on board. We recognized the coxswain. He was from the Empire Javelin. He wouldn’t return to the beach. We asked how the others made out. He said he had dropped them off OK. We went back to the Empire Javelin, which we had left at 0400 that morning. How long had it been? It seemed like just minutes. When I thought to ask, it was 1300.”12

  Barnes and his assault team were extraordinarily lucky. About 60 percent of the men of Company A came from one town, Bedford, Virginia; for Bedford, the first fifteen minutes at Omaha was an unmitigated disaster. Companies G and F were supposed to come in to the immediate left of Company A, but they drifted a kilometer further east before landing, so all the Germans around the heavily defended Vierville draw concentrated their fire on Company A. When the ramps on the Higgins boats dropped, the Germans just poured the machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire on them. It was a slaughter. Of the 200-plus men of the company, only a couple of dozen survived, and virtually all of them were wounded.

  Sgt. Thomas Valance survived, barely. “As we came down the ramp,
we were in water about knee-high and started to do what we were trained to do, that is, move forward and then crouch and fire. One problem was we didn’t quite know what to fire at. I saw some tracers coming from a concrete emplacement which, to me, looked mammoth. I never anticipated any gun emplacements being that big. I shot at it but there was no way I was going to knock out a German concrete emplacement with a .30-caliber rifle.”

  The tide was coming in, rapidly, and the men around Valance were getting hit. He found it difficult to stay on his feet—like most infantrymen, he was badly overloaded, soaking wet, exhausted, trying to struggle through wet sand and avoid the obstacles with mines attached to them. “I abandoned my equipment, which was dragging me down into the water.

  “It became evident rather quickly that we weren’t going to accomplish very much. I remember floundering in the water with my hand up in the air, trying to get my balance, when I was first shot through the palm of my hand, then through the knuckle.

  “Pvt. Henry Witt was rolling over toward me. I remember him saying, ‘Sergeant, they’re leaving us here to die like rats. Just to die like rats.’ ”

  Valance was hit again, in the left thigh by a bullet that broke his hip bone. He took two additional flesh wounds. His pack was hit twice, and the chin strap on his helmet was severed by a bullet. He crawled up the beach “and staggered up against the seawall and sort of collapsed there and, as a matter of fact, spent the whole day in that same position. Essentially my part in the invasion had ended by having been wiped out as most of my company was. The bodies of my buddies were washing ashore and I was the one live body in amongst so many of my friends, all of whom were dead, in many cases very severely blown to pieces.”13

  On his boat, Lt. Edward Tidrick was first off. As he jumped from the ramp into the water he took a bullet through his throat. He staggered to the sand, flopped down near Pvt. Leo Nash, and raised himself up to gasp, “Advance with the wire cutters!” At that instant, machine-gun bullets ripped Tidrick from crown to pelvis.

  By 0640 only one officer from A Company was alive, Lt. E. Ray Nance, and he had been hit in the heel and the belly. Every sergeant was either dead or wounded. On one boat, when the ramp was dropped every man in the thirty-man assault team was killed before any of them could get out.14

  Pvt. George Roach was an assistant flamethrower. He weighed 125 pounds. He carried over 100 pounds of gear ashore, including his M-1 rifle, ammunition, hand grenades, a five-gallon drum of flamethrower fluid, and assorted wrenches and a cylinder of nitrogen.

  “We went down the ramp and the casualty rate was very bad. We couldn’t determine where the fire was coming from, whether from the top of the bluff or from the summer beach-type homes on the shore. I just dropped myself into the sand and took my rifle and fired it at this house and Sergeant Wilkes asked, ‘What are you firing at?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ ”

  The only other live member of his assault team Roach could see was Pvt. Gil Murdoch. The two men were lying together behind an obstacle. Murdoch had lost his glasses and could not see. “Can you swim?” Roach asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, look, we can’t stay here, there’s nobody around here that seems to have any idea of what to do. Let’s go back in the water and come in with the tide.” They fell back and got behind a knocked-out tank. Both men were slightly wounded. The tide covered them and they hung onto the tank. Roach started to swim to shore; a coxswain from a Higgins boat picked him up about halfway in. “He pulled me on board, it was around 1030. And I promptly fell asleep.”

  Roach eventually got up to the seawall, where he helped the medics. The following day, he caught up with what remained of his company. “I met General Cota and I had a brief conversation with him. He asked me what company I was with and I told him and he just shook his head. Company A was just out of action. When we got together, there were eight of us left from Company A ready for duty.”

  (Cota asked Roach what he was going to do when the war was over. “Someday I’d like to go to college and graduate,” Roach replied. “I’d like to go to Fordham.” Five years to the day later, Roach did graduate from Fordham. “Over the years,” he said in 1990, “I don’t think there has been a day that has gone by that I haven’t thought of those men who didn’t make it.”15)

  Sgt. Lee Polek’s landing craft was about to swamp as it approached the shore. Everyone was bailing with helmets. “We yelled to the crew to take us in, we would rather fight than drown. As the ramp dropped we were hit by machine-gun and rifle fire. I yelled to get ready to swim and fight. We were getting direct fire right into our craft. My three squad leaders in front and others were hit. Some men climbed over the side. Two sailors got hit. I got off in water only ankle deep, tried to run but the water was suddenly up to my hips. I crawled to hide behind a steel beach obstacle. Bullets hit off it, others hit more of my men. Got up to the beach to crawl behind the shingle and a few of my men joined me. I took a head count and there was only eleven of us left, from the thirty on the craft. As the tide came in we took turns running out to the water’s edge to drag wounded men to cover. Some of the wounded were hit again while on the beach. More men crowding up and crowding up. More people being hit by shellfire. People trying to help each other.

  “While we were huddled there, I told Jim Hickey that I would like to live to be forty years old and work forty hours a week and make a dollar an hour (when I joined up I was making thirty-seven-and-a-half cents an hour). I felt, boy, I would really have it made at $40 a week.

  “Jim Hickey still calls me from New York on June 6 to ask, ‘Hey, Sarge, are you making forty bucks per yet?’ ”16

  Company A had hardly fired a weapon. Almost certainly it had not killed any Germans. It had expected to move up the Vierville draw and be on top of the bluff by 0730, but at 0730 its handful of survivors were huddled up against the seawall, virtually without weapons. It had lost 96 percent of its effective strength.

  But its sacrifice was not in vain. The men had brought in rifles, BARs, grenades, TNT charges, machine guns, mortars and mortar rounds, flamethrowers, rations, and other equipment. This was now strewn across the sand at Dog Green. The weapons and equipment would make a life-or-death difference to the following waves of infantry, coming in at higher tide and having to abandon everything to make their way to shore.

  • •

  F Company, 116th, supposed to come in at Dog Red, landed near its target, astride the boundary between Dog Red and Easy Green. But G Company, supposed to be to the right of F at Dog White, drifted far left, so the two companies came in together, directly opposite the heavy fortifications at Les Moulins. There was a kilometer or so gap to each side of the intermixed companies, which allowed the German defenders to concentrate their fire.

  For the men of F and G companies, the 200 meters or more journey from the Higgins boats to the shingle was the longest and most hazardous trip they had ever experienced, or ever would. The lieutenant commanding the assault team on Sgt. Harry Bare’s boat was killed as the ramp went down. “As ranking noncom,” Bare related, “I tried to get my men off the boat and make it somehow to get under the seawall. We waded to the sand and threw ourselves down and the men were frozen, unable to move. My radioman had his head blown off three yards from me. The beach was covered with bodies, men with no legs, no arms—God it was awful.”

  When Bare finally made it to the seawall, dodging and ducking behind beach obstacles to get there, “I tried to get the men organized. There were only six out of my boat alive. I was soaking wet, shivering, but trying like hell to keep control. I could feel the cold fingers of fear grip me.”17

  On the boat coming in, Pvt. John Robertson of F Company was throwing up over the side. His sergeant yelled at him to get his head down. Robertson replied, “I’m dying of seasickness, it won’t make much difference.”

  The coxswain hit a sandbar and shouted that he was unloading and getting the hell out of there. The ramp went down and “our guys started jumping out in
water up to their necks.” Robertson was toward the rear of the boat. He saw his leader, Lieutenant Hilscher, get killed by an exploding shell. Then the flamethrower got blown up. Robertson jumped out. Despite his sixty pounds of ammunition and other equipment, he managed to struggle his way inland, to where the water was about a foot deep. “I just lay there wondering what I was going to do.

  “It wasn’t long when I made a quick decision. Behind me, coming at me, was a Sherman tank with pontoons wrapped around it. I had two choices; get run over by the tank or run through the machine-gun fire and the shelling. How I made it, I’ll never know. But I got to the shingle and tried to survive.”18

  When Sgt. Warner Hamlett of F Company made it to the shore, he found that the weight of wet clothes, sand, and equipment made it difficult to run. He could hear men shouting, “Get off the beach!” and realized “our only chance was to get off as quick as possible, because there we were sitting ducks.” He stumbled forward and saw a hole and jumped in. He landed on top of Pvt. O. T. Grimes.II

  A shell exploded within ten meters of Hamlett and blew his rifle from his hands while sending his helmet flying off his head. Crawling on his elbows and knees, he retrieved his rifle and helmet, then waited to regain his strength “and to see if my legs would support my weight.” They did. By short leaps and advances, using obstacles for protection, he worked his way toward the shingle. While he was resting behind an obstacle, “Private Gillingham, a young soldier, fell beside me, white with fear. He seemed to be begging for help with his eyes.

  “I said, ‘Gillingham, let’s stay separated, ‘cause the Germans will fire at two quicker than they will at one.’ He remained silent as I jumped and ran forward again.”