The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  A shell burst between them. “It took Gillingham’s chin off, including the bone, except for a small piece of flesh. He tried to hold his chin in place as he ran toward the shingle. He made it and Bill Hawkes and I gave him his morphine shot. We stayed with him for approximately thirty minutes until he died. The entire time he remained conscious and aware that he was dying.”

  From the beach, to the GIs, that shingle looked like the most desirable place in the world to be at that moment. But when they reached it, they found concertina wire covering it, no way to get across without blowing the wire, nothing on the other side but more death and misery. And although they were now protected from machine-gun and rifle fire coming down from the German trenches on the bluff, they were exposed to mortar fire. The few who made it had no organization, little or no leadership (Lieutenant Wise of F Company, one of the few officers to make it to the wall, was trying to force a gap in the concertina when he was hit by a bullet in the forehead and killed), only a handful of weapons. They could but huddle and hope for follow-up waves to bring in bangalore torpedoes to blow the wire.

  • •

  E Company, 116th, landed farthest from its target. Scheduled to come in at Easy Green, it actually landed on the boundary between Easy Red and Fox Green, a kilometer off and intermixed with men from the 16th Regiment, 1st Division. Pvt. Harry Parley was a flamethrower, so far as he is aware “the only flamethrower to come off the beach unscathed.”III He landed with a pistol, a holster, a shovel, a Mae West, a raincoat, a canteen, a block of dynamite, and his eighty-pound flamethrower.

  “As our boat touched sand and the ramp went down,” Parley recalled, “I became a visitor to hell.” Boats on either side were getting hit by artillery. Some were burning, others sinking. “I shut everything out and concentrated on following the men in front of me down the ramp and into the water.”

  He immediately sank. “I was unable to come up. I knew I was drowning and made a futile attempt to unbuckle the flamethrower harness.” A buddy grabbed his flamethrower and pulled Parley forward, to where he could stand. “Then slowly, half-drowned, coughing water, and dragging my feet, I began walking toward the chaos ahead.”

  He had 200 meters to go to the beach. He made it, exhausted. Machine-gun fire was hitting the beach. As it hit the sand “it made a ‘sip sip’ sound like someone sucking on their teeth. To this day I don’t know why I didn’t dump the flamethrower and run like hell for shelter. But I didn’t.” He was behind the other members of the team. “Months later, trying to analyze why I was able to safely walk across the beach while others running ahead were hit, I found a simple answer. The Germans were directing their fire down onto the beach so that the line of advancing attackers would run into it and, since I was behind, I was ignored. In short, the burden on my back may well have saved my life.”

  When Parley reached the shingle, he found chaos. “Men were trying to dig or scrape trenches or foxholes for protection from the mortars. Others were carrying or helping the wounded to shelter. We had to crouch or crawl on all fours when moving about. To communicate, we had to shout above the din of the shelling from both sides as well as the explosions on the beach. Most of us were in no condition to carry on. We were just trying to stay alive.

  “The enormity of our situation came as I realized that we had landed in the wrong sector and that many of the people around me were from other units and strangers to me. What’s more, the terrain before us was not what I had been trained to encounter. I remember removing my flamethrower and trying to dig a trench while lying on my stomach. Failing that, I searched and found a discarded BAR. But we could see nothing above us to return the fire. We were the targets.”

  Parley lay behind the shingle, “scared, worried, and often praying. Once or twice I was able to control my fear enough to race across the sand to drag a helpless GI from drowning in the incoming tide. That was the extent of my bravery that morning.”19 Not true, as will be seen.

  Capt. Lawrence Madill of E Company was urging his men forward. “One of the episodes I remember the most was debarking from the landing craft and trying to take shelter from the enemy fire behind one of their obstacles,” recalled Walter A. Smith. “Captain Madill came up behind me and others, ordering all that could move to get off the beach. I looked up at him and his left arm appeared to be almost blown off.”

  Madill made it to the seawall, where he discovered that one of his company mortars had also made it but had no ammunition. He ran back to the beach to pick up some rounds. As he was returning, he was hit by machine-gun fire. Before he died, Madill gasped, “Senior noncom, take the men off the beach.”20

  • •

  As what was left of A, F, G, and E companies of the 116th huddled behind obstacles or the shingle, the following waves began to come in: B and H companies at 0700, D at 0710, C, K, I, and M at 0720. Not one came in on target. The coxswains were trying to dodge obstacles and incoming shells, while the smoke drifted in and out and obscured the landmarks and what few marker flags there were on the beach.

  On the command boat for B Company, the CO, Capt. Ettore Zappacosta, heard the British coxswain cry out, “We can’t go in there. We can’t see the landmarks. We must pull off.”

  Zappacosta pulled his Colt .45 and ordered, “By God, you’ll take this boat straight in.”

  The coxswain did. When the ramp dropped, Zappacosta was first off. He was immediately hit. Medic Thomas Kenser saw him bleeding from hip and shoulder. Kenser, still on the ramp, shouted, “Try to make it in! I’m coming.” But the captain was already dead. Before Kenser could jump off the ramp he was shot dead. Every man in the boat save one (Pvt. Robert Sales) was either killed or wounded before reaching the beach.21

  Nineteen-year-old Pvt. Harold Baumgarten of B Company got a bullet through the top of his helmet while jumping from the ramp, then another hit the receiver of his M-1 as he carried it at port arms. He waded through the waist-deep water as his buddies fell alongside him.

  “I saw Pvt. Robert Ditmar of Fairfield, Connecticut, hold his chest and heard him yell, ‘I’m hit, I’m hit!’ I hit the ground and watched him as he continued to go forward about ten more yards. He tripped over an obstacle and, as he fell, his body made a complete turn and he lay sprawled on the damp sand with his head facing the Germans, his face looking skyward. He was yelling, ‘Mother, Mom.’

  “Sgt. Clarence ‘Pilgrim’ Robertson had a gaping wound in the upper right corner of his forehead. He was walking crazily in the water. Then I saw him get down on his knees and start praying with his rosary beads. At this moment, the Germans cut him in half with their deadly crossfire.”

  Baumgarten had drawn a Star of David on the back of his field jacket, with “The Bronx, New York” written on it—that would let Hitler know who he was. He was behind an obstacle. He saw the reflection from the helmet of one of the German riflemen on the bluff “and took aim and later on I found out I got a bull’s eye on him.” That was the only shot he fired because his damaged rifle broke in two when he pulled the trigger.

  Shells were bursting about him. “I raised my head to curse the Germans when an 88 shell exploded about twenty yards in front of me, hitting me in my left cheek. It felt like being hit with a baseball bat only the results were much worse. My upper jaw was shattered, the left cheek blown open. My upper lip was cut in half. The roof of my mouth was cut up and teeth and gums were laying all over my mouth. Blood poured freely from the gaping wound.”

  The tide was coming in. Baumgarten washed his face with the cold, dirty Channel water and managed not to pass out. The water was rising about an inch a minute (between 0630 and 0800 the tide rose eight feet) so he had to get moving or drown. He took another hit, from a bullet, in the leg. He moved forward in a dead man’s float with each wave of the incoming tide. He finally reached the seawall where a medic dressed his wounds. Mortars were coming in, “and I grabbed the medic by the shirt to pull him down. He hit my hand away and said, ‘You’re injured now. When I get hurt you can take car
e of me.’ ”IV

  Sgt. Benjamin McKinney was a combat engineer attached to C Company. When his ramp dropped, “I was so seasick I didn’t care if a bullet hit me between the eyes and got me out of my misery.” As he jumped off the ramp, “rifle and machine-gun fire hit it like rain falling.” Ahead, “it looked as if all the first wave were dead on the beach.” He got to the shingle. He and Sergeant Storms saw a pillbox holding a machine gun and a rifleman about thirty meters to the right, spraying the beach with their weapons. Storms and McKinney crawled toward the position. McKinney threw hand grenades as Storms put rifle fire into it. Two Germans jumped out; Storms killed them. The 116th was starting to fight back.22

  • •

  At 0730 the main command group of the 116th began to come in, including the regimental commander, Col. Charles Canham, and the assistant commander of the 29th Division, Brig. Gen. Norman Cota. They were in an LCVP with an assault team from Company K. The boat got hung up on a beach obstacle to which a Teller mine was attached. Although the boat rose and fell in the swells, by some miracle the mine did not go off, but the LCVP was under heavy machine-gun, mortar, and light-cannon fire. Three men, including Maj. John Sours, the regimental S-4, were instantly killed as the ramp went down.

  Pvt. Felix Branham was in that boat. “Colonel Canham had a BAR and a .45 and he was leading us in,” Branham said. “There he was firing and he got his BAR shot out of his hand and he reached and he used his .45. He was the bravest guy.”23

  The scene the commanders saw as they struggled their way to the beach was described by Cota’s aide-de-camp, Lt. J. T. Shea, in a letter he wrote ten days later: “Although the leading elements of the assault had been on the beach for approximately an hour, none had progressed farther than the seawall at the inland border of the beach. [They] were clustered under the wall, pinned down by machine-gun fire, and the enemy was beginning to bring effective mortar fire to bear on those hidden behind the wall.” The beach was jammed with the dead, the dying, the wounded, and the disorganized.

  When Cota got to the wall, he made an immediate and critical command decision. He saw at once that the plan to go up the draws was obsolete. It simply could not be done. Nor could the men stay where they were. They had to get over the shingle, get through the heavily mined swamp, and climb the bluff to drive the Germans from their trenches and take the draws from the inland side.

  Lieutenant Shea described Cota’s actions: “Exposing himself to enemy fire, General Cota went over the seawall giving encouragement, directions, and orders to those about him, personally supervised the placing of a BAR, and brought fire to bear on some of the enemy positions on the bluff that faced them. Finding a belt of barbed wire inside the seawall, General Cota personally supervised placing a bangalore torpedo for blowing the wire and was one of the first three men to go through the wire.”

  Six mortar shells fell into the immediate area. They killed three men and wounded two others, but Cota was unharmed. “At the head of a mixed column of troops he threaded his way to the foot of the high ground beyond the beach and started the troops up the high ground where they could bring effective fire to bear on the enemy positions.” Behind him, engineers with mine detectors began marking a path through the minefield, using white tape.24

  • •

  Some of the boats in the follow-up waves got in relatively unscathed. It was a question of luck and numbers. The luck was avoiding mined obstacles, now well underwater. The numbers of boats coming in meant that the Germans could no longer concentrate their fire; they had too many targets. By 0730 what was supposed to have happened with the first wave was beginning to take place—the assault teams were coming forward on every sector of the beach (not always or even usually the right one).

  Others had bad luck. LCI 92, approaching Dog White about 0740, was hit in the stern by an 88 as it made its first attempt to get through the obstacles. Sgt. Debs Peters of the 121st ECB was on the craft. He recalled, “We lost headway and turned sideways in the waves and were parallel to the beach for a few seconds. We were hit directly midship and blew up. Those of us on deck were caught on fire with flaming fuel oil and we just rolled overboard. I fell into the water and went down like a rock.” He inflated his Mae West and popped to the surface.

  “The Germans were raking the whole area with machine-gun fire. I held onto one of those poles until I could get my breath, then moved to another one. I finally got within about fifty yards of the shore. Now the tide was in full, it almost reached the road.”

  When Peters reached the beach “I was loaded so heavy with water and sand that I could just stagger about.” He got behind a tank; it got hit by an 88. Shrapnel wounded the man beside him and hit Peters in the cheek. He was lucky; he was one of the few survivors from LCI 92.25

  Capt. Robert Walker of HQ Company was on LCI 91, just behind LCI 92. (LCI 94, the one “Popeye” the skipper decided not to take in on that sector, was just to the left of LCIs 91 and 92.) As it approached the beach, LCI 91 began taking rifle and machine-gun fire. Maneuvering through the obstacles, the LCI got caught on one of the pilings and set off the Teller mine. The explosion tore off the starboard landing ramp.

  The skipper tried to back off. Walker moved to the port-side ramp, only to find it engulfed in flames. A man carrying a flamethrower had been hit by a bullet; another bullet had set the jellied contents of his fuel tank on fire. Screaming in agony, he dove into the sea. “I could see that even the soles of his boots were on fire.” Men around him also burned; Walker saw a couple of riflemen “with horrendous drooping face blisters.”

  The skipper came running to the front deck, waving his arms and yelling “Everybody over the side.” Walker jumped into water about eight feet deep. He was carrying so much equipment that despite two Mae Wests he could not stay afloat. He dropped his rifle, then his helmet, then his musette bag, which enabled him to swim to where he could touch bottom.

  “Here I was on Omaha Beach. Instead of being a fierce, well-trained, fighting infantry warrior, I was an exhausted, almost helpless, unarmed survivor of a shipwreck.” When he got to waist-deep water he got on his knees and crawled the rest of the way. Working his way forward to the seawall, he saw the body of Captain Zappacosta. At the seawall, “I saw dozens of soldiers, mostly wounded. The wounds were ghastly to see.”

  (Forty-nine years later, Walker recorded that the scene brought to his mind Tennyson’s lines in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” especially “Cannon to right of them/Cannon to left of them/Cannon in front of them/Volley’d and thunder’d.” He added that so far as he could tell every GI knew the lines, “Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die,” even if the soldiers did not know the source. Those on Omaha Beach who had committed the poem to memory surely muttered to themselves, “Some one had blunder’d.”)

  Walker came to Cota’s conclusion. Any place was better than this; the plan was kaput; he couldn’t go back; he set out on his own to climb the bluff. He picked up an M-1 and a helmet from a dead soldier and moved out. “I was alone and completely on my own.”26

  Maj. Sidney Bingham (USMA 1940) was CO of 2nd Battalion, 116th. When he reached the shingle he was without radio, aide, or runner. His S-3 was dead, his HQ Company commander wounded, his E Company commander dead, his F Company commander wounded, his H Company commander killed, “and in E Company there were some fifty-five killed out of a total of something just over 200 who landed.”

  Bingham was overwhelmed by a feeling of “complete futility. Here I was, the battalion commander, unable for the most part to influence action or do what I knew had to be done.” He set out to organize a leaderless group from F Company and get it moving up the bluff.

  By this time, around 0745, unknown others were doing the same, whether NCOs or junior officers or, in some cases, privates. Staying on the beach meant certain death; retreat was not possible; someone had to lead; men took the burden on themselves and did. Bingham put it this way: “The individual and small-unit initiative carried the day. Ve
ry little, if any, credit can be accorded company, battalion, or regimental commanders for their tactical prowess and/or their coordination of the action.”

  Bingham did an analysis of what went wrong for the first and second waves. Among other factors, he said, the men were in the Higgins boats far too long. “Seasickness occasioned by the three or four hours in LCVPs played havoc with any idealism that may have been present. It markedly decreased the combat effectiveness of the command.”

  In addition, “The individual loads carried were in my view greatly excessive, hindered mobility, and in some cases caused death by drowning.” In his view, “If the enemy had shown any sort of enthusiasm and moved toward us, they could have run us right back into the Channel without any trouble.”

  From June 6, 1944, on to 1990, Bingham carried with him an unjustified self-criticism: “I’ve often felt very ashamed of the fact that I was so completely inadequate as a leader on the beach on that frightful day.” That is the way a good battalion commander feels when he is leading not much more than a squad—but Bingham got that squad over the shingle and into an attack against the enemy, which was exactly the right thing to do, and the only thing he could do under the circumstances.27

  • •

  The Germans did not counterattack for a number of reasons, some of them good ones. First, they were not present in sufficient strength. General Kraiss had but two of his infantry battalions and one artillery battalion on the scene, about 2,000 men, or less than 250 per kilometer. Second, he was slow to react. Not until 0735 did he call up his division reserve, Kampfgruppe Meyer (named for the CO of the 915th Regiment of Kraiss’s 352nd Division), and then he decided to commit only a single battalion, which did not arrive until midday. He was acting on a false assumption: that his men had stopped the invasion at Omaha. Third, the German infantrymen were not trained for assaults, only to hold their positions and keep firing.