The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Sergeant Bisco called out, “Lieutenant, watch out for the damn mines.” The place was infested with them, Spaulding recalled, “but we lost no men coming through them, although H Company coming along the same trail a few hours later lost several men. The Lord was with us and we had an angel on each shoulder on that trip.”

  A machine gun was firing from above. Sergeant Blades fired the platoon’s only bazooka at it and missed. He was shot in the left arm; a private was shot down; Sergeant Phelps moved up with his BAR and was hit in both legs. Spaulding decided to rush the machine gun.

  “As we rushed it the lone German operating the gun threw up his hands and yelled, ‘Kamerad.’ We needed prisoners for interrogating so I ordered the men not to shoot.”

  The “German” turned out to be Polish. He told Spaulding (Sergeant Streczyk interpreting) there were sixteen other Poles in the nearby trenches and said they had taken a vote on whether to fight and had voted not to, but the German noncoms forced them to fire. “He also said that he had not shot at us, although I had seen him hit three. I turned the PW over to Sergeant Blades, who was wounded. Blades gave his bazooka to another man and guarded the prisoner with a trench knife.”

  Spaulding moved his wounded men into a defile where Pvt. George Bowen, the medic, gave them first aid. Spaulding paid Bowen a tribute: “He covered his whole section of the beach that day; no man waited more than five minutes for first aid. His action did a lot to help morale. He got the DSC for his work.”

  Spaulding moved his platoon up the bluff, taking advantage of every irregularity in the ground. “Coming up along the crest of the hill Sgt. Clarence Colson began to give assault fire from his BAR as he walked along, firing the weapon from his hip. He opened up on the machine gun to our right, firing so rapidly that his ammunition carrier had difficulty getting ammo to him fast enough.” It was about 0800. Americans were clearing out the trenches and advancing toward the high ground.6

  • •

  Spaulding and his men, and other small units in the 116th and 16th led by such men as Capt. Joe Dawson and Capt. Robert Walker, were doing a great thing. The exemplary manner in which they had seized their opportunity, their dash, boldness, initiative, teamwork, and tactical skills were outstanding beyond praise. These were exactly the qualities the Army had hoped for—and spent two years training its civilians-turned-soldiers to achieve—in its junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men.

  The industrial miracle of production in the United States in World War II was one of the great accomplishments in the history of the Republic. The job the Army did in creating and shaping the leadership qualities in its junior officers—just college-age boys, most of them—was also one of the great accomplishments in the history of the Republic.

  • •

  At 0800 the small groups making their way up the bluff were unaware of each other. Spaulding and his men were about midway between Colleville and St.-Laurent. The latter village was their target. There they expected to link up with E Company, 116th, coming in from their right. Actually, E Company, 116th, had been on their left on the beach, and was still stuck behind the seawall.

  L Company of the 16th was on the far left. It came in at 0700, a half hour late, almost a kilometer from its target. Scheduled to land at the foot of the draw that led directly to Colleville, instead it was at Fox Green, the eastern edge of Omaha Beach, at the place where the tidal flat almost reached the bluff and where the first rise of the bluff was clifflike in steepness.

  Because the boats were late, the tide had covered the outermost line of beach obstacles. No company had been scheduled to land on Fox Red, so no engineers had been there to blow the obstacles. Pvt. Kenneth Romanski saw the boat to his right blow up. He looked left and that boat also hit a mine. He saw a GI go up about ten feet in the air, arms and legs outstretched and his whole body in flame.

  “About that time, our platoon leader, Lieutenant Godwin, said, ‘Back it up! Back it up! Put the damn thing in reverse.’ ” The British coxswain did. He pulled back about 100 meters and went over to the left.

  “Drop the ramp,” Lieutenant Godwin ordered. “Drop the ramp!” The water was eight feet deep. Romanski moved out and immediately hit bottom. He threw away his rifle and bangalore, inflated his Mae West, and swam toward shore, or rather paddled as best he could until his feet touched bottom. Then he crawled to the beach, jumped up, and ran the few meters to the base of the cliff.

  “There were already men there, some dead, some wounded. There was wreckage. There was complete confusion. I didn’t know what to do. I picked a rifle from a dead man. As luck would have it, it had a grenade launcher on it. So I fired my six grenades over the cliff. I don’t know where they went but I do know that they went up on enemy territory.”

  Romanski looked back to the beach and saw a sight “I’ll never forget. There was a body rolling with the waves. And his leg was holding on by a chunk of meat about the size of your wrist. The body would roll, then the leg would roll. Then the leg would roll back and then the body would roll back.”

  To L Company’s right there was a tiny draw leading up the far eastern edge of the bluff. An unknown officer was attempting to get the men to move to the right and up the draw.

  “I need help!” Romanski heard him shout. “I need help! Come on over here. I need some men!”

  Romanski moved in that direction. The company was down to 125 men, but it was intact and better organized than any other on the whole of Omaha Beach. Romanski joined the unknown officer, who had gathered twenty men. They started up the draw, other platoons following.7

  • •

  Between Spaulding’s platoon on the right and L Company on the left, companies E, F, and I were badly intermixed, off schedule and off target, hung up on the obstacles or the beach or huddled up against the seawall, taking casualties but not firing back.

  Pvt. H. W. Shroeder was among them. He came in with the third wave. As his boat approached the sandbar “we were hearing noises on the side of the landing craft like someone throwing gravel against it. The German machine gunners had picked us up. Everybody yelled, ‘Stay down!’ The coxswain backed it out, relocated, and came in again, and I noticed the lieutenant’s face was a very gray color and the rest of the men had a look of fear on their faces. All of a sudden the lieutenant yelled to the coxswain, ‘Let her down!’

  “The ramp dropped and we could get a look at the beach and it was sickening. We were supposed to have tanks. There were two tanks there. One was knocked out and the other was out of ammo, and the only good they were doing was the GIs were piling up behind them to get out of the fire that was coming down and looked like a red snowstorm, there were so many tracers coming from so many different directions.”

  Shroeder moved out with his assault team, got through the obstacles and across the beach, and threw himself down at the seawall. “There were GIs piled two deep. I started checking my .30-cal machine gun and it was full of sand and water.” He cleaned it and “stayed there for an hour or so.”8

  • •

  The coxswain on the boat carrying the CO of I Company, Capt. Kimball Richmond, got swept to the east almost to Port-en-Bessin. He was going to land there but Richmond could see it was the wrong place. He redirected the coxswain, who backtracked to the west until he was off Fox Green, the designated target. An hour had been lost. When the coxswain finally got to the right place and dropped the ramp, he was immediately hit by machine-gun fire. He was still able to maneuver the boat. He ordered the ramp pulled up, then backed off out of the range of the machine gun. He circled until Captain Richmond picked a spot and told him to go in. It was about 0800 and the tide had covered the outer obstacles. Going in, the coxswain hardly knew which to fear more, mines or machine guns.

  About 100 meters from shore, as Pvt. Albert Mominee remembered it, “the craft gave a sudden lurch as it hit an obstacle and in an instant an explosion erupted followed by a blinding flash of fire. Flames raced around and over us. The first reaction was survival; the immed
iate instinct was the will to live. Before I knew it I was in the water.”

  Mominee was five feet one inch tall and in water well over his head. He dropped his rifle and equipment, inflated his Mae West, and swam toward shore, machine-gun bullets hitting around him, killing some GIs, wounding others.

  “About fifty yards from shore the water was shallow enough for me to wade. Thirty yards to go and then twenty. I was exhausted and in shock. I heard a voice shouting, ‘Come on, Little One! Come on! You can make it!’ It was Lieutenant Anderson, the exec, urging me on. It seemed like someone had awakened me from a dream. I lunged toward him and as I reached him, he grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the water, then practically dragged me to the cover of the seawall. Only six out of thirty in my craft escaped unharmed.

  “Looking around, all I could see was a scene of havoc and destruction. Abandoned vehicles and tanks, equipment strung all over the beach, medics attending the wounded, chaplains seeking the dead. Suddenly I had a craving for a cigarette. ‘Has anybody got a smoke?’ I asked.”9

  I Company had taken more than one-third casualties. F Company, landing earlier at Fox Green, was simply gone as a fighting unit; some individuals had made it to the shingle but they were mostly without weapons.

  G Company came in at 0700. The CO, Capt. Joe Dawson, was first off his boat, followed by his communications sergeant and his company clerk. As they jumped, a shell hit the boat and destroyed it, killing thirty men, including the naval officer who was to control fire support from the warships.

  Dawson expected to find a path up the bluff cleared out by F Company, but “as I landed I found nothing but men and bodies lying on the shore.” He got to the shingle where survivors from other boats of G Company joined him.10 Among them was Sgt. Joe Pilck. He recalled, “We couldn’t move forward because they had a double apron of barbed wire in front of us, and to our right it was a swampy area we couldn’t cross and to the left they had minefields laid out so we couldn’t go there.”11

  “Utter chaos reigned,” Dawson recalled, “because the Germans controlled the field of fire completely.” He realized that “there was nothing I could do on the beach except die.” To get through the barbed wire he had Pvts. Ed Tatara and Henry Peszek put two bangalore torpedoes together, shoved them under the wire, and blew a gap. They started through the minefield and up the bluff, engaging the enemy.

  The fortified area above the beach in the Easy and Fox sectors was far too extensive to be thoroughly cleaned out by Spaulding’s and Dawson’s small units, but they—and other units—were making a significant contribution to reducing the volume of fire pouring down on the 16th Regiment.

  • •

  Spaulding’s and Dawson’s and the other small groups that were working their way to the top were like magnets to the men along the shingle embankment. If they can make it so can I, was the thought.

  Simultaneously, the men were being urged forward by other junior officers and NCOs, and by the regimental commander, forty-seven-year-old Col. George Taylor. He landed about 0800. Pvt. Warren Rulien watched him come in. “He stepped across the sandbar and bullets began hitting the water around him. He laid down on his stomach and started crawling toward shore, his staff officers doing the same.”

  “He had a couple of tattered-ass second louies following him,” according to Pvt. Paul Radzom, who was also watching. “They looked like they were scared to death.”

  When Taylor made it to the seawall, Rulien heard him say to the officers, “If we’re going to die, let’s die up there.”12 To other groups of men, Taylor said, “There are only two kinds of people on this beach: the dead and those about to die. So let’s get the hell out of here!”13

  Men got to work with the bangalores, blowing gaps in the barbed wire. Engineers with mine detectors moved through, then started laying out tape to show where they had cleared paths through the minefields. Others hit the pillboxes at the base of the bluff. “I went up with my flamethrower to button up the aperture of a pillbox,” Pvt. Buddy Mazzara of C Company remembered, “and Fred Erben came in with his dynamite charge. Soon some soldiers came out of the pillbox with their hands up saying, ‘No shoot. No shoot. Me Pole.’ ”14

  Private Shroeder, his machine gun cleaned and ready to fire, watched as a rifleman moved out. “So the first man, he started out across, and running zigzag he made it to the bluff. So we all felt a little better to see that we had a chance, we were going to get off. And the minefield was already full of dead and wounded. And finally it came my turn and I grabbed my heavy .30-cal and started up over the shingle and across the minefield, trying to keep low. Finally I got to the base of the bluff.” There he ducked behind the old foundation of a house. Two others joined him. “It was just the three of us there, we couldn’t find our platoon leaders or our platoon sergeants or anybody.”

  But they could see two heartening sights. One was Americans on the crest of the bluff. The other was a line of POWs, sent down by Captain Dawson under guard. The enemy prisoners “were really roughed up. Their hair was all full of cement, dirt, everything. They didn’t look so tough. So we started up the bluff carrying our stuff with us, and others started following us.”15

  Lt. William Dillon gathered the survivors from his platoon, joined three bangalores together, shoved them under the barbed wire, blew a gap, dashed through, crossed the swamp, swam across an antitank ditch filled with water, and made it to the base of the bluff.

  “I knew that the Germans had to have a path up the hill that was clear of mines. I looked around. When I was younger I’d been a good hunter and could trail a rabbit easily. I studied the ground and saw a faint path zigzagging to the left up the hill, so I walked the path very carefully. Something blew up behind me. I looked back and a young soldier had stepped on a mine and it had blown off his foot up to his knee. I brought the others up the path. At the top we saw the first and only Russian soldiers I have ever seen.”16

  • •

  In his column for June 12, 1944, Ernie Pyle wrote, “Now that it is over it seems to me a pure miracle that we ever took the beach at all. . . . As one officer said, the only way to take a beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and nothing is being gained.

  “Our men were pinned down for a while, but finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on at all or were able to stay on.”17

  • •

  It was not a miracle. It was infantry. The plan had called for the air and naval bombardments, followed by tanks and dozers, to blast a path through the exits so that the infantry could march up the draws and engage the enemy, but the plan had failed, utterly and completely failed. As is almost always the case in war, it was up to the infantry. It became the infantry’s job to open the exits so that the vehicles could drive up the draws and engage the enemy.

  Exhortation and example, backed by two years of training, got the GIs from the 16th Regiment to overcome their exhaustion, confusion, and fear and get out from behind the shingle and start up the bluff. Colonel Taylor and many others pointed out the obvious, that to stay behind the “shelter” was to die. Retreat was not possible.

  Captain Dawson, Lieutenants Spaulding and Dillon, and many others provided the example; their actions proved that it was possible to cross the swamp, the antitank ditch, the minefields, and find paths to the top of the bluff.

  As they came onto the beach, the junior officers and NCOs saw at once that the intricate plan, the one they had studied so hard and committed to memory, bore no relationship whatsoever to the tactical problem they faced. They had expected to find ready-made craters on the beach, blasted by the bombs from the B-17s, to p
rovide shelter in the unlikely event that they encountered any small-arms fire when they made the shoreline. They had expected to go up the draws, which they anticipated would have been cleared by the DD tanks and dozers, to begin fighting up on the high ground. They had expected fire support from tanks, half-tracks, artillery. Nothing they had expected had happened.

  Yet their training had prepared them for this challenge. They sized up the situation, saw what had to be done, and did it. This was leadership of the highest order. It came from men who had been civilians three or even two years earlier.

  Sgt. John Ellery of the 16th Regiment was one of those leaders. When he reached the shingle, “I had to peer through a haze of sweat, smoke, dust, and mist.” There was a dead man beside him, another behind him. Survivors gathered around him; “I told them that we had to get off the beach and that I’d lead the way.” He did. When he got to the base of the bluff, he started up, four or five men following. About halfway up, a machine gun opened up on them from the right.

  “I scurried and scratched along until I got within ten meters of the gun position. Then I unloaded all four of my fragmentation grenades. When the last one went off, I made a dash for the top. The other kids were right behind me and we all made it. I don’t know if I knocked out that gun crew but they stopped shooting. Those grenades were all the return fire I provided coming off that beach. I didn’t fire a round from either my rifle or my pistol.”

  In giving his account, Ellery spoke about leadership. “After the war,” he said, “I read about a number of generals and colonels who are said to have wandered about exhorting the troops to advance. That must have been very inspirational! I suspect, however, that the men were more interested and more impressed by junior officers and NCOs who were willing to lead them rather than having some general pointing out the direction in which they should go.”

  Warming to the subject, Ellery went on: “I didn’t see any generals in my area of the beach, but I did see a captain and two lieutenants who demonstrated courage beyond belief as they struggled to bring order to the chaos around them.” Those officers managed to get some men organized and moving up the bluff. One of the lieutenants had a broken arm that hung limply at his side, but he led a group of seven to the top, even though he got hit again on the way. Another lieutenant carried one of his wounded men thirty meters before getting hit himself.