The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  There were pillboxes off to Wiehe’s left, at the opening of E-3 draw, firing down the beach. He saw two bulldozers head for the positions, blades down. The dozers piled sand on the pillboxes and put them out of action. “On the return trip to the beach, one of the dozers took a direct hit. The man on it seemed like he flew all to pieces.” Wiehe and the other drivers in his group picked up rifles and carbines and became infantry. “We loaded up and moved forward,” Wiehe said.

  In concluding his oral history, Wiehe recalled his crying episode and declared, “To this day I’ve never shed another tear. I would give anything to have one good cry or one good laugh. I hurt inside but I cannot get my emotions out since that day. I’ve never been able to.”29

  • •

  By 1200, Americans from the 16th, 18th, 115th, and 116th regiments had been coming ashore at Easy Red for five and a half hours. They had made no gains at E-3 draw (directly north of Colleville). The traffic jam was still horrendous. Dead and wounded were strewn about the beach and behind the seawall.

  But what looked like catastrophe, wasn’t. Although the situation was far from being well in hand, it was improving, especially at E-1. Thanks to Spaulding and Dawson, the fortification on the east side of the draw had been neutralized; the fortification on the west side was still in action but was being contained by Company M, 116th Regiment. Dozers had made a gap through the dune line just east of the draw and were making it ready for vehicles to pass through.

  Best of all, a penetration had been made almost exactly between E-1 and E-3 by companies E, I, and G of the 16th Regiment and Colleville was under attack. To the right, five companies from the 116th had gone up the bluff between D-3 and E-1, while to the left of E-3 patrols from three companies of the 16th had done the same.

  At 1309, Gerow was able to make his first favorable report to Bradley: “Troops formerly pinned down on beaches Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red advancing up heights behind beaches.”30

  “The situation everywhere on the beach was still grave,” Bradley later wrote, “but our troops . . . were inching inland. . . . I gave up any thought of abandoning Omaha Beach.”31

  Maj. Gen. Charles Gerhardt, CO of the 29th Division, later wrote a report entitled “Battle Lessons and Conclusions” on D-Day. He summarized the lessons learned in two sentences: “No reports of disaster should be allowed. THEY ARE NEVER TRUE.”32

  * * *

  I. General Smith, in a 1993 letter to the author, recalls, “Today, the site would be very near the Rotunda of our Normandy memorial.” Captain Dawson, also in a 1993 letter, remarks: “I am proud and indeed honored that the esplanade dividing the monument from the reflecting pool and graves is centered at the exact spot where we made the opening from the beach.”

  II. Dawson’s route to the top was approximately the same as the paved path that today leads from the beach to the lookout with the bronze panorama of Omaha Beach on the edge of the American cemetery. His oral history and a written memoir are in EC.

  24

  STRUGGLE FOR THE HIGH GROUND

  Vierville, St.-Laurent, and Colleville

  JOHN RAAEN, the twenty-two-year-old captain with the 5th Rangers, commanding HQ Company, was the son of an Army officer. Born at Fort Benning, a January 1943 graduate of West Point, Raaen loved the Army. He stayed in for forty years and fought in three wars. He retired as a permanent major general. “I wouldn’t change a single day of my military life,” he concluded his oral history. “There were bad days, all right, but they made the good days better.”

  On June 6, 1944, within minutes of going into combat for the first time, Raaen had learned an important lesson—that to give a frightened man something specific to do would work wonders for his nerves. When he got up the bluff at Vierville later that morning, he learned some more lessons: don’t trust intelligence and don’t make assumptions about terrain until you have seen it with your own eyes.

  “As we had looked at the maps and the models of the Normandy area,” Raaen related, “we had recognized hedgerows surrounding all of the fields. Of course we were all familiar with hedgerows from England.” Like virtually every other officer in the invasion, Raaen assumed that the French hedgerows would be similar to those in England—low, compact, built as much for fox hunters to jump over as to maintain a barrier. Reconnaissance photos from the air did not show the height of French hedgerows. “As soon as we got to the top of the crest off the beach,” Raaen said, “we immediately found out that French hedgerows were different. In France, the hedgerow was a mound of dirt from six to ten or twelve feet high with heavy hedges on top and roots that worked down into the mounds, and the mounds themselves were very effective barriers. You simply could not pass through a hedgerow. You had to climb up something and then at the top you were practically blocked by the jungle of the plant roots and trunks, vines, branches, everything.” Usually, there was a single gap in the hedgerow, to allow the farmer to get his cows or equipment in and out, but the gaps were covered by machine-gun fire.I

  “The Germans would dig into the back of a hedgerow,” Raaen remembered, “put a machine-gun nest in there, and then cut a very small slit looking forward, providing them with a field of fire with what was for practical purposes absolute protection. You couldn’t see them as they fired.” Typically, the Germans would place their MG-42s at the corners opposite the gap, so that they could bring crossing fire to bear on anyone who ventured into the gap or out into the field. Further, they had presighted mortar and artillery fire on the field. In the initial hedgerow fighting, the Germans would allow a squad of GIs to get into the field, then cut them down.

  Eventually, the Yanks learned to fight hedgerow-style. They would use TNT to blast a hole in the hedge away from the gap, then send a Sherman tank into the hole so that it could fire white phosphorus shells—terrifying to the Germans, loved by the Yanks—into the far corners. Or they would weld steel rails (picked up from the beach obstacles, thus turning Rommel’s defenses into their own assets) to the front of a Sherman, so that when it drove into the hedge the rails would dig into the earth and prevent the tank from going belly-up against the skyline with its unarmored bottom an easy target for German gunners. But those methods were developed only after a couple of weeks of hedgerow fighting, and in any case there were no tanks on top until late in D-Day.

  When Raaen set up his company CP in a field outside Vierville, it came under artillery fire. He quickly learned another lesson. “After five minutes under artillery fire, you learned when you had to duck and when you didn’t. You could tell from the sound of the incoming rounds where they were going to hit. If they were going to hit fifty yards away, it was too much trouble to hit the dirt. You just stayed up and kept moving. Of course, if they were going to come in a little closer than that, you hit the dirt and prayed.”

  The objective of the 5th Ranger Battalion was Pointe-du-Hoc. That meant moving through Vierville and west along the coastal road. But Colonel Schneider, always quick to make a decision on the basis of what he was seeing even when it meant abandoning the plan, sent a patrol from Raaen’s company to the left (east) to link up with patrols coming up the Les Moulins draw. Raaen did, moving in the ditches and sunken roads between the hedgerows, and “we ran into a patrol of 1st Division troops [actually, Company K of the 116th Regiment, 29th Division, attached to the 1st Division for June 6]. It included one paratrooper from the 101st who had landed in water off Omaha Beach, and the 1st Division boys had fished him out and he was now fighting with them.”

  The linkup, probably the first for the Americans coming up at Vierville and those coming at St.-Laurent, cut off the Germans on the bluff between Dog Green and Easy Green beaches, as well as those between the crest and the coastal road. Raaen observed that “any reasonable commander should have attempted to move his troops off the beach defenses and inland so that they could continue to fight instead of being captured in the mop-up operations.” But the Germans—and the Ost troops on whom German NCOs held pistols—remained loyal to th
eir führer’s and Rommel’s doctrine of standing and fighting in place. Raaen felt that they had to have known “they were being caught in a trap,” but they stayed in their trenches and pillboxes. Something similar was going on over to the west, near Colleville.1

  • •

  Lieutenant Frerking of the Wehrmacht, who had been directing fire on the beach through the morning, finally was blasted out of his bunker. A Sherman tank got it. His last message before fleeing was: “Gunfire barrage on the beach. Every shell a certain hit. We are getting out.” He had waited too long. His battery was out of ammunition, and he and most of his men were killed trying to escape.

  Other German batteries were running low on ammunition. Colonel Ocker, commander of the artillery of the 352nd Division, telephoned to tell 1st Battery that a truck with more shells was coming. “It’s on its way already,” he promised. It was, but it took a direct hit from a 14-inch naval shell. The explosion left nothing describable.2

  Most Germans did not know it yet, but they had lost the battle. They had expended most of their immediately available ammunition and failed to stop the assault. Things were in reverse. With land lines of communication, the Germans should have been able to move unlimited quantities of ammunition to their guns—as they had done in World War I. But Allied naval and air power had turned the Calvados coast into something like an island, which meant the Germans in the front lines would have to fight with what they had at hand. Meanwhile, the Americans should have found it difficult to supply their men ashore as they had no ports and everything from bullets to shells had to be brought in over water to an open beach. Yet it was the Americans who had a steady stream of reinforcements and fresh supplies coming into the battle and the Germans could do nothing to stop them.

  The general German failure to fall back and regroup once American patrols had infiltrated the German line was a major mistake. Still it had some benefits: Germans in observation posts on the bluff and crest could call in artillery fire on the beaches and keep the exits under fire, so long as ammunition held out, while those in the trenches and pillboxes could continue to direct aimed fire on the beaches. But the price was far too high. Staying in place meant the Germans could not form up for concentrated counterattacks against the squads, platoons, and companies that had made it to the top at a time when the GIs had no artillery support and no weapons heavier than BARs, .30-caliber machine guns, and mortars.

  “They could have swept us off with a broom,” one ranger declared,3 but instead the Wehrmacht soldiers stayed in their fixed defenses, from which they could still kill Americans but not win the battle. They paid the price for Hitler’s obsession with defending every square inch of his conquered empire, and for Rommel’s obsession with stopping the invasion cold on the beach.

  On the high ground, too, the Germans fought a strictly defensive action. Partly this was because the hedgerows were such marvelous defensive positions, mainly it was because they were receiving few reinforcements even as the Americans sent wave after wave of combat infantry onto the beach and into the battle. The Germans were supposed to counterattack immediately, in battalion strength, but because they were confused with their senior commanders absent, because they had their troops scattered in platoon strength in the small villages of Normandy and it took time to assemble them, because they were still a horse-drawn army for the most part, and mainly because the Allied air forces, which had done so little to help the infantry on the beach, did an outstanding job of strafing and bombing bridges, crossroads, and assembly points inland all through D-Day, thus hampering German movement to the sound of the guns, the Germans were unable to launch even one company-strength counterattack at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

  They fought effectively, inflicting casualties and for the most part holding their hedgerows, thus preventing the Americans from getting inland more than a couple of kilometers—far short of their intended D-Day objectives—but they fought isolated, confused, small-unit actions designed to delay and harass and hold rather than to drive the Americans off the high ground.

  • •

  As Raaen was establishing contact with K Company, 116th, Colonel Schneider pushed the remainder of the 5th Rangers across the coastal road, intending to go around Vierville to the south and head out for Pointe-du-Hoc. But the leading companies were held up by machine guns firing from hedgerows south of the road. Three times Schneider tried to outflank the German positions, only to run into new ones.

  “We ran into the doggonest bunch of Germans you ever did see,” Pvt. Donald Nelson recalled. “We got pinned down and we really couldn’t move.” Colonel Schneider came up and wanted to know what the trouble was.

  “Snipers,” Nelson replied.

  “Can’t you get them?” Schneider asked.

  “No, sir, we can’t even see them,” Nelson answered.

  Schneider took his helmet off, got a stick, put the helmet on the stick, and eased it up.

  “The moment that helmet got up above the hedgerow,” Nelson said, “the snipers started shooting at it. That’s the way we got a few of the snipers.”

  Nelson was on “the very tip of the front line.” He wanted to see more so he and a buddy “crawled up on this hedgerow and took our helmets off and a five-man German machine-gun crew set their gun right in front of us. We laid real quiet and watched them. They were about twenty feet from us. They got the machine gun all set up and pulled the slide back and put a shell in the chamber. My buddy tapped me on the side of my foot with his foot, and I tapped him back. We let them have it. I covered him while he went and rolled them over to see if they were all dead. They were.”4

  As the rangers continued to extend their line to the south in the attempt to outflank Vierville, Company C of the 116th Regiment moved through the village, without opposition. Company B of the rangers joined up; the combined forces then moved west, along the coastal road, toward Pointe-du-Hoc. At about 500 meters out of Vierville they were stopped by machine-gun fire from hedgerows. For the next few hours the Americans tried to outflank the positions, only to run into new ones. Every attempt to move across an open field was checked by German rifle and automatic-weapon fire at ranges of 200–300 meters.

  A major problem for the Americans was keeping up the momentum of the advance. This is always a problem for an attacking force, made much worse at Omaha by the natural and inevitable tendency of the men who had made it up from the hell on the beach to the comparative quiet of the high ground to feel that they had triumphed—and thus done their job for that day. In addition, they were exhausted. Furthermore, as with the paratroopers at Utah, when the men got into a village they had immediate, easy access to wine. Sgt. William Lewis of the 116th recalled spending the afternoon of D-Day “trying to get organized outside Vierville. I had liberated a big jug of wine and we all had a drink.”5

  (The residents of Vierville were, of course, terrified. Pierre and Fernand Piprel decided to flee to the south. On the way, they saw some soldiers crouching behind a hedgerow. Pierre Piprel said it was “hard to tell who they were since we did not know the Allied uniforms. Arriving close, I asked them, English? and they answered, No, Americans. Seeing their packs of Lucky Strikes, we knew we were safe. They let us go on.”6)

  The absence of radios, the lack of unit cohesion, and the nature of the terrain also contributed to the inability to maintain momentum west of Vierville. Where individuals could set an example and lead the way up the bluff, in the hedgerows the brave got cut down when they exposed themselves by dashing forward.

  “We were under observation all afternoon long,” Cpl. Gale Beccue of the rangers recalled. “One man moving alone would draw sniper fire, but any concentration of men would bring in the artillery and mortar rounds. We had the village secure but outside Vierville we had only fleeting glimpses of the Germans.”7

  Those who led the way off the beach and up the bluff had a much better chance than those who tried to lead on top. The men behind the seawall could see for themselves that to stay where they were was to di
e, that they could not fall back, that only by following advancing columns did they have any chance at all. On top, a man crouched behind a hedgerow was safe right where he was.

  Isolation contributed to the loss of momentum, as it led many men to the conclusion that their groups were on their own—as was indeed often the case. “From noon through the balance of June 6,” Pvt. Harry Parley of the 116th said, “I am unable to recall chronologically what happened to me. The rest of the day is a jumbled memory of running, fighting, and hiding. We moved like a small band of outlaws, much of the time not knowing where we were, often meeting other groups like ours, joining and separating as situations arose, always asking for news of one’s company or battalion.”

  Parley related one incident from the early afternoon. He was moving along a road when he heard the characteristic clank of a tracked vehicle, then the roar of a German cannon. “Terrified, I turned, ran like hell, and dove into a roadside ditch. Already there was a tough old sergeant from the 1st Division lying on his side as one would relax on a sofa. I screamed at him, ‘It’s a tank—what the hell do we do now?’ ”

  The sergeant, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, stared calmly at Parley for a few seconds, poker-faced, and said, “Relax, kid, maybe it will go away.” Sure enough, it did.8

  • •

  Colonel Canham, CO of the 116th, moved out of Vierville at around 1200 to set up his HQ at the prearranged CP location, the Chateau de Vaumicel, a half kilometer south of the village. In the process, his HQ group (three or four officers and a couple of enlisted men) got isolated behind a hedgerow just short of the chateau. Pvt. Carl Weast with a platoon of rangers came on the scene; Canham spotted the men and ordered them to act as his CP guard.