The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The chateau was full of Germans. A German riding a bicycle came up the road. The rangers shot him, then took up outpost positions around the chateau. Weast watched as a platoon of German soldiers came out of the chateau and formed up in a column around an old two-wheeled horse buggy with wounded in it. The Germans were unaware of the presence of Americans; they had their rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “They were pulling the cart along, two guys shoving and two guys pulling. We waited until they got real close, maybe ten yards, and we stepped out in the road with our weapons pointed at them and they surrendered immediately.

  “Now, with this kind of a situation, what in the hell do you do with twenty-five prisoners? We put them in an orchard and we put one man guarding them and we tried to interrogate them. Hell, there were no Germans! They were all Hungarians, Romanians, Russians, anything but Germans. There was one German noncom, middle-aged, and this guy looked like he wanted to do anything but fight a war. He was just happy as hell to be a prisoner, although he was concerned about a German counterattack, but not nearly as concerned as we were.

  “The situation was becoming very, very tenuous. Here was Colonel Canham with 1500 yards of front to cover, and he had a total of about thirty-five men to do it with, expecting a German armored attack. Oh, man, you talk about bad spirits.”

  As the afternoon wore on, there was talk among the rangers about shooting the prisoners, but Weast pointed out that “not only is that illegal and immoral, it’s stupid.” When the light began to fade, “we had them lay real close to each other and we put a man with a BAR at the end and we made it plain to them that when it got dark we wouldn’t be able to observe them but we could hear them and if anybody made any move we were going to get the whole bunch of them with the BAR. They lay there through the night and believe me, those were some damn quiet enemy.”9

  At 1400 Lt. Jay Mehaffey of the rangers was on the outskirts of Vierville. He lost a man who had been crossing a gap in a hedgerow to a German sniper. Just then a ranger came down the road with eight German POWs. Mehaffey lined the prisoners up in the gap, hands clasped over their helmets, then had his men get past the gap behind the prisoners.

  “We didn’t have time to fool with prisoners,” he said, so once safely beyond the gap he just waved to the Germans to continue on down the bluff and find someone to whom they could surrender.10

  • •

  Colonel Canham’s isolation was complete. His only working radio belonged to the liaison officer from the 743rd Tank Battalion and even he could not contact any of the tanks still down on the beach. Canham did get some help—that may not have been needed—from the Navy. At 1350, a signalman on LCI 538 at Dog Green beach sent a visual message to destroyer Harding: “Believe church steeple to be enemy artillery observation post, can you blast it?”

  Harding replied, “Which church do you mean?”

  “Vierville.”

  “Don’t you mean the church at Colleville?”

  “No, Vierville.”

  Harding called the commander of Force O Forward Observers to report the request. CFOFO replied five minutes later, granting permission to fire on the church for one minute. Harding’s action report noted, “At 1413 opened fire at a range of 3200 yards and completely demolished church, expending 40 rounds, every shell of which landed on the target.”11

  The incident was typical in a number of ways of not only D-Day but of the later fighting in France. Whenever the Americans took artillery fire they were convinced that the Germans were using the spires of nearby churches for observation posts and used their own artillery to knock those spires down. Sometimes they were right about the OP, often they were wrong; in any case there were few standing spires left in Normandy after the battle.

  In the case of Vierville, the town was in American hands (unknown to LCI 538 and Harding) and none of those on the spot thought the spire was being used as an OP. Harding claimed a ranger officer later confirmed that the church contained four enemy machine guns “which were completely demolished.”

  Harding’s claim to have hit the church with every shell was contradicted by Mayor Michel Hardelay of Vierville, who said that the first shell exploded in his house, causing the wall of the second floor to collapse. The second hit the bakery, killing the maid and the baker’s baby. The following shells hit the surrounding buildings as well as the church. The GIs in the town took some casualties from the naval fire.12

  Such contradictions in the testimony of eyewitnesses, well known among witnesses to traffic accidents, are commonplace in war; in the case of the D-Day fights at Vierville, St.-Laurent, and Colleville, they are exacerbated by the nature of the action—small groups without knowledge of what was going on around them, no radio or other contact, each group engaged in its own battle.

  When the American destroyers had a spotter, they could be deadly accurate. Private Slaughter of the 116th saw Satterlee do some fine work. Slaughter was on the edge of the Vierville draw. He spotted Sgt. William Presley leading a small band of men. Presley was six feet four inches, weighed 230 pounds, and was, according to Slaughter, “the epitome of a first sergeant: rugged-looking, immaculate, and gifted with a booming voice.”

  In front of Presley there was a naval forward observer, lying face down, dead, with a radio strapped to his back. Presley had been observing a battery of Nebelwerfer, 105mm mottars, firing from a fixed position a couple of hundred meters to his front. The shells were playing hell with the reinforcements arriving on the beach. Presley retrieved the radio and made contact with Satterlee. He said he had a target and gave the coordinates. Satterlee fired; Presley gave a correction; another shell, another correction; then Presley called, “Fire for effect.”

  Slaughter, watching all this, recalled, “We heard the salvo, ‘Boom-ba-ba-boom-ba-ba-boom-ba-be-boom!’ Soon the shells came screaming over on the way to the German tormentors. ‘Ker-whoom-ker-whoom-ker-whoom! Ker-whoom-oom-oom-ker-whoom-oom-oom!’ The ground trembled under us. The exploding shells saturated the area, some of them landing too close for comfort to our position. That action put the Nebelwerfer out of action and earned Presley the Distinguished Service Cross.”

  Shortly thereafter, Slaughter saw his first German prisoner. He was being interrogated by a German-speaking American officer armed with a carbine. The captive was on his knees, hands behind his head. The American demanded to know where the minefields were located. The prisoner replied with his name, rank, and serial number.

  “Where are the damn minefields?” the officer shouted. With an arrogant look on his face, the prisoner gave his name, rank, and serial number. The American fired his carbine between the German’s knees. With a smirk on his face, the German pointed to his crotch and said, “Nichthier.” Then he pointed to his head and said, “Hier!”

  The American interrogator gave up and waved the prisoner away. Slaughter commented, “This convinced me that we were fighting first-rate soldiers.”13

  • •

  “At nightfall the Vierville area was the weakest part of the beachhead,” the Army official history states.14 The 5th Rangers and elements of the 1st Battalion, 116th, with some combat engineers, were holding defensive positions west and southwest of the village. Many were surrounded. (One ranger platoon had, amazingly, managed to make it to Pointe-du-Hoc, almost without incident.) Communication ranged from poor to completely absent. The Vierville draw remained closed almost until dark. Dog Green, White, and Red sectors on the beach were still under heavy artillery fire and few landings had been attempted after 1200, which meant that few reinforcements were coming up to help.

  Lt. Francis Dawson of the rangers had already earned a DSC for his actions in getting men off the beach. When he got to Vierville his unit was stopped on the west side by machine-gun fire. “We failed to eliminate this gun, so we withdrew and came back to the Vierville road and tried to outflank it. But as night fell, we were not too far from Vierville. We dug in.”15

  Others had similar experiences. Lieutenant Mehaffe
y got through Vierville in the midafternoon, then stopped. “Our right flank was the English Channel, our left flank our own outposts. We held this position the rest of D-Day. We were less than a mile from where we had landed.”16

  Pvt. Paul Calvert of the 116th, after describing the route his company followed to Vierville, declared, “The end of the day saw this group completely fatigued, demoralized, disorganized, and utterly incapable of concerted military action. The men were scattered from captured German positions overlooking the Vierville draw to the designated CP with Colonel Canham.”17

  But the Germans at Vierville were also fatigued, demoralized, disorganized, and incapable of concerted action. From behind their hedgerows, German snipers and machine gunners could delay and harass and stop the American advance—but they could not push the men from the rangers and the 116th back down the bluff.

  • •

  The village of Vierville had not been defended by the Germans, but St.-Laurent held a company of infantry from the 352nd Division. The Germans were dug in on the high ground commanding the upper end of the Les Moulins draw. They were on both sides of the road coming up the draw and controlled the approaches to the main crossroad on the western outskirts of the village. Maj. Sidney Bingham, CO of 2nd Battalion, 116th, organized a series of attacks against the German position, only to be stopped by machine-gun fire from positions which his men were unable to locate.

  In the afternoon, the GIs at St.-Laurent got help from the 115th Regiment, 29th Division. The 115th landed at E-1 draw just before noon, but it took many hours for the regiment to clear the beach and launch an assault on St.-Laurent from the northeast. It was slowed by mines—and by a rumor sweeping through the troops that American mine detectors could not locate German mines, so that the paths marked out by white tape were not safe. German snipers on the bluff caused some casualties and many delays.

  “We moved cautiously and hesitantly, partly because of fear and partly because of the strangeness of the situation,” Sgt. Charles Zarfass recalled. St.-Laurent was only about a kilometer up from the beach, but the 2nd Battalion, 115th, did not start its attack against the village until late afternoon, while the 1st Battalion did not reach its objective south of St.-Laurent until 1800.18

  Pvt. John Hooper got near St.-Laurent in midafternoon. “Creeping forward, ever so cautiously, I tripped a Bouncing Betty mine. It popped into the air and I hit the ground expecting to be blown to bits. It fell back to earth with a thump—a dud. Greatly fatigued, I just lay there wondering if the war would last much longer.”

  Hooper got up and advanced, only to be held up by machine-gun fire coming from a wood. A prolonged firefight ensued. Rifle ammunition for the GIs was running critically low. A lieutenant with an M-1 and binoculars told Hooper to cover him—he intended to climb a tree and “get those bastards.”

  “That’s not a good idea, Lieutenant,” Hooper said. The lieutenant glared at him, turned, climbed the tree, found a good firing position, and shot three times. Then he came crashing down, screaming, “My God, I’m hit.”

  Hooper and a buddy dragged him to a hedgerow. He had been shot in the chest. They called for a medic who gave him some morphine.

  “What a thorough waste,” Hooper commented to his buddy. “All the money spent on commissioning this guy and he’s trying to act like a Sergeant York. Didn’t last a day. What a terrible waste.” The lieutenant died that evening.19

  By late afternoon, E-1 was open for tracked vehicles. At 2000 hours, Major Bingham sent a runner to ask for tank support in the assault on St.-Laurent. Three tanks from the 741st Tank Battalion came up. They destroyed sniper and machine-gun nests in the vicinity of the village. But just as the infantry began to move in, 5-inch shells from American destroyers came pouring down. As at Vierville, the troops at St.-Laurent had no way of contacting the Navy, and they took some casualties as a result of the bombardment.

  After the naval fire lifted, the fighting in St.-Laurent reached a crescendo. GIs ducked around corners, threw grenades into windows, kicked in doors, and sprayed interiors with their BARs and carbines. The Germans, taking advantage of the stone houses that might as well have been fortresses, fought back furiously.

  In the midst of this street fighting, several men from the 115th were startled to see Lt. Col. William Warfield, CO of the 2nd Battalion, calmly sitting on a curb with his feet extended into the street, tossing pebbles at a scruffy dog.

  Another strange sight: General Gerhardt had come ashore in the late afternoon and set up 29th Division HQ in a quarry in the Vierville draw. He could not get much information on how things were going up on top for his regiments, but he could see a long file of men trudging up the draw. He spotted a passing soldier eating an orange. When the man tossed the orange peel away, Gerhardt sprang up from the maps he was studying and gave the GI a furious tongue-lashing for littering.20

  By nightfall, 29th Division troops held positions north, east, and south of St.-Laurent and parts of the town. Elements from five battalions had spent the afternoon fighting through an area of about a square mile without securing it—and it was defended by only a single German company. That spoke well for the German defenders—and showed what excellent defensive positions hedgerows and stone houses on narrow streets provided, as well as how difficult it was in World War II for infantry lacking on-site artillery, tank, or mortar support to carry out a successful assault.

  But although the Germans had done well and the Americans had failed to reach their objectives, the prospects for the next day were decidedly dismal for the Germans. The GIs had fresh supplies coming up from the beach, plus reinforcements, plus all those vehicles waiting for a chance to drive up the draws and get into the action. The Germans were all but surrounded, they had no hope of fresh supplies or reinforcements, and they were badly outnumbered.

  • •

  At Colleville, as in the other two villages, small separate battles developed throughout the afternoon. Advancing American units were more or less blind, and coordinated action by the assaulting forces was impossible. Capt. Joe Dawson got his men from G Company, 16th Regiment, 1st Division, into the western edge of Colleville in the afternoon, but after seizing the first few buildings he was unable to advance further, due to a terrible experience.

  “The Navy had been given orders to fire on Colleville as soon as visibility would permit,” Dawson explained. “Due to the haze of battle which permeated the whole sky and area, observation was almost impossible. Nevertheless, in the late afternoon, our Navy did go ahead and decide to level Colleville while we were there. We lost sixty-four men from our naval fire, as it swept the town from one end to the other. That was the worst tragedy that befell us on D-Day.”21

  Harding participated in the bombardment. The ship’s action report read, “At 1854 received orders from Commander Task Force to open fire for two minutes on Colleville Church, range 3500 yards, which was complied with.

  “At 1857 ceased fire, church badly battered, 73 rounds expended.

  “At 1935 again received orders from CTF to open fire again for two minutes on Colleville Church and to spread fire around area.

  “At 1937 opened fire again on same target, range at this time 3800 yards, scoring numerous hits on church and area. Sixty rounds expended. It is believed that this church was being used as an observation post for mortar fire since the beach at this time was being bombarded apparently from inland.”22

  The CTF was just guessing; Dawson’s losses, and those of other companies in Vierville and St.-Laurent, to so-called friendly fire were one of the prices paid for the complete absence of radio communication between those on the high ground and the Navy in the Channel.

  • •

  Between 1100 and 1400, the 18th Regiment landed in front of E-1 draw and began moving up to join in the attack on the Colleville area. The 2nd Battalion passed to the west of Dawson to take up positions a half kilometer southeast of the village. The 1st Battalion ran into two platoons of Germans holding trenches near the head of
E-1 draw, eventually bypassed them, and headed toward the village.

  “As we moved against moderate fire toward the town of Colleville,” Lt. Charles Ryan of Company A related, “I became aware of a small group of men moving steadily toward Colleville. As I reached my position, I saw that it was my battalion commander, Lt. Col. Robert York, who was one of the greatest combat leaders of WWII or any other war.

  “He had his command group with him. He paused to say, ‘Keep moving, boys, through town to the other side. We’re getting a handle on this thing but we still have a long way to go.’ Then he moved ahead.”

  At 1730, Ryan’s platoon reached the coastal road, where it assumed defensive positions for the anticipated counterattack. “That night,” Ryan remembered, “we were subjected to continuous machine-gun and rifle fire.” He paused, then went on: “But there was a beachhead. The 1st Division was ashore.

  “The Sixth of June, 1944, was an exhausting day, a frightening day, an exhilarating day, a sorrowful day, and a joyous day. It was a day when the men in the 1st Division lived up to the division motto, ‘NO MISSION TOO DIFFICULT, NO SACRIFICE TOO GREAT. DUTY FIRST.’

  “Now, forty-five years later, it’s hard for me to believe that I was a part of this. I still correspond with some of the men in my D-Day platoon and we’re all still proud of what was done and happy that we were a part of it and completely bewildered as to why we survived. But we’re bewildered by lots of things these days.”23

  • •

  At 1900, the 1st Division CO, General Huebner, landed on Easy Red and set up his CP. At 2030 General Gerow and the advance HQ of V Corps left the Ancon for shore. On the high ground inland, the men of the 29th and 1st divisions were scattered and isolated in eighteen different pockets around the three villages. There was no continuous line. They had no artillery or heavy mortars, only a few tanks, no communications with the naval or air forces. For the night, they were on the defensive, dug in.

  But they were there. The presence of so much brass on the beach was proof that they had secured the beachhead and won the battle.