The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  Eight minutes after the first explosion, with the main deck awash knee-deep, Corry’s captain ordered her abandoned. Radio codes were slung overboard in weighted bags. For two hours, until rescue vessels pulled close, survivors thrashed about in fifty-four-degree water; an ensign dying of exposure tried to lash himself to a raft with his uniform necktie. German shells pummeled the wreckage, rupturing Corry’s smoke generator, detonating 40mm shells, and killing more men. She sank in six fathoms, with her prow and mainmast—an American flag still flying—visible at low water three miles from shore. The mishap killed twenty-two and injured thirty-three. Five more vessels were sunk and two dozen damaged near Cardonnet Bank in the next ten days.

  Experience from the Pacific suggested that naval bombardment against stout coastal defenses should last days, even weeks. But profound differences existed between battering an isolated island and shelling, from the shallow, cramped English Channel, a long coastline with interior lines that permitted quick enemy reinforcement. The job was the tougher because German gun casemates had concrete walls and ceilings up to twelve feet thick. Consequently the preparatory bombardment for the American beaches in OVERLORD lasted barely half an hour in order to get on with the landings. Allied ships on June 6 fired 140,000 shells, but few enemy casemates were destroyed. Of 218 huge shells and almost 1,000 6-inch rounds flung at the Houlgate battery, for example, only one direct hit was recorded. Of 28 batteries capable of ranging Utah Beach with 111 guns, none were completely knocked out in the dawn barrage. And despite being hammered by three battleships, a heavy cruiser, and sundry lesser vessels, that pesky St.-Marcouf battery would hold out until June 12. As with the air bombardment, the extent to which German defenders were unmanned by the naval pummeling would be revealed only by making land.

  * * *

  Brigadier General Roosevelt intended to see with his own congenitally weak, vaguely crossed eyes just how stout the enemy defenses remained.

  The Channel’s idiosyncratic tidal flow required staggering the five beach landings over the space of an hour; Utah, the westernmost, would be first, and Roosevelt would be first among the first, landing with the initial twenty assault boats of the 4th Infantry Division. After a peevish colloquy aboard U.S.S. Barnett over his missing life belt—“I’ve already given you three,” an exasperated aide complained—he stumped to the ship’s wet rail, patting his shoulder holster. “I’ve got my pistol, one clip of ammunition, and my walking cane,” he announced in his foghorn bass. “That’s all I expect to need.” When a soldier leaned across from the dangling landing craft to offer a hand, Roosevelt swatted it aside. “Get the hell out of my way. I can jump in there by myself. You know I can take it as well as any of you.” Springing five feet into the boat, he steadied himself with his cane as whirring windlasses lowered the craft into the heaving chop. Sailors cast off the shackles as Roosevelt bantered with the pale, wide-eyed men around him because, as he had written Eleanor, “there are shadows when they stop to think.”

  “Away all boats,” a voice called from above. Icy water sloshed around the ankles of thirty soldiers, already shivering and vomiting, packed like herring in the thirty-six-foot hull. A coxswain gunned the diesel engine, swinging the blunt bow into the swell, and Ted Roosevelt headed back to the war.

  He was an unlikely vanguard, even if he had stormed ashore with the assault waves at Oran and Gela, even if he had won Distinguished Service Crosses in the Great War and for heroics against German panzers at El Guettar, and even if, as A. J. Liebling warranted, he was “as nearly fearless as it is given to man to be.” Short, gnarled, and bandy-legged, he reminded one GI of “some frazzle-assed old sergeant.” Gassed in the eyes and lungs at Cantigny in 1918, then left with a permanent limp after being shot at Soissons, Roosevelt more recently had been hospitalized in England for three weeks after returning from the Mediterranean with pneumonia. He liked to quote from The Pilgrim’s Progress, always tucked into his kit bag: “My marks and scars I carry with me.” To no one had he disclosed the chest pains gnawing beneath his service ribbons.

  His greatest ambition, according to his mother, was “to achieve the same heights as his father,” the twenty-sixth president, whose famous crowded hour in combat—he had charged off to San Juan Hill in a Brooks Brothers cavalry uniform with a dozen spare pairs of steel-rimmed spectacles—seemed to haunt his son’s own crowded hours. If Ted was unlikely to join Theodore on Mount Rushmore, his achievements were impressive enough given that he had nearly flunked out of Harvard before working as a mill hand in a Connecticut carpet factory. A wealthy investment banker by age thirty, he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy, chairman of American Express, governor-general of the Philippines, and governor of Puerto Rico, where he learned Spanish, attacked the island’s health problems, and helped forestall a run on the banks by ponying up $100,000 of his own money. His many books included Three Kingdoms of Indo-China, and Hemingway included one of his World War I yarns in Men at War: Best War Stories of All Time. His correspondents ranged from Irving Berlin and Robert Frost to Orville Wright, Rudyard Kipling, and Babe Ruth. Roosevelt’s political career stalled when he lost the 1924 New York gubernatorial election to Al Smith; the other Eleanor in the family, the wife of his distant cousin Franklin, had campaigned against him by touring the state in a truck shaped like a huge steaming teapot, implicating him in the Teapot Dome scandal. He was in fact guiltless.

  “What man of spirit does not envy you?” Theodore had written to his son in France in 1917. Military life, then as now, proved Ted’s “first, best destiny all along,” one admirer wrote. Returning to uniform in 1941, he became assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division, but his tolerance of rowdy indiscipline in a unit given to rampages ran afoul of Omar Bradley: Roosevelt and the division commander, Terry de la Mesa Allen, were sacked toward the end of the Sicilian campaign. Roosevelt wept at this “great grief,” then promptly campaigned for another combat billet. “As long as I can fight in the front lines,” he wrote, “I’ve still got manhood.” After pestering Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Beetle Smith, he asked his wife to petition George Marshall, reasoning that it was “all right to pull strings … if what you wanted was a more dangerous job than the one you had.” Failing to move Marshall in a personal visit, Eleanor persisted with a note: “Is the matter considered so serious that he is not to be given another chance to command troops?”

  The Army’s chief capitulated. Roosevelt joined the 4th Division in early spring and immediately agitated to lead the Utah assault. Twice refused by the division commander, Major General Raymond O. “Tubby” Barton, Roosevelt on May 26 tried again with a six-point memorandum, arguing that “the behavior pattern of all is apt to be set by those first engaged.” He added, “They’ll figure that if a general is with them, it can’t be that rough.” Barton relented as well, and now, at 6:30 A.M., the boat ramp dropped one hundred yards from shore. Drenched, cold, and exhilarated, Roosevelt waded waist-deep through the surf and onto France.

  He was on the wrong beach. Billowing dust from the air and naval bombardment hid what few landmarks existed on the flat coastline, and the two guide boats leading the cockleshell flotilla had fallen back, one with a fouled propeller, the other sunk with a hole in the port bow from a Cardonnet Bank mine. Rather than landing opposite beach Exit 3 and its adjacent causeway over the flooded marshlands, Roosevelt and his spearhead of six hundred men had come ashore almost two thousand yards south, near Exit 2. Worse still, eight LCTs carrying thirty-two Sherman tanks, outfitted with propellers and inflatable canvas bloomers allowing them to putter to shore, had been delayed when one vessel tripped another mine. “Higher than her length she rises,” wrote Admiral Deyo on Tuscaloosa, “turns slowly, stern downward and crashes back into the bay.” Four tanks went to the bottom and some twenty men to their graves. Rather than beaching just behind the assault infantry as intended, the remaining Shermans would arrive twenty minutes late.

  Weak eyes or no, Roosevelt recognized his plight. Hobbl
ing into the dunes, he spied a windmill and other structures far to the north. “We’re not where we’re supposed to be,” he told the 8th Infantry commander, Colonel James A. Van Fleet, who arrived at seven A.M. “You see that brick building over there to our right front? It always showed up in those aerial photographs, and it was always on the left.… I’m sure we’re about a mile or two miles farther south.”

  The accidental beach proved pleasingly benign, with few fortifications, fewer beach obstacles, and little enemy artillery; German defenders did indeed seem dazed by the air and naval pummeling. Wave followed wave of landing craft, jammed with standing troops who reminded Hemingway of “medieval pikemen.” Roosevelt worked the waterline “with a cane in one hand, a map in the other, walking around as if he was looking over some real estate,” as one sergeant recalled. Occasional enemy shells detonated in the dunes with a concussion likened by Hemingway to “a punch with a heavy, dry glove.” Few of the shells fell with precision.

  “How do you boys like the beach?” Roosevelt roared at arriving 12th Infantry troops. “It’s a great day for hunting. Glad you made it!” Engineers swarmed ashore, blowing beach obstacles and gaps in the masonry seawall with “Hell Box” charges and cries of “Fire in the hole!” Demolition teams had hoped to clear the beaches in twelve hours; instead, ninety minutes after Roosevelt first sloshed ashore the fleet was advised that all boats could land with “no fear of impaling themselves on the obstacles.”

  Through the dunes and across the beach road, several thousand GIs—the first of 32,000 in Force U—cleared resistance nests with grenades, tommy guns, and tank fire. A German corpse crushed beneath a Sherman’s tracks lay “ironed flat like a figure in a comic book,” according to a staff officer’s description, with “the arms of its gray uniform at right angles to its pressed and flattened coat, [and] black boots and the legs that were in them just as flat and thin as if they had been cut from a sheet of dirty cardboard.” Four causeways leading to the Cotentin interior would be seized and exploited on June 6, including one under a foot of water. To avoid clogging the narrow roads, swimmers and nonswimmers from the 12th Infantry paired off to cross the flooded fields. “I gave an arm signal,” the regimental commander reported, “and three thousand heavily burdened infantrymen walked into the man-made lake.”

  The mutter of gunfire sounded along a three-mile front, scarlet tracers skipping like hot stones across the water. Soldiers waggled swatches of orange cloth, peering westward through the haze for answering waggles from the 101st Airborne. Near Exit 1, in the far south, a tank lieutenant hopped down from his Sherman to help a wounded paratrooper only to trip a mine, blowing off both feet; his crew dragged both damaged men to safety with ropes. A dead German soldier was found stripped to the waist, shaving cream still on his chin. Others were mowed down or captured, including fifty gunners with three horse-drawn 88mm guns. An enemy soldier burned by a flamethrower was evacuated to the beach, charred, blistered, but still breathing. “It sure takes a lot to kill a German,” a Coast Guard lieutenant told his diary. GIs snipped the unit flashes from enemy sleeves and gave the patches to intelligence analysts.

  East of Pouppeville, a 101st Airborne squad cautiously summoned scouts from the 4th Division across the causeway. “Where’s the war?” an 8th Infantry soldier asked, rifle slung on his shoulder. A paratrooper gestured vaguely inland. “Anywhere from here on back.” Soon enough Roosevelt raced up in his newly landed jeep, Rough Rider. Hearing the slap of artillery ahead he shouted to an officer, “Hey, boy, they’re shooting up there,” then cackled with laughter as he drove off to the sound of the guns.

  * * *

  Eleven miles offshore, aboard U.S.S. Bayfield, the naval commander of Force U, Rear Admiral Don P. Moon, sent a heartening battle report at 9:45 A.M.: fifteen of twenty-six waves landed; obstacles cleared; vehicles moving inland. Moon’s buoyant dispatch belied a fretful anxiety: the loss of Corry and other vessels on the Cardonnet Bank had already led him to delay seven assault waves, and now he had all but decided to halt the landings completely until minesweepers could carefully comb the shallows.

  At age fifty, Admiral Moon was given to perturbations. The son of an Indiana lawyer, he had graduated from Annapolis in 1916 at the top of his class in ordnance, gunnery, and engineering; his graduate studies of ballistics at the University of Chicago led to successful field tests aboard the battleships Maryland and Nevada. He wrote short stories, secured a patent for a “razor blade holder,” and commanded a destroyer squadron during the invasion of Morocco with “exemplary conduct and leadership under fire.” After a year as a staff officer in Washington and promotion to flag rank, he took command of Force U when OVERLORD expanded from three beaches to five. Subordinates considered him “hardworking, hard-driving, and humorless,” sometimes demanding of junior officers, “What are you famous for? What do you do?” The deaths of seven hundred men on his watch during Exercise TIGER in late April nearly unhinged him—“Moon really broke down,” a staff officer reported—and he was determined that no such calamity would occur in the Bay of the Seine.

  In his spare office aboard Bayfield, Moon abruptly revealed his plan to halt the landings to the Army’s VII Corps commander. This was Major General J. Lawton Collins, a boyish towhead and Guadalcanal veteran known as Lightning Joe; he would oversee all operations in the Cotentin once Force U reached shore. Collins was appalled if unsurprised, having detected in Moon “a tendency to be overly cautious”; to his wife, the general wrote in mid-May, “He is the first admiral I’ve ever met who wears rubbers on a mere rainy day.” Both forceful and charming, Collins ticked off the reasons to continue to press ahead: light resistance on Utah, with fewer than two hundred casualties in the 4th Division; troops boring inland; naval losses painful but moderate. More to the point, the 101st Airborne needed urgent reinforcement, and nothing had been heard from the 82nd Airborne. “I had to put my foot down hard to persuade the admiral,” Collins later said.

  Persuade him he did. Moon relented, with misgivings, then assumed a brave face in a brief, stilted statement to reporters on his flagship. “It is our good fortune, which always goes with parties who plan well, that Force U has made a successful landing,” he told them, then added, “The initial action has been won.”

  Hell’s Beach

  FIFTEEN miles southeast of Utah, the flat Norman littoral lifted briefly to form a sea-chewed plateau named La Côte du Calvados after a reef on which legend held the Spanish galleon Salvador came to grief in 1588 as part of the Armada’s larger mischance. In various Allied plans the crescent plage below the bluffs had been labeled Beach 46, Beach 313, and X Beach; now it was known, and would forever be known, as Omaha. Five miles long, composed of packed sand yielding to shingle sorted in size by a thousand storms, the beach offered but five exits up the hundred-foot escarpment, each following a narrow watercourse to four villages of thick-walled farmhouses a mile or so inland. June airs usually wafted out of the south, but on this fraught morning the wind whistled from the northwest at almost twenty knots, raising the offshore lop to six feet and accelerating the current from two knots to three, running easterly or westerly depending on the tide.

  That Norman tide was a primordial force unseen in any previous amphibious landing. Rising twenty-three feet, twice daily it inundated the beach and everything on it at a rate of a vertical foot every eight minutes, then ebbed at almost an inch per second. Low tide typically revealed four hundred yards of open strand, but six hours later that low-tide mark would lie more than twenty feet deep. To finesse this phenomenon in landing the 30,000 assault troops of Task Force O, followed by 26,000 more in Force B, planners chose to attack on a rising tide the morning of June 6. This would permit landing craft to ferry the assault force as far up the exposed beach as possible, but without stranding the boats on falling water as the tide retreated. Ten thousand combat engineers would land with the infantry on June 6, as the historian Joseph Balkoski has written, yet the first sappers would have only half an hour to bl
ow open lanes among the beach obstacles for landing craft before the rising sea swallowed them.

  OVERLORD’s plan called for nine infantry companies to attack simultaneously on a beach divided into segments: Dog, Easy, Charlie, and Fox. But three mistakes had already given Omaha an ineluctable tragic cast—one error attributable mostly to the Navy, two to the Army. To minimize the risk of German shore fire, naval captains had anchored their transport ships eleven miles distant, guaranteeing derangement of the landing echelons by wind, current, and confusion. In a bid for tactical surprise, Army commanders had insisted on truncating the naval bombardment to barely thirty-five minutes—enough to scare the defenders but not enough, given the clean miss by Allied air forces, to subdue them. The Army also had chosen to storm the narrow beach exits where fortifications were sturdiest, rather than stressing infiltration up the bluffs to outflank enemy strong points.

  The German defenses were fearsome. Eighty-five machine-gun nests, soon known to GIs as “murder holes,” covered Omaha, more than all three British beaches combined. Unlike the obstacles at Utah, many of the 3,700 wood pilings and iron barriers embedded in the tidal flat at Omaha were festooned with mines—“like huckleberries,” as a Navy officer described them. Unique among the five beaches, the escarpment allowed plunging as well as grazing fire. Thirty-five pillboxes and eight massive bunkers—some “as big as a New England town hall,” in one reporter’s description—defended the beach’s five exits, while eighteen antitank sites, six Nebelwerfer rocket-launcher pits, and four artillery positions covered the balance of the beach. Guns enfiladed nearly every grain of sand on Omaha, concealed from the sea by concrete and earthen blast shields that aerial photos had failed to find. Thanks to smokeless, flashless powder and a German ban on tracer bullets here, gun pits remained, as a Navy analysis conceded, “exceedingly difficult to detect.”