The Longest Day

by Cornelius Ryan

  There seemed greater reason for optimism at the headquarters of the Seventh Army, the army that was actually fighting the Allied attack. To staff officers there it looked as though the 352nd Division had thrown the invaders back into the sea in the area between Vierville and Colleville—Omaha Beach. What had happened was that an officer in a bunker overlooking the beach had finally been able to get through to his headquarters with an encouraging report on the progress of the battle. The report was considered so important that it was taken down word for word. “At the water’s edge,” said the observer, “the enemy is in search of cover behind the coastal-zone obstacles. A great many motor vehicles—among them ten tanks—stand burning on the beach. The obstacle demolition squads have given up their activities. Debarkation from the landing boats has ceased … the boats keep farther out to sea. The fire of our battle positions and artillery is well placed and has inflicted considerable casualties on the enemy. A great many wounded and dead lie on the beach….”*

  This was the first good news that the Seventh Army had received. Spirits were so high as a result that when the Fifteenth Army’s commanding officer, General von Salmuth, suggested that he send his 346th Infantry Division to help the Seventh out, he was haughtily turned down. “We don’t need them,” he was told.

  Even though everyone was confident, the Seventh Army’s chief of staff, General Pemsel, was still trying to piece together an accurate picture of the situation. It was difficult, for he had practically no communications. Wires and cables had been cut or otherwise destroyed by the French underground, by the paratroopers or by the naval and air bombardment. Pemsel told Rommel’s headquarters, “I’m fighting the sort of battle that William the Conqueror must have fought—by ear and sight alone.” Actually Pemsel did not know how bad his communications really were. He thought that only paratroopers had landed on the Cherbourg peninsula. At this time he had no idea that seaborne landings had taken place on the east coast of the peninsula, at Utah Beach.

  Difficult as it was for Pemsel to define the exact geographic limits of the attack, he was certain of one thing—the Normandy assault was the invasion. He continued to point this out to his superiors at Rommel’s and Von Rundstedt’s headquarters, but he remained very much in the minority. As both Army Group B and OB West stated in their morning reports, “at the present time, it is still too early to say whether this is a large-scale diversionary attack or the main effort.” The general continued to look for the Schwerpunkt. Along the Normandy coast any private could have told them where it was.

  Half a mile from Sword Beach, Lance Corporal Josef Hager, dazed and trembling, somehow found the trigger of his machine gun and began firing again. The earth seemed to be blowing up all about him. The noise was deafening. His head roared and the eighteen-year-old ma-chine-gunner was sick with fear. He had fought well, helping to cover the retreat of his company ever since the 716th Division’s line broke back of Sword. How many Tommies he had hit Häger did not know. Fascinated, he had watched them come off the beach and had chopped them down one after another. Often in the past he had wondered what it would be like to kill the enemy. Many times he had talked about it with his friends Huf, Saxler and “Ferdi” Klug. Now Häger had found out: It was terribly easy. Huf hadn’t lived long enough to discover how easy it was—he had been killed as they ran back. Hager had left him lying in a hedgerow, his mouth open, a hole where his forehead had been. Häger didn’t know where Saxler was, but Ferdi was still beside him, half blind, blood running down his face from a shrapnel burst. And now Häger knew that it was only a question of time before they were all killed. He and nineteen men—all that remained of the company—were in a trench before a small bunker. They were being hit from all sides by machine-gun, mortar and rifle fire. They were surrounded. It was either surrender or be killed. Everyone knew this—everyone except the captain firing the machine gun behind them in the bunker. He wouldn’t let them in. “We must hold! We must hold!” he kept yelling.

  This was the most terrible time of Häger’s life. He no longer knew what he was firing at. Every time the shelling lifted he automatically pulled the trigger and felt the machine gun pound. It gave him courage. Then the shelling would begin again and everyone would yell at the captain, “Let us in! Let us in!”

  Perhaps it was the tanks that made the captain change his mind. They all heard the whirring and clanking. There were two of them. One stopped a field away. The other ambled slowly on, crushing its way across a hedge, passing three cows that munched unconcernedly in a nearby meadow. Then the men in the trench saw its gun slowly lower, ready to fire at point-blank range. At the moment the tank suddenly, unbelievably blew up. A bazooka man in the trench, down to his last bulbous-nosed rocket projectile, had scored a direct hit. Spellbound, not quite sure how it had all happened, Häger and his friend Ferdi saw the hatch of the blazing tank open and through the billowing black smoke a man desperately trying to climb out. Screaming, his clothes on fire, he got halfway through the opening and then collapsed, his body hanging down the side of the tank. Hägar said to Ferdi, “I hope God gives us a better death.”

  The second tank, prudently remaining out of bazooka range, began firing, and at last the captain ordered everyone into the bunker. Hägar and the other survivors stumbled inside—into a fresh nightmare. The bunker, barely the size of a living room, was filled with dead and dying soldiers. More than thirty other men in the bunker were so jammed together that they were unable to sit down or even turn about. It was hot and dark and hideously noisy. The wounded were moaning. Men were talking in several different languages—many of them were Poles or Russians. And all the time, the captain, oblivious to the yells of the wounded to “Surrender! Surrender!” fired his machine gun through the single aperture.

  For an instant there was a lull and Hägar and the suffocating men in the bunker heard someone outside shout, “All right, Herman—you better come out!” The captain angrily began firing his machine gun. A few minutes later they heard the same voice again. “You better give Up, Fritz!”

  Men were coughing now from the acrid gaseous discharge of the captain’s machine gun, which was fouling the already stifling atmosphere. Each time the captain stopped to reload the voice demanded that they surrender. Finally somebody outside called to them in German and Häger would always remember that one of the wounded, apparently using the only two words of English he knew, began chanting back, “Hello, boys! Hello, boys! Hello, boys!”

  The firing outside stopped and it seemed to Hägar that everyone realized almost at the same moment what was about to happen. There was a small peephole in a cupola over their heads. Häger and several others lifted a man up so that he could see what was happening. Suddenly, he yelled, “Flame thrower! They’re bringing up a flame thrower!”

  Hägar knew that the flames could not reach them because the metal air shaft which entered the bunker from the back was built in staggered sections. But the heat could kill them. Suddenly they heard the “woof” of the flame thrower. Now the only way that air could get into the bunker was through the narrow aperture, where the captain continued to blaze away with his machine gun, and through the peephole in the roof.

  Gradually the temperature began to rise. Some men panicked. Clawing and pushing and yelling, “We’ve got to get out!” They tried to drop to the floor and burrow through the legs of the others toward the door. But, pinioned by the press of men around them, they were unable even to reach the floor. Everyone was now begging the captain to surrender. The captain, still firing, didn’t even turn from the aperture. The air was getting indescribably foul.

  “We’ll all breathe in and out on my command,” yelled a lieutenant. “In! … Out! … In! … Out! …” Häger watched the metal fairing of the air shaft go from pink to red and then to a glowing white. “In! … Out! … In! … Out!” yelled the officer. “Hello, boys! Hello, boys!” cried the wounded man. And at a radio set in one corner Häger could hear the operator saying over and over, “Come in, Spinach! Come
in, Spinach!”

  “Sir!” yelled the lieutenant. “The wounded are suffocating—we must surrender!”

  “It’s out of the question!” roared the captain. “We’re going to fight our way out! Count the men and their weapons!”

  “No! No!” men yelled from every corner of the bunker.

  Ferdi said to Häger, “You’re the only one besides the captain with a machine gun. That madman will send you out first, believe me.”

  By now, many of the men were defiantly pulling the bolts of their rifles and throwing them on the floor. “I won’t go,” Häger told Ferdi. He pulled the locking pin on his machine gun and threw it away.

  Men began to collapse from the heat. Knees buckling, heads lolling, they remained in a partly upright position; they could not fall to the floor. The young lieutenant continued to plead with the captain, but to no avail. No one could get to the door, because the aperture was next to it and the captain was there with his machine gun.

  Suddenly the captain stopped firing and turning to the radio operator he said, “Have you made contact?” The operator said, “Nothing sir,” It was then that the captain looked about him as though seeing the jam-packed bunker for the first time. He seemed dazed and bewildered. Then he threw down his machine gun and said resignedly, “Open the door.”

  Häger saw somebody stick a rifle with a piece of torn white cloth on it through the aperture. From outside a voice said, “All right, Fritz, out you come—one at a time!”

  Gasping for air, dazzled by the light, the men reeled out of the dark bunker. If they did not drop their weapons and helmets fast enough, British troops standing on either side of the trench fired into the ground behind them. As they reached the end of the trench their captors cut their belts, laces and tunics and sliced the buttons off the flies of their pants. Then they were made to lie face downward in a field.

  Hägar and Ferdi ran down the trench, their hands in the air. As Ferdi’s belt was cut, a British officer said to him, “In two weeks we’ll be seeing your pals in Berlin, Fritz.” Ferdi, his face bloody and puffed up from the shrapnel splinters, tried to joke. He said, “By that time we’ll be in England.” He meant that they would be in a prisoner-of-war camp, but the British misunderstood. “Take these men to the beaches!” he roared. Holding up their pants, they marched away, passing the still burning tank and the same cows munching quietly in the meadow.

  Fifteen minutes later, Häger and the others were working among the obstacles in the surf, removing mines. Ferdi said to Häger, “I bet you never thought when you were putting these things in that one day you’d be taking them up again.”*

  Private Aloysius Damski had no heart for the fight at all. Damski, a Pole who had been impressed into the 716th Division, had long ago decided that if the invasion ever came he would run up the ramp of the nearest landing craft and surrender. But Damski didn’t get the chance. The British landed under such a fierce protective bombardment of naval and tank fire that Damski’s battery commander, in a position near the western edge of Gold Beach, promptly ordered a withdrawal. Damski realized that to run foward would mean certain death—either at the hands of the Germans behind or at those of the advancing British ahead. But in the confusion of the withdrawal he struck out for the village of Tracy, where he was billeted in the home of an old French lady. If he stayed there, Damski reasoned, he could surrender when the village was captured.

  As he was making his way across the fields he ran into a hard-bitten Wehrmacht sergeant on horseback. Marching ahead of the sergeant was another private, a Russian. The sergeant looked down at Damski and with a broad smile asked, “Now, just where do you think you’re going all by yourself?” They looked at each other for a moment and Damski knew that the sergeant had guessed he was running away. Then, still smiling, the sergeant said, “I think you’d better come with us.” Damski wasn’t surprised. As they marched off he bitterly thought that his luck had never been good and that it certainly wasn’t improving.

  Ten miles away, roughly in the vicinity of Caen, Private Wilhelm Voigt of a mobile radio monitoring unit was also wondering how he could surrender. Voigt had lived seventeen years in Chicago, but he had never taken out naturalization papers. In 1939 his wife, visiting her home in Germany, had been forced to stay because of an ailing mother. In 1940, against the advice of friends, Voigt had set out to bring her home. Unable to reach wartime Germany by regular routes, he had made a tortuous journey across the Pacific to Japan, then to Vladivostok and via the Trans-Siberian railway to Moscow. From there he had traveled to Poland and into Germany. The journey took nearly four months—and once across the border Voigt could not get out. He and his wife were trapped. Now, for the first time in four years, he could hear American voices in his earphones. For hours he had been planning what he would say when he saw the first U.S. troops. He was going to run up to them yelling, “Hi, you guys, I’m from Chicago!” But his unit was being held too far back. He had made almost a complete circle of the world just to get back to Chicago—and now all he could do was sit in his truck and listen to the voices, only a few short miles away,* that to him spelled home.

  Behind Omaha Beach, Major Werner Pluskat lay gasping in a ditch. He was almost unrecognizable. He had lost his helmet. His clothes were ripped and torn. His face was scratched and bloody. For more than an hour and a half, ever since he had left his bunker at Ste.-Honorine to return to his headquarters, Pluskat had been crawling through a burning, erupting no-man’s-land. Scores of fighter planes, flying back and forth just behind the bluffs, were strafing everything that moved, and all the while naval gunfire was plowing up the area. His Volkswagen was somewhere behind him, a burning, twisted wreck. Smoke billowed up from burning hedgerows and grass fires. Here and there he had come across trenches filled with dead troops, blasted either by artillery or by the merciless strafing. At first he had tried to run, but he had been pounced on by the planes. Again and again he had been straffed. Now Pluskat crawled. He figured he had made just one mile and he was still three miles from his headquarters at Etreham. Painfully he moved on. Ahead he saw a farmhouse. He decided that when he came abreast of it he would sprint the twenty yards or so from the ditch and ask the occupants for a drink of water. As he drew near, he was amazed to see two Frenchwomen sitting calmly in the open door, as though immune from the shelling and strafing. They looked across at him and one, laughing spitefully, called out, “C’est terrible, n’est-ce pas?” Pluskat crawled past, the laughter still ringing in his ears. At that moment he hated the French, the Normans and the whole rotten stinking war.

  Corporal Anton Wuensch of the 6th Parachute Regiment saw the parachute hanging high in the branches of a tree. It was blue and there was a large canvas container swinging below it. In the distance there was a lot of rifle and machine-gun fire, but so far Wuensch and his mortar unit had seen nothing of the enemy. They had been marching for almost for three hours and now they were in a small wood above Carentan, roughly ten miles southwest of Utah Beach.

  Lance Corporal Richter looked at the parachute and said, “It belongs to the Amis [Americans]. Probably contains ammo.” Private Fritz “Friedolin” Wendt thought there might be food in it. “God, I’m so hungry,” he said. Wuensch told them all to stay in the ditch while he crawled forward. It might be a trick; they might be ambushed when they tried to get the container down, or it could be a booby trap.

  Wuensch carefully reconnoitered ahead. Then, satisfied that everything was quiet, he tied two grenades around the tree trunk and pulled the pins. The tree crashed down and with it the parachute container. Wuensch waited, but apparently the explosions had gone unnoticed. He waved his unit in. “Let’s see what the Amis have sent us,” he yelled.

  Friedolin ran forward with his knife and cut through the canvas. He was ecstatic. “Oh, my God,” he yelled, “it’s food! Food!”

  For the next half hour the seven tough paratroopers had the time of their lives. They found cans of pineapple and orange juice, cartons of chocolate and cigare
ttes, and an assortment of foods the like of which they had not seen in years. Friedolin gorged himself. He even poured powdered Nescafe down his throat and tried to wash it down with condensed milk. “I don’t know what it is,” he said, “but it tastes wonderful.”

  Finally, over Friedolin’s protest, Wuensch decided that they had better “move on and find the war.” Stuffed, their pockets bulging with all the cigarettes they could carry, Wuensch and his men moved out of the wood and headed in single file toward the distant firing. Minutes later the war found them. One of Wuensch’s men fell, shot through the temple.

  “Sniper!” yelled Wuensch. Everyone dived for cover as shots began to whistle about them.

  “Look,” yelled one of the men, pointing toward a clump of trees off to the right, “I’m sure I saw him up there.”

  Wuensch took out his binoculars and, focusing his glasses on the treetops, began a careful search. He thought he saw a slight movement of the branches in one tree, but he wasn’t sure. For a long time he held the glasses steady and then he saw the foliage move again. Picking up his rifle, he said, “Now we’ll see who’s the man and who’s the fake.” He fired.

  At first Wuensch thought he had missed, for as he watched he saw the sniper climbing down the tree. Again Wuensch aimed, this time for a spot on the tree trunk which was clear of branches and foliage. “My boy,” he said aloud, “I’m going to get you now.” He saw the sniper’s legs appear and then his torso. Wuensch fired, again and again. Very slowly the sniper fell backward out of the tree. Wuensch’s men cheered and then everybody ran over to the body. They stood looking down at the first American paratrooper they had seen. “He was dark-haired, he was very handsome and very young. There was a trickle of blood at the side of his mouth,” Wuensch recalls.