"Get back to Colonel Taylor. Tell him Exit E-i is open!"
"Where's the CP?" I yelled.
"It's supposed to be on our left!" shouted the lieutenant. "Find the colonel, Fuller! Now!"
Without a moment's hesitation, I jumped up and ran back toward the landing craft, desperately searching for any sign of the colonel and what was left of our command post. Being vertical on Omaha was an invitation to death. God, how I ran! In all my years as a copyboy, my legs never moved that fast. The dead and the wounded lay everywhere, body parts strewn across the sand. Scurrying like a mad rabbit, I jumped over all the corpses. I stumbled once on somebody's leg and fell onto a dead dogface. Getting up, I careened into the surf, but floating bodies blocked me. Swerving from the water to the sand and back again, I ran until I thought my heart would burst.
I fell again, got up, and fell once more, this time landing on my face between a dead medic and a bandaged soldier, the one-eyed dogface staring at me as I gasped for air. The thought of just staying there and acting like a corpse crossed my mind. But I couldn't, for cryin' out loud, I had to find Colonel Taylor. Maybe he was already dead. Then I spotted a halfsmoked cigar on the sand. I picked up the wet stogie and jammed it into my mouth. Hell, even in the eye of that tornado of bullets and explosions, there was no mistaking a Havana. Taylor smoked them. He had to be somewhere nearby. I lifted up my head and spotted him thirty feet up the beach, hugging another seawall with a captain. I scurried over to them arid flopped down on my belly. Miraculously, there were no bulletholes in me.
"E-i's open!" I yelled.
"Who blew it?"
This shot was taken a few minutes after one of the first waves of the D-day assault made it to cover Tired, hurt, but not beaten, Biy Red One dories try to assess the madness.
"Streczyck."
"All right," said the colonel, smiling at me. He reached into his bag and pulled out his private box of cigars and gave them to me.
"Enjoy 'em, Sammy. You earned them, running over here."
Then Taylor stood up. I couldn't believe it. He just stood up. Like me, everyone who saw him get to his feet thought he'd gone nuts.
"There are two kinds of men out here!" shouted the colonel to anyone listening. "The dead! And those who are about to die! So let's get the hell off this beach and at least die inland!"
He went from man to man, kicking and cursing every living dogface in his path, ordering them to get on their feet and get their asses into motion. He looked at me.
"We'll follow you, Fuller, back to the breach!"
"Yes sir!" I said, getting to my feet, knowing that I had to make that nightmare run through the dead and wounded all over again. This time, I was sure I'd catch a Nazi bullet. The sight of Colonel Taylor running up the beach inspired everyone who was still breathing to follow him. After fifty yards, Taylor no longer had to order men to their feet. Dazed dogfaces forced themselves to get up and move up the beach behind the colonel toward the only exit from that death trap. Many were hit and fell backward on the sand. One of the hail of bullets raining down on us caught Taylor in his arm.
"Flesh wound!" he told a medic as they bandaged him on the move. "Make it a temp!"
By then, a couple of our tanks had landed. One of them targeted the top of the bluff and, for the first time, started returning fire at the Schnell Battalions up above. Small teams were organized to lob hand grenades at enemy positions; then, in the resulting confusion, bazooka squads blasted the pillboxes overlooking the sector with split-second timing, giving us our first respite from Nazi machine guns. My company pushed through the open exit on tiptoe, staring at the ground anxiously. On Omaha, a lot of dogfaces had already stepped on land mines, disappearing in a cloud of smoke, sand, and fire. In single file, we got through the breach in the barbed wire and off that goddamned beach.
I was so exhausted, I collapsed at the base of the bluff for a momentary rest. I unwrapped one of the colonel's Havanas, bit off the tip, and lit it with my Zippo. How I'd survived Omaha without a bullet in my brain nor my guts spilled out on the sand wasn't, as my Silver Star citation would call it, "Gallantry in Action." Gallantry sounds dramatic and appealing. But the term should be used only for the way a guy cares for his lover. Omaha was more a game of Russian roulette that I somehow miraculously didn't lose.
Heroes? No such damned thing! You moved your ass one way, and you didn't get hit. You moved it another way, you were blown to bits. When the battle was under way, experience and intuition, not heroics, were useful. Luck had a helluva lot more to do with it. Lucky or not, you still might get hit. But if you were lucky, you got wounded in a way that allowed you to stay alive. Sure there were heroes, but not in the classic sense that many people imagine them. A soldier did something out of panic or hysteria, never considering the risks. He was too goddamned scared to understand the consequences. Or a guy deliberately risked his own life because he felt compelled to save other dogfaces. He didn't feel heroic in the heat of the moment. He followed his gut reaction. It was better not to reflect too much. The whole situation was so crazy, only a madman could find any rationale for being there.
When we'd first landed on Omaha, there was an ammunitions truck on the beach that had caught fire. It was on the verge of blowing to kingdom come. A soldier ran out of nowhere, jumped into the truck, and drove it madly toward the ocean, crushing corpses under the big tires. The truck exploded in the surf in a mountain of flames, killing its driver but saving other lives. He was crazy to have jumped into the driver's seat, though lie probably didn't think he was going to die. What do we call that incomprehensible instinct to put our survival second to that of others? Heroism? Sure, after the act. During the act, you're just following your gut. Maddened by the chaos and cacophony, soldiers couldn't think straight. Due to the shock and stress of Omaha, I wouldn't even remember everything I did on that beach until sometime afterward. In the heat of the moment, nothing made much sense. Moments were hours. Minutes seemed like days. I was thirty-one years old when we landed. I'd aged years when we finally got off Omaha.
Later, I remembered a wounded dogface in the surf calling out my name. I'd run over to him and dragged him up on the beach. He was in excruciating pain, the saltwater burning his wounds. Other doggies yelled at me. I dragged somebody else out of the water toward a medic. A war historian wrote later that it was probably the only battle in history in which the wounded were brought toward the front line for first aid. Like us, medics were in the thick of the combat, risking their lives to work on the wounded. When I pulled guys out of the water, I don't remember thinking that I was risking my life. Who the hell considered risk? You tried helping someone the way you'd want him to help you. Hell, talk about risk, consider the medics who were getting shot at and didn't even have a gun to shoot back.
When I made movies about men at war years later, I'd try to show that survival, not heroics, was the basic motivation of soldiers on the field of battle. Heroes were anointed by brain-trust boys, generals, or newspaper editors behind desks far from the death and destruction. The last thing you ever thought about was winning a medal. Your biggest preoccupation was staying in one piece. When we did catch a bullet or shrapnel, and it didn't hit anything vital, it wasn't a big deal. At least, we acted like it wasn't. I got hit by a bullet in my chest as we fought our way toward SaintLo. Everyone got hurt one way or another. You pretended that your wound was nothing more than another little hole in your body. If you were as lucky as I was, the bullet missed vital organs and you survived. Wounds were as quotidian as drinking a cup of coffee or smoking a cigarette. We poked fun at anyone who made a fuss about a wound. That was one of the ways we made it through the craziness of war.
Above the Normandy beaches, we came face-to-face with the Nazi 352nd Infantry, and what was left of our outfit beat them back in fierce fighting. Of the 183 men who'd landed with my company, about a hundred were dead, wounded, or missing in action. Despite our ragged condition, we were ordered to push out for Colleville-sur-Mer in t
he early afternoon, moving along a road where enemy snipers and machine-gun nests hidden in farmhouses and trees had to be destroyed. We suffered more casualties as we reached the edge of town and ran headfirst into heavy enemy artillery fire. There, we had to dig in and hope that Cannon Company, plus our antitank platoon, would he able to land on the beach and make it through to help us. No such support materialized, because those outfits were decimated on Omaha. Then, to our surprise, U.S. naval artillery starting pounding the village in midafternoon, killing seven of our own men in the process.
One of the hundreds of amazing stories that came out of D day was that of two Big Red One privates, Joseph Parks and Peter Cavaliere, who were part of another company approaching Colleville from the other side. They found themselves cut off from their outfit when the German counterattack began in earnest. In no time, Parks and Cavaliere were confronted by two hundred enemy infantrymen moving forward, supported by a Mark IV tank. Parks and Cavaliere sniped at the assault wave for three hours, resisting every effort to dislodge them from behind a stone wall, which, as the hours passed, was almost totally destroyed. Believe it or not, the two dogfaces kept all those German troops at bay until reinforcements finally arrived.
The first Frenchman we found in Colleville was Monsieur Brobant, who led us to a building where he'd killed a couple of Nazis with a shovel. So much for the idea that all the local French were collaborating with occupation armies. That night, we liberated a bottle of Calvados from an empty bar after we secured the town, and we dug in north of Colleville. The brandy was passed around until the bottle was empty. Sleep was next to impossible, for our ships anchored off the coast pounded enemy strongholds with their heavy artillery throughout the night. At dawn, other sections of the Big Red One moved through our position to continue the main attack inland while we were given the mission of mopping up isolated enemy nests hidden in the bocage, those immense hedgerows that surrounded all the fields in Normandy.
With all the mountains of information they'd accumulated for Overlord, you'd think Intelligence would have told us about the strategic hell of battling the enemy in that hellacious tangle of hedgerows. They were dark, thick, impenetrable tangles of brambles, weeds, bushes, and trees rising up twenty feet high from ancient banks of packed earth. German snipers hid inside the hedgerows, intent on putting holes straight through our hearts. Not a word about the bocage was ever mentioned in our months of preparation. Maybe they figured that training us for the hedgerows would have given away Overlord's master plan.
It was slow, methodical, and dangerous fighting. We had to drive out the enemy cautiously. There were few dramatic charges like you see in Hollywood movies. Any patrol that tried something flashy or overt was devastated by cross fire from Nazi sharpshooters. You crept a few yards, waited, listened carefully, then crept a little more. You saw no one, yet bullets started flying everywhere. This may have been the road to Get many, but it had to be taken one hedgerow at a time. We didn't march across Normandy. We crawled.
Me and an American tank somewhere in Norinandys bocage, the French fitrmers' centuries-old defense against stiff ocean winds, shielding fields of grain, orchards of apples, and pastures of grazing cows
Tanks got stuck and became easy targets. Our engineers wised up and eventually attached revolving iron blades to the front of our tanks-the very same "Rommel's asparagus" that had made Omaha a living hell-and tried crashing straight through the hedges. It was up to small squads of dogfaces to follow the tanks, eliminating all German resistance as we pushed forward. That was one of the most frustrating, dangerous battlefields we'd ever encounter. It made me think of Balzac's first big novel, Les Chouans, about the Breton peasants fighting in the French Revolution, sandbagging the Republicans in those very same hedgerows.
The situation shifted dramatically when American bombs started to fall. Eighth and Ninth Air Force heavy bombers broke the deadlock by leveling fields, farmhouses, and villages. It was the first time our planes worked so close to the front lines. Some bombs hit too close, inflicting heavy casualties on American troops. Among the victims was General Lesley J. McNair, chief of the U.S. Army ground forces. When the U.S. bombing subsided, German soldiers emerged from the hedgerows, shaking, vomiting, bleeding. They raised their hands above their heads, forming a grotesque serpent of confused men desperately searching for someone to surrender to. We moved toward the shuffling Germans and herded them together. No words were spoken. They offered no resistance, no tricks. The bombardment had destroyed their last hopes of standing fast against our invasion.
The bulk of enemy forces, about forty thousand troops, fell back behind the road from Coutances to Saint-Lo. Code-named "Cobra," an Allied operation was planned to break through their defenses, utilizing intense bombing, a breach led by tanks from the Third Armored Division, and, finally, an infantry assault by the Big Red One toward Coutances to isolate the German army. We'd have to face some of their best regiments, including several SS divisions, a half-dozen Panzer divisions pulled off the Russian front, and Goring's bombers and fighters. If Cobra failed, we'd be driven back into the English Channel, where there'd be no salvation. No doubt the German high command expected a repeat performance of the Kasserine Pass debacle. Operation Cobra was to begin sometime in July, though no one knew exactly when, for the surprise element of our advance was essential. As preparations for the next campaign proceeded, they gave our regiment a little time off. After so many casualties, there was no way we could carry on a sustained offensive.
The outfit was bivouacked in front of a chateau near Colombieres to allow time to recuperate and bring in replacements. Dogfaces hit baseballs and threw footballs around the beautiful grounds. Some shot baskets through a hoop made of de-barbed wire. Red Cross gals served us coffee and doughnuts. Letters were written home.
I strolled by a group of fresh replacements leaning against a stone wall and I spotted a young soldier reading an armed forces edition of some book. It was specially bound for GIs in the field. I looked closer. Holy cow, the title on the cover was The Dark Page! That was the first published copy of my novel I'd ever seen. I took a small bottle of booze out of my backpack. My mother had sent it to me in her last care package along with cigars and chocolate. I offered the young soldier a swig of whiskey. He felt pretty lucky.
"To your mother," I said. "And to mine."
"You guys sure know how to live," said the wetnose.
I shrugged. He would soon find out we knew more about dying than living. "How do you like the book?"
"The book?" he said. "It's pretty good."
"Pretty good? That's all?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"It's mine."
"No, it's not. It's mine. I bought it at the commissary in Saint-Lo!"
"I mean I wrote it, babyface."
"You wrote it?"
"Fuller," I said, pointing at my name on the cover. "That's me."
I plucked the book from the kid and called over some guys in my squad to show it to them. A couple of my pals were just as thrilled to see my byline as I was. I lay down in the sunlight on the chateau lawn and reread The Dark Page. It was good to feel the pages in my hands. The yarn took me back to working on Park Row and to Hollywood, far-off memories of life before Pearl Harbor. Hell, I didn't long for the good old days, nor did I have any interest in reliving the past. Nostalgia was a cop-out. I only yearned for one thing: to survive that goddamned war and keep on writing.
Another day during the lull in Normandy, I was taking a nap on the grass.
"Hey, Sammy," said a dogface, pulling me out of a deep sleep. "Remember that photographer who took a picture of you while you were snoring away on the troopship before D day?"
"Do I ever!" I said. "He went on patrol with us in Sicily. His name's Capa."
"Just went by with his cameras again."
"Sonofabitch!" I said. "Which way did he go?"
"Toward OC." That meant Officer's Country.
I jumped up and ran over to our command post. There w
as Robert Capa having a drink with my captain.
"Hey, Capa," I said. "Where's the photo you were supposed to send to my sweet little mother in New York?"
The photographer grinned and shook his head.
"Sammy Fuller! I'm going to send it to her," he said. "Promise."
With General Terry Allen's blessing, Capa had hooked up with our outfit during Husky to get some shots of dogfaces in action. While we attacked a Sicilian farmhouse, Capa had taken cover behind a big rock, snapping away as we zigzagged toward an enemy machine-gun nest. We caught some Wehrmacht and Italians in a cross fire and took them prisoner. Capa told our sergeant that the attack looked like choreography. He started asking for detailed explanations about our maneuvers, taking notes for captions to go with his photos. The sergeant didn't like Capa being there, because he thought the picture-taking would interfere with our concentration. I was brought over to help out because of my newspaper background.
Capa was delighted with all the details I gave him. I knew his work from the Spanish civil war, and I was glad to be of assistance.
"Where's your family, Fuller?" he'd asked me.
"My mother lives in New York."
"Give me her address. I'll send her your photo."
He took some shots of me chowing down on K-rations. It'd been an entire year since I'd met the famous Life photographer in Sicily. Capa and I had a good reunion in Normandy. The next time I'd run into Robert was in Hollywood years after the war. He was coming out of Howard Hawks's office as I was walking in for a meeting with the Gray Fox. Capa was so pleased to see me again that he invited me over for drinks at his place on Holloway Drive that very evening. His photos were everywhere.
1 got a kick out of seeing The Dark Page read by guys in my outfit, thanks to the special armed forces edition of my novel that surprisingly showed up on the front lines.
A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking Page 18