The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  Everything anyone could think up failed. Those “Belgian Gates,” mainly, in the deeper water were too damned obstreperous. There was just no way to get our landing craft safely over or through those obstacles so we could make our assault at high tide—it just wasn’t possible. A little sadly, that word was passed back to our planners round about Grosvenor Square; something in their planning was going to have to be changed radically.

  By this time, our invasion planners had developed a high degree of flexibility in their thinking. If it wasn’t possible to make a proper assault as called for by the book, then an improper assault would have to be made. Regardless of how sacred was the idea of attacking only from closest in on a high tide, the idea was going to have to be jettisoned—high tide, by the grace of Erwin Rommel and his obstacles, was out for us. For at high tide, when we couldn’t see those obstacles, if we came roaring in with our troop-laden assault craft, we could neither clear them nor dodge them—they would ruin us, exactly as Rommel intended.

  But if instead, we came in a little before a rising half tide, things would be different. Although now a very unwelcome eighth of a mile further seaward when our boats grounded at the half tide waterline, there before us, more or less in the dry on the uneven sands, would be all of Rommel’s obstacles, fully exposed to our view. So if we picked as D-day a day on which half tide flood came a little after dawn, we could ground our boats just to seaward of those obstacles, drop our ramps, and unload. Then, while the men of our first wave worked their way in over the last eighth of a mile of exposed sand through obstacles they could now see and dodge, demolition teams of engineers, armed with explosives and wire cutters, could blast apart all the “Belgian Gates,” cut loose the barbed wires, explode the enemy mines, and mark clear paths with poles and buoys for all our landing craft to follow. After that, as the rising tide flooded swiftly in, the waiting boats could run right up through the blasted out stakes and hedgehogs to the high-water mark and unload the following waves of troops close up to their objectives.

  It would all, of course, have to be done under enemy fire. But shortly before H-hour, a preliminary terrific heavy air bombing was scheduled to be laid on to blast to bits all the gun emplacements on the bluffs overlooking the beach. Then just before H-hour, the naval fire from the fleet of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers lying offshore would take care of what Nazi guns might still be left. Our first wave and our demolition teams would go in at H-hour against a badly shattered and wholly demoralized defense.

  So D-day was moved in the planning from that day on which high tide came at dawn to that day on which at dawn the rising tide had still four hours to go before reaching full flood—roughly four days later in the month finally chosen for attack.

  But setting our attack date back four days wasn’t all Rommel and his obstacles had done to us. The need to deal with those obstacles called immediately for the provision of what might well be a near-suicide unit in the assault force. Demolition teams, both engineer and naval, began feverishly to be trained for what obviously was going to be the most deadly task on the Omaha Beach on D-day—to stand there on the wet sands in the early dawn at H-hour, practically sitting ducks for every Nazi gunner still in action, and make no attempt to take cover while blasting and slashing clear the paths through those mine-draped obstacles for our troop-laden landing craft waiting close by in the surf to seaward. And in spite of Nazi fire, to be damned quick about it, too. For the incoming Channel tide would be rising rapidly, four feet an hour, coming in fast behind them. Either the men in the demolition teams kept blasting beachward at a fast clip despite enemy fire from the bluffs above, or they’d be caught in the still undemolished barbed wire before them, swiftly to be drowned there in the surging currents of the tide coming in behind them. For that incoming sea would finally stand some sixteen feet higher over the sands they were working on than when they’d started their blasting a little before half tide—plenty deep enough to drown anybody if he didn’t keep moving shoreward ahead of it.

  That then, was the problem facing the demolition teams, composed mainly of the men of the 6th Special Engineer Brigade, and of some naval demolition groups assigned to work with them. The top command of this amphibious force took a good look at the operation as training for it began, and reported, with much understatement, it might be “expensive.” And on May 4, as D-day began to loom up close aboard, General Eisenhower himself was writing to our Army’s Chief of Staff, General Marshall in Washington, to list as very first among the “worst problems of these days,” the problem of how to remove those underwater obstacles that Rommel had planted in his path to the beachheads. It began to look to all involved that unless something drastic was done to silence the guns commanding the beachhead, the removal of those obstacles would be carried through at the expense of most of the blood of the men of the demolition teams.

  CHAPTER 16

  The sands chosen as scene for the assault on what came to be known as the Omaha Beach, the major American point of attack on D-day, were crescent-shaped. They were about 7000 yards long, rather thick in the middle, thinning down to sharp points at both ends, where the beach faded away into the rocky bases of the cliffs protruding there to the water’s edge, enclosing and terminating the crescent.

  Just above the high-water mark, the fine beach sand changed into a thick bank of coarse shingle, about fifteen yards wide, thrown up there by the never-ending surf. This rocky shingle, of heavy pebbles running up to three inches in size, was banked up along the westerly third of the beach against a sloping seawall built partly of masonry and partly of wood, from four to twelve feet high, and about a mile long. Back of this seawall for the length of that same mile ran a paved promenade road paralleling the beach. At its easterly point, both pavement and seawall ended together. The beach road itself, however, continued farther east, still paralleling the sea, for some two miles more, but now only as an unimproved track on the hard-beaten sand, no longer paved. Along this easterly two mile stretch, the same coarse shingle now directly lay against a dune line buttressing the seaward side of the road, forming a natural seawall there. This, in a crude way, gave to the unpaved road behind it the same protection from the pounding seas as was provided for the paved promenade road toward the west, first by the sloping wooden seawall there and then by the sloping masonry wall beyond. It was not possible for a vehicle to get from the beach itself up that shingle bank onto the road behind it—the steep slope of the bank and the poor traction in the shingle between them barred such passage.

  Further inshore, on the landward side of the beach road was a second sandy flat, not very wide at its extremities, but reaching a depth of perhaps two hundred yards at its midpoint, with the tiny village of les Moulins set on this inner strip, not much above sea level.

  Some miles to the eastward of the Omaha Beach, the British under Montgomery directly, were to land and attack toward Caen. About an equal number of miles to the westward of the Omaha Beach, a second American army under our Major General Lawton Collins, in smaller force than at Omaha, was to land and attack on the north and south stretch of sand at the southerly base of the Cherbourg Peninsula that we called the Utah Beach. This spot was substantially closer to our first objective, Cherbourg, than was the Omaha Beach. In both these assaults, to the east and to the west of Omaha, beyond the flat beaches on which the landings were to be made, lay only further flat terrain going inland—nothing in a topographical way to give to the defenders any great natural advantage in opposing the landings.

  But on the Omaha Beach, this was decidedly not so. Back of the beach flat there and behind les Moulins, lay the feature which made the Omaha Beach a joy to the Nazis to defend, a splitting headache to us as attackers.

  Fronting the whole of the Omaha Beach from end to end, and close up to the sands beyond the beach road, rose a continuous line of bluffs and cliffs, ranging in height from 100 to 170 feet above sea level, and in declivity from very steep slopes to sheer cliffs. Particularly at the western end, whe
re the sand faded out and the cliffs rose abruptly from the sea, did those precipices dominate the whole crescent of the beach.

  Anyone who looks across the Hudson River from Manhattan toward the New Jersey shore in the vicinity of the George Washington Bridge, will see practically what faced us overhanging the Omaha Beach—for all the differences there were, we might as well have had the Palisades themselves towering over most of our landing beach.

  No planner in his senses would ever have picked a beach so completely at the mercy of both raking and direct fire from the line of cliffs fringing it, had there been any other beach whatever available to him in the vicinity with sufficient frontage to act thereafter as the temporary harbor site we so desperately needed to back up our assault. But there was none such. So we had to settle for those forbidding cliffs and bluffs, along with the beach we needed, if we were to invade at all. The beach itself suited us fine as an ideal site for our artificial harbor; no doubt the cliffs looming up above it suited Rommel quite as well as made-to-order sites for his guns. Gettysburg was won by the North and lost to the South solely because of Union guns on the ridges dominating that bloody battlefield. At Omaha Beach, Rommel began by utilizing to the hilt every advantage nature had bestowed on him in gun positions. Atop the far western end of the sheer cliffs, at Pointe du Hoe, where there was no beach, he had emplaced a heavy coastal defense battery of six 155 millimeter howitzers, partially casemated. These were the heaviest artillery pieces anywhere between the naval batteries defending Cherbourg and those set to defend Le Havre; they were sited for use against ships at sea, not against infantry. With their range of 25,000 yards, from Pointe du Hoe as a center their fire covered an arc of the sea to over twelve miles out, controlling the entire area into which must come every vessel of the invading American armada, carrying all the troops for both Omaha and Utah Beaches. The plunging fire from that battery of powerful howitzers at Pointe du Hoe could destroy any ship in the invading fleet—even the armored decks of our bombarding battleships would not be proof aganist the hail of 155 mm. shells coming down on them from the sky at such steep angles. That single battery of six 155’s was capable of completely disorganizing and disrupting the entire invasion fleet before ever it had the chance to land its men—unless it were first put out of action.

  A little further to the eastward of Pointe du Hoe, coming just where the sand beach itself commenced, lay Pointe de la Percée, a very prominent cliff. At this point began the more local defenses of the beach itself. Built into the face of that cliff near its top were casemated 88’s, the famous all-purpose gun Rommel had first unveiled in the Libyan Desert, with which he had there shot to pieces practically all the Eighth Army’s armored divisions. Set now into that cliff, with their long muzzles cunningly masked from view from seaward by thick concrete walls running diagonally outward from the casemates, these 88’s were the most deadly of the beach defenses. From their strategic placement high up at the western edge of the sands, they dominated the beachhead completely. They could cover it with lateral artillery fire from end to end, while themselves immune to observation from the sea and consequently to any counter-battery fire from warships offshore.

  Somewhat to the eastward of Pointe de la Percée came the first of four narrow natural gaps in the cliffs, cutting gashes from the inland plateau down to the beach sands. Up through this first gap, from the promenade road on the beach to the village of Vierville-sur-Mer, a quarter of a mile inland, ran. the solitary paved road leading off the sands to the main network of highways serving the interior. This gap, the major break in the cliffs facing us, was denominated the Vierville Draw.

  About a mile still further east at the other end of the paved promenade road, lay the village of les Moulins, nestling on the sands at the foot of the cliffs there. A second gap in the cliffs occurred just behind les Moulins, which we called les Moulins Draw. And three-quarters of a mile eastward of les Moulins came the third gap, labelled as the St. Laurent Draw, with the fourth and last gap opening up another three-quarters of a mile along. This last one was designated as the Colleville Draw.

  Through each of these last three gaps, unpaved roads led inland also. The two more westerly roads, from les Moulins Draw and St. Laurent Draw, though starting at points three-quarters of a mile apart on the beach, once they were up on the plateau both converged on the village of St. Laurent, about a mile in. The fourth and more easterly road, from the Colleville Draw, as its name indicated went directly to the village of Colleville, also about a mile in from the shore.

  So leading off the sands at Omaha, there were four gashes through the cliffs, each with its own road leading up and inland off the beach. Those four roads were vital to us in getting our tanks and heavy guns up off the narrow beachhead and deployed inland, there to get set to take the initial shock of counterattack by Rommel’s Panzers. Getting possession of these four roads and opening them to traffic off the beach was our first and major D-day objective.

  But Rommel was himself just as interested in these gaps as we, except that his interest lay in seeing that we never got near those four roads through the cliffs, let alone up them and inland. Consequently he clustered his major defensive gun positions about those four gaps, with the Vierville Draw, the only one with a paved road going up through it, and the les Moulins Draw at about the center of the beach, getting the greater attention.

  A dozen Nazi strongpoints were strung out along the crests of the cliffs and bluffs behind the beach. Eight concreted gun casemates, containing 88’s and 75’s, flanked each of the gaps to deny to us any passage through them. Thirty-five pillboxes with lighter guns stiffened up a line of firing trehches and machine gun nests, all sited to cover with plunging fire both the roads up from the beach and the beach sands themselves. Eighteen anti-tank guns, ranging in caliber from 37 to 75 mms., were distributed among these positions to help the heavier casemated guns in taking care of any armor we might bring ashore.

  Not on the heights but down on the beach level itself, the village of les Moulins after first having its inhabitants totally evacuated and then being partly demolished by the Nazis to give them unobstructed arcs of fire, had been converted into a self-contained fortress area on the sands. It was a forbidding maze of trenches, machine gun nests and pillboxes, made humanly unapproachable from the sea by tangles of barbed wire, mine fields in the sands, and echeloned anti-tank ditches fifteen feet wide and twelve feet deep which blocked off every approach to the road there leading off the beach and going up through les Moulins Draw.

  Coming about in the center of the beach area, the defenses at les Moulins, on the beach and on the heights above it taken together, had probably more deadly fire power concentrated there than at any other spot on the beachhead.

  Blocking off approach to the three other roads up the cliffs, anti-tank ditches similar to those at les Moulins cut deep scars in the sands.

  To finish off the defenses of the beach as a whole, double coils of concertina barbed wire were strung along its entire length, placed close up against the landward side of the beach roads. Anyone attempting to dash across the road would be fully exposed to fire during his crossing and would end on the far side, not only still fully exposed but also snarled up in the snaky coils of this wire, there, now close under the machine guns hidden on the nearby ridges, immediately to be cut to ribbons by almost point-blank fire from above.

  However, should anyone somehow get through the wire while the attention of the machine gunners was momentarily engaged elsewhere, he would nevertheless be taken care of. The sands between the road and the foot of the bluffs, and even such of the bluff slopes as seemed climbable were sowed with land mines—all kinds of mines—mustard pots, butterflies, Tellers, trip mines and rock fougasses, these last being blocks of TNT covered with rock, to be set off by trip wires in the underbrush. The Nazis, and Rommel in particular, were adept in making murderous minefields of the most innocent looking areas.

  Rommel must have surveyed the hornet’s nest he had built up do
minating the approaches to and the heights over the Omaha Beach with complete satisfaction. Skillfully cooperating with nature, he had turned out the perfect defensive position.

  Back at SHAEF in London, where now sat the concentrated command for the invasion, practically all this was known either from reconnaissance photographs or from information dribbled surreptitiously across the Channel by members of the French Resistance in Normandy. Soberly, all of it was carefully taken into account in laying out the assault.

  First, there was that ominous battery of 155 mm. howitzers at Pointe du Hoe. Unless that were swiftly washed out, the invasion fleet would be sunk before it managed to get its troops unloaded. That battery might be knocked out by heavy air bombing in the weeks before D-day, but any such concentrated air attack on Pointe du Hoe would be a dead giveaway of just where we intended to invade; that was not to be thought of. So scaling the precipices on which stood that battery in a surprise attack and knocking out those six howitzers right at H-hour seemed the only alternative. That was obviously a Commando job. It was turned over to Lieut. Colonel James Rudder (who happened to come from Texas) and some 250 of his men (who came from all over), comprising three companies of Rangers (no relation whatever to Texas Rangers), the American counterparts of those specially trained tough bruisers which the British called Commandos. Colonel Rudder was given the cliffs near Swanage on the Isle of Wight to practice on and a completely free hand in figuring out how to carry through from the sea a scaling operation on precipices that might well have discouraged a troop of monkeys.