The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  By H + 30, the rising tide put a period to the efforts of the demolition teams; the water was so high now in the outer and intermediate obstacles they could no longer work. And the LCVP’s of the next wave were already coming in. The remnants struggled inshore. In thirty minutes, the men of the two Engineer Combat Battalions and the Navy Combat Demolition Units had suffered 41% casualties.

  They had, however, succeeded in clearing six gaps through the obstacles to the shore—one each side of les Moulins Draw, four between the St. Laurent and Colleville Draws. They had been unable to blast any gaps at all before the important Vierville Draw on the west, or along the easterly end of the beach. And of the six gaps they had blown, they had unfortunately been able to mark only one with buoys and poles so that it would still be visible after the incoming tide had wholly covered the obstacles—the remainder of their marking gear had been lost or destroyed in the melee. The net result was that in spite of the wholesale sacrifice of the men of the demolition teams to the unopposed fire from above, 95% of the obstacle fields, at H + 30, remained in place. But at half tide, for a while at least, they were still partly visible to the incoming LCVP’s.

  The wan survivors, for the first time in half an hour free now like every other G.I. on the beachhead to concentrate only on dodging machine gun fire, headed from the fire-swept obstacle field to the shingle above the high water mark, seeking what cover it might afford them.

  There was not a demolition man left on his feet but agreed wholeheartedly now that Dr. Goebbels for once had spoken truly about the Atlantic Wall. Those not on their feet, the scattered corpses mainly in the water rising among the remaining obstacles, bore silent testimony to the same truth.

  CHAPTER 22

  The situation along the beachhead, though but thirty minutes had gone by since H-hour, was already completely sickening.

  Between the shattering effects of the storm and the unexpected strength of the defense, the spearhead of Eisenhower’s carefully prepared assault was practically demoralized, with no more visible effect on the Nazi defense than to cause them some expenditure of ammunition.

  As for the spearhead, Company A of the 116th Infantry, landing on the right of the beachhead (with Company C of the 2nd Rangers on its right flank) was already shot to pieces. Company A, almost alone of all the attackers on the western half of the beach, had to its immediate grief come in on its proper objective—squarely in front of the Vierville Draw. On its left, over the adjoining thousand yards of beach, where ten other boatloads of infantry should simultaneously be touching down, there wasn’t a single boat to engage Nazi attention—they had all been set down to the eastward with the tide.

  The result for the men of Company A and for the two boatloads of Rangers just on their right was practically a massacre.

  They were all directly in front of the heavily defended strongpoints at the Vierville Draw, and also the nearest target on the beach to that devastating battery of 88’s perched high up on Pointe de la Percée where it could enfilade the whole stretch of beach looking eastward. And there was nothing anywhere close to them beyond on their left to invite any dispersion of enemy fire. They caught it all—from in front and from their right.

  One boat belonging to Company A foundered a little offshore. A second landing craft, just touching down, literally disintegrated in the breakers under the bursts of four direct mortar hits rained down on it from the cliff above. The men going overboard from the remaining boats when they grounded found themselves enveloped in intense machine gun fire. In spite of peeling off to right and left to get some dispersion as they stumbled down the ramps into the surf, in no time at all every officer and practically every sergeant was killed or wounded, and within fifteen minutes, two-thirds of all the men of Company A, pierced by bullets or gashed by bursting shells, were lying dead or wounded among the obstacles. The remaining third (joined now by those few who had managed to gain the open sand at the high water line, only to find that if they wanted to stay alive, they had better get back into the water) crouched in the breakers to hide themselves. There, with no more of their noses exposed in the surf than they needed to catch an occasional breath, they dodged from obstacle to obstacle as the tide rose, to work their way in with it to the shelter of the shingle lying against the steeply sloping masonry seawall. And there finally the leaderless remnants of Company A clung, practically weaponless, completely knocked out as a fighting force, out of action for the rest of the day.

  A little to their right and therefore not quite so exposed to the direct fire from the Vierville Draw, Captain Ralph Goranson and his sixty-four Rangers landed. Still, in spite of being a trifle out of the line of fire, they had about as bad a time; the whole top of the cliff before them burst into fire as they entered the surf.

  Since the beach promenade road at its western end terminated where it turned to ascend the Vierville Draw, there was no seawall at their end of the beach sands—there the high water mark ran practically up to the foot of the cliff, which was the first possible shelter for the Rangers.

  With artillery shells exploding all about his two boats as he came in, and with intense machine gun fire greeting them as they touched down, Goranson’s Rangers lost over half their men before they made the base of that cliff. In its lee, safe temporarily at least from further fire, Captain Goran-son paused to reorganize what men he had left. He, at least, unlike most, knew exactly where he was and what he was supposed to do there—to knock out the strongpoint on the cliff above him, just to the west of the Vierville Draw, which had been murdering his men with their machine guns. With his remaining twenty-three men, he prepared to try to scale that vertical cliff and do it.

  Meanwhile Companies F and G of the 116th Infantry, which should have been hitting the beach evenly spaced to the left of A Company, came in instead with a gap of a thousand yards open on their right, with the boats of both these companies crazily intermingled, and with the already disorganized flotilla landing almost en masse directly in front of les Moulins.

  As a consequence, these men were trebly in hard luck. For not only were they jammed up instead of evenly dispersed, and also with that fatal gap of a thousand yards open on their right, but additionally there was another gap, even worse, of twelve hundred yards, open on their left. With wide gaps on both sides of them, they came in on the beachhead with nothing in their vicinity to force any dispersion of enemy fire. To the Nazis overhead, they offered a beautifully concentrated target.

  The results were almost similar to those at the Vierville Draw. Les Moulins, both on the beach sands and overhead, was a heavily defended set of Nazi strongpoints guarding the draw there. Some of the men of Company F on the right flank, coming across the sands, got a little shelter from clouds of smoke rising from burning grass on the bluffs set afire by the naval bombardment, and within fifteen minutes of landing made the shelter of the seawall to the right of the les Moulins Draw with no great losses. Still, when they got there, they did not know where they were; their confused officers could not decide what to do.

  However, the majority of the men of Companies F and G disgorged in that area by their landing craft, unsheltered by any smokescreen, came instantly under withering fire from les Moulins. Half never reached the beach; the remaining half, after forty-five minutes of dodging bullets in the surf, managed to get to the shelter of the shingle, badly disorganized, with most of their officers gone, on terrain where they should not have landed, and ignorant therefore of the defenses confronting them and how best those defenses might be attacked. But this last difficulty made little difference at the moment—the completely exhausted and stunned G.I.’s still alive were in no condition to assault anything—their major preoccupation was so to dig themselves into the depressions in the uneven slopes of the shingle as to get some shielding from that lethal plunging fire coming from the bluffs beyond.

  So on the western half of the beach, the assault made by the four companies of the 116th Infantry was in poor shape—by no stretch of any imaginatio
n could it be called an assault—there had been no fire from the battalion on the enemy positions. Company A was already shot to pieces. Company F, in front of les Moulins, was nearly as badly off. Company E had been carried so far to the eastward by the tide that when finally it touched down, it wasn’t in the western section at all. And Company G, in somewhat better shape than the others, was lost somewhere to the east of les Moulins, where it knew it shouldn’t be, and was considering how to go about a move westward along the fireswept beach to the sector where it belonged.

  On the eastern half of the beach, the men of the 16th Infantry, all veterans of the landings in Sicily and in North Africa, were to land. Like all old soldiers, they had taken extra precautions—each man of the 16th wore two Mae Wests instead of the usual one, and each man in addition had an extra Mae West tied to his heavy equipment to help in floating it through the surf. But in spite of what all these veterans had thought they had learned in their previous encounters with the sea, on the Omaha Beach their landings on the eastern half of the sands was only a heartbreaking repetition of what was going on in the western sector—of wounded men helplessly drowning in the surf; of men who survived the initial debarkations from the landing craft only to be shot to pieces as they struggled inshore through the obstacles; of the same murderous fire continuously pouring in on the dazed remnants as they stumbled in toward the shingle.

  Only on the far left end of the beach crescent, where as on the far right the tidal flat reached all the way up to the foot of the vertical bluff with almost no shingle in between, did a single company succeed in duplicating the dubious luck of Captain Goranson’s company of Rangers on the far right. There on the far left of the Omaha Beach, Company L of the 16th Infantry managed to get in to the protection of the bluff itself with the loss of only half its men, which was neither much better nor much worse than others, but unlike them, with its officers still alive and with it, and ready as quickly as the exhausted remnant could catch its breath, to do something with what was left of the company.

  All along the beachhead from west to east, those who had finally made the shelter of the shingle or of the cliffs, now received a respite from fire. Seaward of them in the open, offering at the moment much better targets, were the demolition parties working amongst the obstacles. Most of the Nazi machine guns now concentrated on them. The men sheltering behind the seawall or the shingle they would take care of a little later.

  An odd feeling of isolation descended on the stunned G.I.’s huddling together for such, shelter as the sloping seawall and the shingle might afford for the moment. Till the Nazis could pay attention to them again and start to pulverize them with high angle mortar fire against which the sloping seawall would afford little protection, they were relatively unmolested.

  Plastered flat against the shingle, it was not possible for the G.I.’s there to see even a hundred yards along the beach. What might be going on, if anything, either to the right or to the left, was beyond anyone’s determination—and there was no means available for communication beyond what could be seen. Practically all the radio communication gear being lugged ashore had either been jettisoned by men unexpectedly stepping into water over their heads, or ruined by salt water while coming through the breakers.

  Here was a situation unique in the history of warfare—and the more so for occurring in this age of the wonders of wireless. Not only did Eisenhower in his headquarters a hundred miles away across the Channel in Portsmouth not know what was going on, nor did Bradley aboard the Augusta only a few miles offshore know any more, but even the men actually on the Omaha Beach could see little and knew less. The battle, if so far it could be called one, was wholly out of anyone’s control. From what little of it the dazed G.I.’s squeezed against the seawalls could see about them, it also seemed irretrievably lost. And so far as they in the first assault wave were concerned, it was.

  However, to some of the men looking behind them over the exposed sands where lay their dead and such of the wounded as had not yet drowned, came an unexpected sight. Here and there along the water’s edge were a few tanks, engaged in a decidedly unequal battle with the artillery on the cliffs. The G.I.’s rubbed their eyes; most of them, wholly wrapped up in dodging from obstacle to obstacle in getting inshore, hadn’t noticed that before.

  Some of the tanks, after all, had managed to make the beach, but neither in time nor in the force anticipated to be any shield to the first wave. Of the 64 DD’s which should have swum in to furnish the intense artillery fire needed to cover the first wave in landing, only 29 actually were launched, 27 of these swamped, and only 2 succeeded in reaching shore.

  On the LCT’s carrying the remaining 35 DD’s fitted out to swim in, the officers there took a thoughtful look at the flotilla of DD’s already launched and already sinking, took a sober second look at the 6000 yards of white-capped seas between them and the beach, and decided that enough tanks had submerged already to show that this was not any morning for amphibious tank operations. Instead of trying to swim in any more DD’s, they would take their chances of bringing in the LCT’s themselves, tanks still aboard, till they grounded. There, under fire, of course, they would unload the tanks in the surf, and let them bull their way in through the obstacles—if they could. They would be no worse off then than the 32 General Sherman tanks which had never been converted to DD’s, and which were to be landed exactly that way. These last 32 General Shermans it had always been intended to take in on carriers, to bolster up the DD barrage on the beachhead, giving a total of 96 tanks all told for close-in artillery support. They would all be a little late for H-hour that way, but that was no cause for argument. Anyone looking at the streams of bubbles marking where the tanks already launched had submerged, would concede that a little late was infinitely better than never.

  So nearly a score of LCT’s, carrying the 35 unlaunched DD’s, the 32 General Sherman tanks, and 16 bulldozers for the combat engineers, started for the beachhead.

  On the far right of this line of tank landing craft, Company B of the 743rd Tank Battalion with 16 DD’s on 4 LCT’s tried to beach in front of the Vierville Draw. That put it under fire from the flanking 88’s on Pointe de la Percée, the deadliest battery on the beach. Those 88’s literally tore apart the two nearest carriers, sinking eight tanks, and killing the company commander and most of his other officers.

  While the 88’s on Pointe de la Percée were fully absorbed in this slaughter, the other two LCT’s of Company B managed to slip in to the surf line and get their eight tanks overboard. This they were successful in doing because the guns squarely before them on the Vierville strongpoints, with their muzzles shielded from direct view to seaward by lateral concrete walls, couldn’t fire down at them. But by the same token, neither could the tanks there fire on the guns behind those casemates at Vierville. At the best, the tanks could fire only laterally to their right at the gunflashes on Pointe de la Percée, where the guns, unfortunately for them in an artillery duel, had them at a strong disadvantage in target visibility. So in general these eight tanks were in a poor position to help anyone where they were and terribly handicapped in getting anywhere else where they could help more—they couldn’t climb the shingle to the road to get better angles of fire for themselves. Their only real hope lay in the bulldozers coming in far to their left with the combat engineers—those bulldozers should open a slope for them through the shingle up to the road. Unfortunately for this hope, of the 16 bulldozers coming in on the LCT’s along with the tanks on their left, only three ever survived the barrage of shells from the cliffs above them during their passage through the obstacles to the beach. And of these three bulldozers, not one was close enough to help disentangle the eight tanks marooned before the Vierville Draw.

  To the left of the Vierville Draw, profiting also by the time it took the 88’s on Pointe de la Percée to finish off to their satisfaction the two nearest LCT’s and the eight tanks aboard them, the LCT’s farther away managed also to unload 16 DD’s and 16 General She
rmans, a total of 32 tanks, in the surf line just short of the obstacles in front of les Moulins. But these tanks, like those at the Vierville Draw, found themselves also immobilized by their inability to get across the shingle to the road.

  Somewhat farther to the left, the going for the remaining LCT’s was tougher. Here the two DD’s which by some miracle had covered 6000 yards of heaving seas on their own flotation and power finally landed. And near them, the three remaining DD’s of their group which had never been launched were put overboard from an LCT. Alongside them, on other LCT’s, came the second squadron of 16 General Shermans for the eastern half of the beach.

  Instantly, this concentration of LCT’s drew artillery fire from all along their fronts—laterally from les Moulins and the St. Laurent strongpoints on their right and a criss-cross from the Colleville strongpoint to the left. Three of the remaining DD’s and five of the General Shermans were swiftly destroyed. The remaining thirteen tanks—two of the DD’s and eleven of the General Shermans—went into action as best they could against what they could—immobilized, like all the others.

  But it was much too late for any of the remaining tanks to do anything to save the men of the first wave. In general, machine gun fire from hidden trenches just beyond the crest of the bluffs had already pretty thoroughly chewed them up. All the tanks could do now was to divert some of the artillery fire from above to themselves and away from the men in the landing craft in the waves to follow. But when it came to smothering the machine gun fire, they could do little to help, even by diverting some of that fire also to themselves. For the canny Nazi machine gunners wasted none of their bullets on tanks, and the flat-trajectory tank fire was ineffective on machine gun nests buried in trenches behind the crest of the bluffs. And against the concreted casemates the tanks could see, their 75 mm. guns weren’t powerful enough to smash through; the most they could hope for was that flying shrapnel from their bursts would interfere with and hold down the artillery fire from above.