A little on his left, Captain Joseph Dawson who had come in on the second wave with a substantial part of Company G of the 16th, in a little better condition than most for he had succeeded in getting several of his machine guns ashore with him, considered the same idea.
Spalding acted first. He blew a gap in the wire facing him with a bangalore torpedo, got his men across the road and through the gap, and then found himself blocked by minefields in the marshy ground beyond, while machine guns from the strongpoint on his left started to spray him with bullets. Luckily his men spotted a path around the minefield or they would shortly all have been cut to pieces; they swiftly got in to the protection of the draw Spalding originally had noted. Unfortunately, on his right, a soldier who had inched ahead with a bangalore to try to clear a path there through the minefield was killed by an anti-personnel mine. And exploding mines killed two other G.I.’s attempting to get through the minefields toward the left.
Meanwhile, on Spalding’s left, Captain Dawson had also started operations. With some machine guns of his own to help, he waited till the enemy machine guns on the crest above exposed their positions by firing on the next flotilla of LCVP’s coming in. Then building up a heavy supporting fire of his own on the nearest of those enemy guns, he sent several little groups across the road to blow the wire there. At this point, so thickly had the Nazis laid their concertina coils, it took four bangalores to blow a single gap.
To complicate matters, trip wires to detonate anti-personnel mines had cunningly been set out to snare anyone approaching the wire. So the job took some time; without the smothering fire of his own machine guns on the crest above, it is doubtful that any of his men would have survived long enough to make the cuts. As soon as the gaps were blown, Captain Dawson started to move his company across the road for an advance on the bluffs.
He got them across, only to find in front of him more of the same minefields which had faced Spalding.
Dawson got his men safely through by a grisly expedient. Before him were the dead bodies of the two G.I.’s recently torn to pieces in the first attempt to cross. Evidently there, at least, the hidden mines had already been exploded. His men might, if that turned out to be the fact, have a safe passage through simply by going over the bodies of their dead comrades. They did, but it was a little nerve-racking. Immediately, some stray combat engineers followed them across the road, to clear more mines and to widen the gaps in the wire.
Meanwhile, the rest of the men of the 16th Infantry, jammed up behind the shingle in a confused conglomerate of disorganized units with no longer any officers, showed no inclination at all on their own to follow through the gaps. They had seen the mine explosions just beyond the wire; they’d had enough already; they wanted none of that. They weren’t moving in spite of enfilading artillery bursts and exploding mortar shells now starting to inflict casualties on them even behind the shingle.
Colonel George Taylor of the 16th endeavored personally to order the mob before him forward through the gaps. But those G.I.’s were not accustomed to getting orders directly from colonels. Orders from sergeants, yes; to those they had learned by hard experience to react automatically. But as for orders from colonels, the men were too numbed by what they’d gone through already to absorb any such radically new ideas—they only stared dumbly at him and squeezed a little harder against the shingle. They weren’t moving.
Colonel Taylor was no man to accept disaster simply because it was inevitable. Grabbing the nearest sergeant, he roared out to him and to all the panic-stricken G.I.’s clinging to the shingle near him.
“Two kinds of people are staying on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die! Now let’s get the hell out of here!”
And ordering that sergeant to collect a sizable squad, regardless of what unit either he or they belonged to, and start across the road, he now got action. Soon every non-com, leading men he’d never seen before, was on his way through the wire toward the bluffs. The jam tying up the 16th Infantry behind the shingle was loosening.
While the men of Company G were gingerly picking their way through the minefield, Captain Dawson and one of his men started up the bluff. Halfway up, a machine gun set to cover any approach up the little draw opened fire on them. Jumping for cover into the brush, Dawson ordered the man with him back to bring up the company while he alone kept on. Still under fire but screened by one patch of brush after another, he managed to get within 75 yards of the gun when the Nazis lost sight of him and ceased firing.
At that, Dawson circled to his left, made the crest unobserved and then crawled toward the gun from behind. Not till he was within 30 feet of it was he spotted; then action on both sides was amazingly rapid. Dawson leaped to his feet, clutching a grenade; the Germans started to swivel their gun on him.
Dawson got his grenade in first; the explosion killed the whole crew.
The path up the inclined draw was now open. Shortly the 5th Section of Dawson’s company, arriving first, knocked out the two machine gun nests adjacent, leaving quite a hole in the line of enemy machine gun fire from the bluff.
Captain Dawson reorganized his Company G just beyond the crest and started immediately inland in columns of sections toward Colleville. As had been thoroughly impressed on him, the imperative need to get a defense line hurriedly organized inland against counterattack took first priority over all else, over even his opportunity to further damage the defenses of our enemies on the Atlantic Wall, once he had penetrated that.
A little on Dawson’s right, there was Lieut. Spalding with his section of Company E. His struggle up the bluff was partly eased by what Dawson had accomplished in knocking out the machine gun at the crest, but even so, it was no clear sailing.
Nearing the bluff top, he came under fire from another machine gun covering the draw from the right; before he could rush the position and capture the solitary soldier manning that gun, it had knocked down three of his men. With twenty-three only left now, he reached the crest, found a line of trenches there already abandoned, and then parted company with Dawson—while Dawson with the larger group went inland, he would first see what he might do with his small party on the bluffs to help those still below. So he went west.
Looking down now from the bluffs, Spalding saw the cluttered beachhead as the enemy had seen it—a dismal sight for American eyes, but now there was something he could do about it.
Directly below him lay the shingle bank and adjoining it the beach road. Racing across that road in sporadic groups headed for the gaps in the wire beyond were squads of the G.I.’s of his own regiment whom Colonel Taylor was pushing forward. But the Nazis in the massive strongpoint to Spalding’s right, guarding the easterly side of the St. Laurent Draw, noting that heavy advance, were beginning to mass machine gun fire on those gaps.
Moving back from the crest of the bluff into fields crisscrossed by hedgerows and shaded by clumps of trees, Spalding and his twenty-three G.I.’s managed undetected to get to the rear of the strongpoint and above it.
In a concerted rush then, they came downhill upon the surprised Nazis busily engaged in firing in the opposite direction, and burst into the outworks.
From then on, it was hand to hand combat with grenades and rifle butts. In that tangled network of trenches and gun-pits, it took Spalding’s men two hours to knock down the opposition, but at least from the first assault, there was no more fire on the beach from that strongpoint—a most important gain, for major reinforcements were just starting to debark at that section of the beachhead.
By 1000, Spalding had the strong point. And immediately, a startling change took place on the beach below. No longer under fire from artillery overhead, the combat engineers of the 37th Engineer Battalion, manning one of the two bulldozers still in action, tore the first chunk out of the shingle bank, opening at last a path for vehicles from the cluttered beach up to the road beyond. And on the other side of the St. Laurent Draw, the 146th Engineer Battalion promptly bulldozed through a second gap. Move
ment off the sands was at last possible to trucks. They began to untangle themselves.
Whether Spalding and his little group of G.I.’s from Company E of the 16th ever had a chance to pause and look down on the change they had wrought on the beachhead situation, is dubious. Hardly had they finished rounding up their prisoners (aside from the enemy dead, as large a force as they) when a runner reached them from battalion headquarters with orders to move immediately south to Colleville, there to join the rest of their regiment, now pouring unmolested up the sides of the bluff, to establish the inland counterattack defense line.
Farther to the west, between the Vierville Draw and les Moulins, up against the seawall, lay the units of the 116th Infantry Regiment in various stages of demoralization. Directly in front of the guns of the Vierville Draw, sheltered at least temporarily by the concrete seawall, lay the remnants of Companies A and B, battered into impotence, incapable even of further movement to save themselves. On their left were somewhat less than half of Companies B and C of the 2nd Rangers, almost as badly cut to pieces while coming in by the fire of the same German positions.
From here eastward came a gap of some four hundred yards to where lay the 5th Ranger Battalion, practically intact, with the wreck of LCI(L) 91 blazing fiercely on the beach in their rear. Adjoining them, clustered against the timber seawall there, was Company C of the 116th Infantry, the only company in the 116th Regiment that had the luck to come in reasonably whole. With this company was the regimental commander. Colonel Canham.
Action in this sector started on the right. Here sixty-two survivors of the original hundred and thirty men of Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers lay against the masonry seawall, catching their breath after their desperate struggle in the water and on the sands to get through against exploding shells and whizzing bullets from the Vierville Draw.
But where they now were hardly looked good to them as a shelter for long. To add to this gloomy outlook, neither on their right or on their left could they see any other troops. A sense of utter isolation gripped them all. Except for three DD tanks (the few survivors of the sixteen brought in there by LCT’s) at the water’s edge, firing on the strongpoint of le Hamel with its machine gun nests cresting the bluff immediately over their heads, it seemed to them they had made the shore only to be left there practically unaided to take on the massed fire of the whole Atlantic Wall.
Still, there were those few tanks for company. However, a swift look to the westward showed over half a dozen similar tanks already blazing furiously from the shells coming from Pointe de la Percée; it could hardly be long now before the gunners there knocked out these tanks also and then turned attention to what lay behind the seawall. So rest or no rest, they had better get out of there before either the enfilading fire from Pointe de la Percée or the mortars from the Vierville Draw were centered on them as the sole remaining target.
Looking particularly attractive as a better refuge was a group of beach villas just across the road from them, all wrecked now by the gunfire of the naval bombardment, but shrouded by tall trees and thick shrubbery which offered excellent cover—only there was that concertina wire in between and they had no bangalore torpedoes to blast the wire apart.
However, they hadn’t any time either. There was that protective tank fire blanketing the ridge above; while still it lasted to protect them, they might gap the wire only with wire cutters. A few men dashed across the road to try; they did it; then the others sprinted over into the cover of the shrubs to join them.
About half of Company B’s men now turned right, intending to ascend the Vierville Draw as laid out in their original briefing. But the original briefing had been based on the theory that by now either bombs or spotter-directed naval gunfire would have washed out the gun emplacements there. Intense fire from the Vierville Draw indicating as they approached it how completely theoretical this still was, they backtracked to their point of departure, the ruined villas.
Meantime, the men of Company A were cautiously trying the ascent of the bluffs directly. The first two Rangers to make the 150 foot climb and gingerly crawl over the top, could see enemy trenches just beyond the crest with three machine-gun emplacements, all clearly in view hardly twenty yards off but all unmanned—the German strongpoint which had helped to shoot them to pieces amongst the obstacles.
While the gratified Rangers were contemplating this unusual situation, six more G.I.’s snaked up to join them. All eight crept forward then to examine the empty defenses. But scarcely had that movement started when the Germans rushed from the dugouts where they had been sheltering from the shells of the three tanks on the beach below, manned their machine guns, opened fire. But they had already made the fatal error of waiting too long.
Three Rangers were knocked down, but the others, aided swiftly by more Rangers coming up over the bluff, soon mopped up all the enemy positions, killing half the defenders and capturing the rest. That ended the resistance at the crest, the major defense on that bluff.
While the battered but undaunted handful of the 2nd Rangers on the right was punching this hole in the Atlantic Wall, about a quarter of a mile to their left but out of their sight and unknown to them a wider movement was simultaneously underway.
In front of Company C of the 116th Infantry lay a very steep section of the bluffs, but it was to a fair degree now masked by smoke from grass fires all along the slope which promised some cover once a man got that far. However, when it came to getting that far, there facing the men behind the seawall were those forbidding coils of concertina wire. And what might lie beyond that on the bluff, they didn’t know; what they did know was that they had landed about half a mile out of position to their left—they should have landed before the Vierville Draw, on which they had been briefed. What actually might be before them was terra incognita, except there was nothing doubtful about the presence of machine gun nests excellently placed for plunging fire on the beach beneath—bullets from above sprayed the top of the shingle as a warning to them to go no farther.
Private Ingram Lambert, lugging a bangalore torpedo, disregarded the warning. Scrambling over the top of the seawall, he sprinted across the road, shoved the bangalore tube through the wire, pulled the friction igniter. However, he could, see it had failed. He paused to reset it. But that delay of even a few seconds was fatal. An unseen machine gun above swung over, a burst of fire hit him. Lambert fell dead.
There was no gap. Neither were there any volunteers for a second try—very obviously, the machine gunners above were exceedingly quick in swivelling their guns. So their platoon leader, Lieut. Stanley Schwartz, crossed over to tend to it himself. He reset the igniter, jerked it once more; got safely back.
The explosion this time blew a very satisfactory gap in the wire but the first man across to try it was felled alongside Lambert. However, after that, their luck changed very decidedly; with only a few casualties, the entire company, well dispersed, straggled across the road into the tall grass beyond.
From there, protected by smoke but slowed up markedly by a wary search for mines ahead, they went diagonally up the bluff, reaching the top to find the trenches there empty, and the plateau before them invitingly open.
While Company C was starting its move, the largest intact group of men on the beach, from end to end of it, was doing likewise. Lieut. Colonel Schneider with 450 men of the 5th Rangers, practically his whole battalion, had hardly got himself ensconced behind the seawall before he was organizing his forces to leave it.
Simultaneously, his men blew four gaps in the concertina wire with bangalores. Then masked somewhat by smoke, his battalion streamed across the road with only eight casualties, and started up the steep bluff. Smoke so heavy as to force some of the men to don their gas masks slowed them, but it was welcome—in that smoke they, were beautifully screened.
Nearing the top, the Rangers on the left came on the machine gun nest, craftily positioned just under the bluff crest for fire on the beach below, which had killed their comrades
just as their dash across the beach road had begun. This position, manned only by a few Germans, they swiftly disposed of.
Then unbelievably they had another bit of luck. As the Ranger battalion streamed over the crest, they spotted signs intended only for the defenders, cautioning,
“ACHTUNG! MINEN!”
Guided by those friendly signs, they easily avoided a minefield containing over 150 mines and moved safely onto the plateau beyond. And there on their right, very much astonished at finding they were after all not alone in the area, were the men of the 2nd Rangers who had just reached the top.
So now, all on top of the bluff were the little group of the 2nd Rangers, the entire 5th Ranger Battalion, and all of Company C, 116th Infantry—nearly 700 men all told—by far the largest force to reach the top in one place anywhere. From there, Colonel Canham of the 116th started the entire force southwestward toward Vierville to take up a position on the counterattack line.
CHAPTER 26
Five miles to the right of the Omaha Beach, with nothing but rocky cliffs and no sand at all in between, lay Pointe du Hoe. On top this rugged promontory was sited the battery of six 155 mm. howitzers that was the specific objective of Lieut. Colonel James Rudder and his three companies, D, E, and F of the 2nd Rangers.
Rudder and his men, carried in ten British LCA’s, got underway in the darkness from twelve miles out for a three hour voyage through rough seas to hit his objective at H-hour, simultaneously with the landing of the first wave on the Omaha Beach itself. To ease his problem, the U.S.S. Texas from 18,000 yards offshore was given Pointe du Hoe as the specific target for its 14-inch guns during the initial bombardment; and two destroyers, one British, one American, H.M.S. Talybont and U.S.S. Satterlee, were detailed for close-in fire support after H-hour, once the fire of the distant Texas had then to be lifted as Rudder’s men landed for their assault.
The Far Shore Page 25