The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  Rudder’s plan for scaling rested mainly on rocket guns, similar to those long used by life saving crews in firing lines aboard wrecks. Each of his LCA’s was fitted with three pairs of such rocket guns, firing rockets dragging grapnels to which were secured three separate sets of lines. The lines for one pair of guns were plain ropes; for the second pair, toggled lines; and for the third pair, rope ladders. All were to be fired simultaneously from the boats on beaching.

  As a second resource, each LCA carried a pair of small, portable rocket projectors to be carried ashore and fired from closer in. These dragged plain lines.

  Finally, each LCA carried also a set of tubular sectional ladders, each section four feet long, which could swiftly be joined into whatever length seemed necessary for scaling.

  And as a last resource, should all else fail, Rudder had with him four Dukws, each fitted with a 100 foot extension ladder borrowed from the London Fire Department. It was hoped the Dukws could be run up the shingle to the very base of the cliff, there to raise their ladders right from the Dukws to the cliff top.

  So with three companies of Rangers, all of whom had had extensive training with this very equipment on the cliffs at Swanage on the Isle of Wight which greatly resembled those at Pointe du Hoe, the expedition was put overboard and shoved off on its desperate adventure. Rudder had trouble from the beginning, all stemming from the storm. One of his ten LCA’s swamped near the start. Of the two supply boats carrying his reserve ammunition and equipment, one swiftly went down in the heavy seas, and the other had to jettison all its cargo to avoid a similar fate. But the four Dukws, in spite of the load of the long Fire Department extension ladders they were carrying, strangely all survived the breaking seas to reach Pointe du Hoe.

  Now came a second and worse trouble, as a result both of darkness and the heavy seas. The tidal current set them to the eastward, far to the left of their objective. This went unnoticed by the Rangers in the tossing boats, since Pointe de la Percée on their left so much resembled Pointe du Hoe as viewed from the sea in the dim light around dawn that they were practically on Pointe de la Percée before the mistake was caught.

  Rudder had then to head his whole flotilla to starboard, close enough inshore now to bring him under fire from strongpoints in his lee, and head westward back toward Pointe du Hoe. As a result of all this extra voyage under fire, not till forty minutes after H-hour did he get back to the cliff which was his target.

  This delay had two highly disastrous results. As scheduled, at three minutes before H-hour, the Texas lifted its fire off Pointe du Hoe. With the forty-three minutes grace from heavy gunfire thus bestowed on them, rather than the intended three minutes only, the Nazi defenders of Pointe du Hoe had ample time once again to man their defenses on the cliff crest before a solitary landing craft made the cliff base. But even worse, Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers, temporarily under Lieut. Colonel Schneider together with his own entire Battalion of the 5th Rangers, eight companies all told, waiting well offshore for the code signal (two flares) from Rudder that he had successfully scaled the cliffs and they should then come in behind him on Pointe du Hoe as his support, of course never got any such signal as expected shortly after H-hour.

  So following their prearranged orders, when H + 30 (0700) came with still no signal received from Rudder (who had not even by then got back to his objective) all the eight supporting companies of Rangers concluded he had failed and joined the second wave of the 116th Infantry. Their instructions were then to come in with the 116th on their alternative objective, the Vierville Draw, and their final orders were to proceed from there inland and overland to Pointe du Hoe to take out that battery of howitzers by an assault from the landward side, it being then a reasonable assumption that Rudder’s attack from the sea had been beaten off.

  So that delay in getting to Pointe du Hoe, due to the combination of bad weather and the tide, cost Rudder dearly—it deprived him of his supports and it permitted the enemy time to get set again to repel him.

  The destroyer Talybont, lying off Pointe du Hoe, watched with dismay Rudder’s flotilla heading for Pointe de la Percée, unable to understand it, for the shells from the Texas were visibly bursting atop Pointe du Hoe. Things were going to be bad now for Rudder. Both the Talybont and the Satterlee moved in closer to extend what help they could when he returned.

  At 0710, Rudder’s flotilla got back and turned to come in on the eastern flank of Pointe du Hoe and on a 400 yard front. Immediately from above the enemy opened on him; one of his Dukws was sunk by 20 mm. fire. The remaining boats started to touch down on the heavy shingle footing the cliff. Machine guns opened on them; fifteen Rangers were hit.

  Both Satterlee and Talybont took a hand at sweeping the crest with every gun they had from 5-inch turret guns down to their AA’s while the Rangers debarked. They managed to pin down much of the fire coming from the crest, and prevent greater disaster.

  Meantime, all the LCA’s as they hit the shingle, fired their rocket guns. Immediately, twenty-seven sets of grapnels dragging a varied assortment of lines tailing from them went hurtling toward the cliff top. But only about half of them ever cleared the edge to get a grip there. Another unforeseen result of the storm here took a hand—on the long run in, many of the ropes had become so thoroughly water-soaked by spray that the rockets could no longer lift the added weight.

  And the Dukws immediately ran into another unforeseen difficulty which ended any hope of assistance in scaling from the three still left. There was a shingle strip, about twenty-five yards wide, at the base of the cliff. Although there was not a single crater on the entire area of the Omaha Beach, this little strip of shingle was so badly cratered by shell bursts from the Texas (and perhaps also from some pre-D-day bombs) that no vehicle could possibly hope to cross it to get to the foot of the precipice. And from where the Dukws were marooned at the water’s edge, 75 feet out, their 100 foot extension ladders couldn’t reach the top. The Dukw experiment was immediately liquidated. The Rangers aboard the Dukws promptly abandoned them to join their mates from the LCA’s in a mad rush for the ropes hanging down the precipice before the Germans above should cut them all.

  The Germans on top started to rain “potato masher” grenades and rifle fire down on the Rangers below to keep them from the ropes, but this proved a bad mistake—there were more Rangers below than Germans on top. While most of the Rangers kept on for the ropes, others armed with BAR’s, keeping back a little, instantly picked off each Nazi who exposed himself; the Satterlee, in close now, swept the whole crest for a few minutes with a concentrated fire that chased every remaining enemy well back from the cliff top. The Satterlee then lifted its fire and the men below started up the cliff—some on toggles, some on hurriedly assembled sectional ladders, some on the few rope ladders which had made the top. In less than five minutes from the touchdown of their LCA’s, at half a dozen different points, Rangers were coming over the top. A few of the ropes over the top, had been cut by the enemy or the grapnels had slipped, but enough were left so that supplemented by the portable ladders, within twenty minutes, the entire scaling party was over the top on Pointe du Hoe.

  Before them was a scene of unbelievable destruction. Shellfire had so badly cratered everything, there was hardly a landmark they had been briefed on which could still be recognized. But without waiting for more than two or three others to join, each group started as best it could to find the howitzer position assigned to it for destruction. What few Germans first showed themselves as the gun demolition parties dashed for their prey, they promptly drove to cover in the maze of ruined trenches.

  But one party after another, as it arrived at the gun emplacement it had been briefed to destroy, got the same shock—there was the concrete gun position, all right—but it was empty. There was no howitzer there!

  However, if there wasn’t a big gun left on Pointe du Hoe, the startled Rangers swiftly found all their gun crews still remained—and in substantial force. From a machine gun nest on t
he east, from an AA emplacement on the west, and from several of the smashed trenches here and there, artillery and mortar shells and bullets started coming at them from all directions. Immediately, those on top the point itself, the bulk of the Rangers, had to take over the smashed trenches nearest them to organize for defense lest they all be swiftly destroyed.

  But Pointe du Hoe, even though the Rangers had it, was not their real objective. Where were those guns? Without the guns, Pointe du Hoe was no danger to the invasion, and worthless to expend another man in holding. But the guns, wherever they were, even without Pointe du Hoe, still constituted the gravest menace to the success of the invasion.

  Where were those guns? They were too bulky to have been moved far; they must still be somewhere about.

  While Colonel Rudder and most of his force stayed on the point to fight a seesaw battle with a superior force of Nazis in underground shelters and tunnels of whose ramifications they knew nothing, to hold Pointe du Hoe as a base while they sought the guns, Rudder sent his remaining Rangers in several parties under Lieutenants Hill and Lapres inland to find those guns.

  They had a series of bad brushes on the way. One group, hardly 300 yards from the point, was caught by fire from inland and lost eight killed and seven wounded. Lieut. Hill, skirmishing ahead then with Pfc. Anderson for support, reached a low hedgerow beyond which Hill spotted a machine gun, without himself being seen.

  Hill, enraged by what already had happened to his men, decided he could best destroy that gun by getting its invisible crew to expose itself. So standing suddenly up, he shouted:

  “You sons of bitches! You couldn’t hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle!”

  As the startled Nazis leaped up to swing their gun toward him, Hill dropped to cover, caught a grenade tossed him by Anderson, and as the machine gunners opened fire, he hurled the grenade. That finished the machine gun; very luckily too, as only a few minutes later Lieut. Lapres and his party came by the same position.

  By 0815, hardly an hour after their touchdown, Lapres and Hill had reached the main road half a mile inland and with a total force of fifty men, established a roadblock, cutting the main east-west highway to the Omaha Beach.

  Immediately they sent out patrols. Those guns must be somewhere about, most logically somewhere near the road. And they were right.

  At 0900, a two man patrol consisting of Sergeants Lomell and Kuhn, going down a double-hedgerowed lane some 300 yards south of the main road, found the guns. There they were, most ingeniously camouflaged, sited and ready to fire on either Utah or Omaha Beach as desired, shells nearby with points inserted ready for setting—but not a Nazi gunner in sight anywhere!

  There were, however, only five guns, not six. Whatever had happened to the sixth, no one ever found out—at the moment, however, neither Kuhn or Lomell cared. There were five of the big guns anyway, over which many of their comrades already had died.

  While Kuhn with his rifle at the ready stood guard to prevent interruption, Lomell dropped thermit grenades into the recoil cylinders of two of the guns, smashed the sights on a third, and then, two demolition grenades being all they had with them, they both hurried back to the roadblock to get more grenades.

  During their absence, a second patrol led by Sergeant Rupinski, independently stumbled again on the guns. Rupinski’s patrol was more plentifully equipped for destruction. He dropped a thermit grenade down the muzzle of each gun, smashed all the sights, then heaved another grenade into the ammunition neatly stacked nearby, to start a sparkling blaze there, and hurriedly beat a retreat, lest the gunners, alerted by the explosions of their powder, should unexpectedly reappear.

  But there was never a gunner anywhere about—apparently they had all been pinned down by the heavy fire from the Texas in their permanent quarters on Pointe du Hoe; that tremendous drumfire had so numbed them, they hadn’t moved as far as their guns, even when it lifted. And now Rudder had them pinned down for good (or was it vice versa as to who was pinned down?) and the guns were no more. All within less than two hours of their arrival on Pointe du Hoe.

  Immediately a runner was dispatched from the roadblock position to inform Colonel Rudder, still fighting a nip and tuck battle on the tip of Pointe du Hoe, that the guns had been found and destroyed.

  But so difficult were communications that it was midafternoon before Rudder’s message, via Navy sources, finally reached Bradley aboard the Augusta:

  “Located Pointe du Hoe—mission accomplished—need ammunition and reinforcement—many casualties.”

  Bradley, hardly able to do anything even to affect the major battle on the beachhead, was wholly unable to do anything for Rudder. Had it not been for the destroyers Satterlee and Talybont, and later the Barton and the Thompson, which stood by him for two days and with their guns beat off increasing German attacks both from inland and from the Nazis already on the point, it is unlikely any of Rudder’s devoted command would ever have survived.

  As it was, two days later when the 116th Infantry and the 5th Rangers, with heavy tank support, finally fought their way through from Vierville to his rescue on Pointe du Hoe, hardly 90 men of his original 250 Rangers were still on their feet.

  Lieut. Colonel James Rudder, twice wounded in these actions, was awarded the DSC for extraordinary heroism, and his 2nd Rangers a Unit Citation for knocking out that vital battery of 155’s on Pointe du Hoe.

  Each earned it.

  CHAPTER 27

  1000. Ten A.M.

  Three and a half hours only since H-hour.

  To the men of the 16th and 116th, to the combat engineers and the Navy demolition teams, to the Rangers on Pointe du Hoe, to all still living who had come in on the first wave, it seemed an eternity since dawn.

  To the dead lying shoulder to shoulder all along the sands, the G.I.’s whose waterlogged corpses in solid lines from one end of the Omaha Beach to the other fringed the sea where they had been washed up by the flooding tide, gruesomely jostling each other in the pounding surf, it was eternity. Their sodden eyes would never see another dawn.

  To the G.I.’s of the 18th Infantry, just coming in on LCVP’s and LCI(L)’s for a landing a trifle to the right of the St. Laurent Draw, matters on the beachhead could not possibly have looked worse. The tide was running toward flood. The obstacles were all invisible, exactly the state expected by the Nazis when they set them there. The losses to landing craft as they came in to beach were high from bottoms stove in on log ramps or blasted open by mines. The narrow strip of sand between surf line and shingle bank was jammed with immovable vehicles; below the surf line were plenty more awash, already drowned out. And so far as they could see machine gun fire was still coming from the bluff tops and shells from the strongpoints guarding every draw. If the situation had been any worse at H-hour, they couldn’t see how.

  But they were in a poor position to judge. Compared to the drenching rain of machine gun bullets which had greeted the first wave, what now still was coming from the bluffs was nothing. And no longer was there the criss-cross artillery fire on both sides of the St. Laurent Draw to envelop them in bursting shells as they approached. Lieut. Spalding had washed out the strongpoint firing westerly from the easterly side of the draw, they fortunately were landing in that washed out sector where no nearby artillery now covered the beach, and at that very moment, bulldozers were starting to slice the first two cuts through the shingle to the beach road beyond.

  The 18th Infantry landed. A terrific number of its landing craft were lost in the invisible obstacles but the personnel losses were light, thanks to the work of the G.I.’s of the 16th and the 116th who had already in their surge through the wire and up the bluffs disposed of many of the machine gun nests above which otherwise would have shot the 18th Regiment to ribbons as it floundered ashore from its wrecked landing craft. On the whole therefore, while the beach looked like hell to them, the men of the 18th waded to it still mostly intact, and what was as important, with most of their heavy weapons and radio equipment sti
ll with them and in working order.

  A little offshore, every here and there off the beach lay a destroyer, eager to help in the fight, helpless to do anything till the camouflaged strongpoints were spotted for them—but there were no spotters in the air, and those wading in with the earlier waves had lost or had ruined their radio equipment in the surf. The destroyers were impotent to do anything. A few LCT’s and LCI(L)’s, unable to stand off and watch the slaughter of the G.I.’s they were bringing in if landed beyond the obstacles, had smashed through the obstacles to the surf line, there to remain with all guns firing on the strongpoints inshore until Nazi artillery had set them ablaze. To the demoralized men behind the shingle, this display of courageous naval support may have helped momentarily in bolstering morale, but as the end result was only more blazing wrecks on the beach, even that was questionable.

  In front of the 18th Regiment as it landed was that obstreperous casemate covering the westerly side of the St. Laurent Draw. And blocking everything but a frontal approach to it were entrenched machine gun nests on the slopes, minefields, and tangled concertina wire. Company M of the 116th, which for two hours had been trying to get up the westerly shoulder, was containing the machine gun nests on that flank by a heavy fire of its own, but it wasn’t getting either in or up. The situation was a stalemate.

  The 18th Infantry, which had to get forward, decided to break it. On its left on the sand was a tank, the only one in the area still able to fire. A joint attack by the tank and the infantry opened, directed at the casemate. But the shells from the tank’s 75 mm. gun were too light—they made no impression whatever, either on the gun shield or on the concrete encasing the gun. The attack stalled completely.