‘Move, for Christ’s sake, move!’2 Winters called and Toye rolled, the grenade exploding against his rifle butt without injuring any of them. Quickly, they got up and rushed the gun. Three Germans fled across the open field. Winters hit one, while Guarnere fired with his Tommy gun and missed. A second was hit and the third began to turn back when Winters lay down and shot him clean in the head. ‘This entire engagement,’ noted Winters, ‘must have taken about fifteen or twenty seconds.’3
Up ahead, two Germans were now frantically setting up a machine gun but, spotting them, Winters fired, hitting one in the hip and the second in the shoulder. He now sent Wynn back to battalion to get his backside looked at, then got ready to assault the next gun. Clearly, the Germans were now fully alive to what was happening and were probably preparing to counter-attack. At this moment, Compton, who had been fiddling with a grenade, dropped it; they were all in the gun pit, but although it exploded, for some miraculous reason none of them was hurt. Meanwhile, Malarkey now ran out to one of the dead Germans to take what he thought was a Luger pistol. As it turned out, he was mistaken so ran back, Winters yelling at him and bullets pinging around him as he dived back into the cover of the gun pit. Two acts of foolishness had nearly cost them dear.
A frightened German now ran towards them with his hands over his head – their first prisoner – but they needed to disable the first gun. Only Sergeant Carwood Lipton had any TNT, but it was in his musette bag, left where they had started the attack. Winters ordered him to fetch it and they got ready to attack the second gun. Leaving three men with the first gun and to provide cover, Winters led four others on a charge down the trench, lobbing grenades and managing to hit the second gun. The enemy crew fell back and the two men he had wounded earlier were taken prisoner. Six more Germans came forward, hands up, calling out, ‘No make me dead!’4
That was two guns down. Captain Hester came along the hedge line with extra TNT and an extra man, Private John Hall of HQ Company. Reinforcements were on their way, Hester told him – Lieutenant Ronald Speirs would soon be along with some Company D men – but in the meantime Winters had three of his men charge the third gun. Hall took the lead and was killed, but the gun was captured in much the same way as the others. Meanwhile, Winters had found a map at the second gun on which every gun position on the Cotentin Peninsula was clearly marked; he immediately had it sent back to Battalion. He also spotted a box of wooden machine-gun bullets. ‘Perhaps the Germans were short of ammunition,’ he noted, ‘but that was the least of my concerns.’5
Here they paused. The final gun was still firing, though most of the enemy troops had pulled back towards the manor house of Brécourt beyond the far end of the field; none the less, the attackers were still drawing heavy machine-gun fire every time they raised their heads. Eventually, Speirs arrived and they put in an assault on the last gun, charging down the connecting trench, lobbing grenades and firing. Having disabled the fourth gun with TNT down the barrel and the mission accomplished, Winters ordered them all to fall back. He was the last to leave. ‘I took a final look down the trench,’ he wrote, ‘and there was this one wounded Jerry trying to put a machine gun into operation.6 I drilled him through the head.’
By the time they reached Battalion HQ, three hours had passed: it was 11.30 a.m., and more men had arrived. The next task would be to clear the entire area of enemy troops, but for the moment Winters and his men could afford to take a breather. Just twelve men had destroyed four guns and although the German troops, from Artillerie-Regiment 90, had hardly been the finest in Normandy, it had been a spectacularly audacious and brilliantly executed operation.fn1 Winters neither drank nor smoke, but he did allow himself a swig of cider. ‘I was thirsty as hell,’ he admitted, ‘and I needed a lift.’7 It had been a very long day already.
While the Allies assaulted the Normandy coastline, the German reaction to what was happening was, frankly, a chaotic mess. Achieving tactical surprise had been such a key objective for the Allied planners and, despite the hints, leaks and signals, that was exactly what had happened. As General Miles Dempsey, the commander of British Second Army, pointed out, assuming surprise was achieved, D-Day would always favour the attacker. ‘Everything is in his favour,’ he noted.8 ‘Detailed plans, rehearsals, tactical surprise, morale.’ It gave them an extraordinary advantage. On the morning of 6 June, German leadership was in disarray to say the very least. At OB West Headquarters in Paris, it had been around 4 a.m. before von Rundstedt had finally agreed with General Günther Blumentritt, his chief of staff, that the invasion was upon them; Blumentritt had contacted the OKW at Berchtesgaden ten minutes earlier, asking permission to release the Panzer-Lehr, which was at Le Mans, and the 12. Waffen-SS-Division ‘Hitlerjugend’, which was north of Paris. Without waiting for a reply, von Rundstedt ordered both divisions to send forward one Kampfgruppe – battle group – towards Lisieux and Caen respectively. Permission to take control of those divisions was not granted, however, even though during these hours of darkness, before the main invasion force landed and Allied air forces flew over en masse, every minute counted.
Meanwhile, General Max Pemsel at 7. Armee HQ was repeatedly ringing General Speidel at La Roche-Guyon. At 5.15 a.m. he reported that a map of Caen had been discovered on a crashed British glider. Everything that was happening, Pemsel said, pointed to this being a major assault. At 5.40 a.m. Speidel asked whether any troops had actually yet landed from the sea? Pemsel had to admit they had not. Pemsel rang again at 6.15 a.m. A massive naval bombardment had begun and a huge fleet lay off the Normandy coast. Still Speidel refused to accept this was the main invasion; that, he told Pemsel, could still be coming elsewhere. What was Speidel thinking? Was he still drunk? Another member of staff at Rommel’s HQ was Admiral Ruge. He had stayed up all night listening to the various reports coming in, although there had been little he could do. Like Speidel, he was not thinking logically or clearly; perhaps he had drunk too much the previous evening as well. At 6.45 a.m., Pemsel had rung von Salmuth’s 15. Armee and told him about the naval bombardment, but added that no troops had yet landed. In fact, by then they had. ‘So,’ replied von Salmuth, ‘the enemy invasion has failed already.’9 He then went back to bed.
Speidel finally rang Rommel at around 6.20 a.m. – 7.20 a.m. in Germany. The field marshal had already been up getting things ready for Lucie’s birthday – arranging presents on the drawing-room table, with the shoes he had bought for her in Paris as the centrepiece. The house resembled a hothouse, there were so many flowers. Then he was called to the phone. It was Speidel. Was it the main invasion, Rommel demanded, or some kind of large-scale raid? Speidel wasn’t sure. ‘Well find out – now!’ Rommel told him, slamming down the phone. After hurrying to change and get ready to head straight back to France, Rommel was then kept waiting at least three more hours. Not until 10.15 a.m. did Speidel call back to confirm that what was happening was unquestionably the invasion. Five invasion beaches, the airborne drops, all well established already. Rommel was stunned. ‘Normandy! Normandy!’10 he muttered over and over. ‘How stupid of me!’ He finally got going for France at around 10.30 a.m. It was a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted.
With Speidel still inebriated, inert or just having a momentary loss of reason, it had been left to Pemsel and General Marcks to organize what response they could without any armoured-division support except that of 21. Panzer. Conflicting reports and demands were addling Marcks’s brain too. At 8 a.m. Oberst Fritz Ziegelmann, the chief of staff of the 352. Division, had telephoned Marcks and implored him to hand back command of Oberst Karl Meyer’s reinforced Regiment 915. Yes, it was the corps reserve, but, Ziegelmann argued, it was needed by 352. Division further west and certainly not where Marcks had sent Meyer’s Kampfgruppe shortly after 3 a.m. Whatever trouble was being caused there by enemy paratroopers was being dealt with by Regiment 914 and Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6. Instead, Ziegelmann suggested, they should be ordered urgently to head to the Bayeux are
a to protect the division’s right flank. Marcks agreed.
At Pointe du Hoc, the US Army Rangers had achieved their task with ease. Despite wet ropes made overly heavy by the sea spray, and despite the entire force landing on the eastern side of the Pointe rather than on either side, the Rangers had clambered up the cliffs with very little difficulty. Only a few defenders above took pot shots and lobbed grenades, and the Rangers reached the top with just fifteen casualties. At the summit, they encountered a scene of barely imaginable devastation: bomb craters peppered the site, turning it into a lunar landscape, with smashed and broken concrete and debris all around. Of the 155mm guns there was absolutely no sign: the gun positions were all empty, and while a small amount of inaccurate enemy sniping greeted them, the Germans appeared to have either fled or gone to ground. The observation post was quickly neutralized and some prisoners taken, and Colonel Rudder set up his command post by the smashed concrete of the anti-aircraft casement on the western side of the Pointe’s cliffs.
Meanwhile, patrols from Companies D and E pushed inland, reached the coastal road 1,000 yards from the tip of the Pointe, then crossed and probed further down a hedge-lined track. Both patrols, moving at different times, came across five guns, heavily camouflaged along a hedgerow in an orchard and pointing towards Utah Beach. Much to their surprise, they were completely abandoned. Sergeant Leonard Lomell of Company D was first to find them.fn2 He had only a couple of incendiary grenades, which he used to disable two of the guns, and then bashed the optics on a third before heading back to the rest of his men to get more charges. On his return, he was within 50 yards of the guns when he saw the patrol from Company E, led by Sergeant Frank Rupinski, destroying the rest with thermite grenades down the barrels and setting fire to the enemy powder charges. The Rangers’ Force A mission had been accomplished. It was now around 7.50 a.m., a mere forty-five minutes or so since they had first landed at the base of the cliffs.
This action has gone down in folklore as one of the most challenging and heroic of the war, yet it could hardly have been easier. The enemy had quite sensibly moved the guns back 1,500 yards into a camouflaged position and the intense air bombardment and naval fire had understandably driven what troops were there under cover. The Germans manning the position had not expected American troops to then scale the sheer cliffs and so the Rangers had managed to achieve almost complete tactical surprise.
What was unknown to Rudder’s men at this stage was what enemy forces remained in the area, and whether and on what scale they might counter-attack. Another unknown was how long it might be before Force A was relieved by the Rangers’ Force C, coming from Omaha with a company from the 116th Infantry. The truth was, their mission might have been fulfilled in quick order, but they were now in a potentially precarious situation. Ranger companies were only sixty-five men strong and they had already lost one LSA, which had turned back because of flooding on the way in and had taken those fifteen casualties who reached the top. That didn’t leave a lot of men holding the Pointe – not an issue so long as reinforcements from Omaha arrived soon. What the Rangers on the Pointe did not know, however, was that a far tougher battle was raging on the increasingly bloodstained sand 4 miles to the east.
The scene on Omaha Beach was chaotic, yet by 9 a.m. the Americans were most definitely wresting control from the defenders. At WN61, an 88mm gun had been knocked out just after 7 a.m., while at WN62 Franz Gockel and his comrades had been feeling the heat. ‘With every casualty we weakened,’ Gockel admitted.11 ‘More and more comrades were killed or wounded.’ The 75mm gun near him was knocked out by naval gunfire, while smoke, dust and grit were making it ever harder to see clearly what was happening down below. Grit had got into the breech of his machine gun and caused it to jam. Frantically, he cleaned it and had just fired a few rounds when a burst of fire from the beach knocked it from his hands. Miraculously, he was unscathed, but attrition was chipping away at the ability of the defenders – so few in number to begin with – to keep hammering the attackers effectively.
Down on the beach, to the east of the Vierville Draw, Sergeant Bob Slaughter had gathered a number of his men around him and now had a clean weapon that was once more working. He knew they had to keep going, had to move. Having organized his squad as best he could, he ordered them to make a dash for it, over the wall and towards the bluffs. Up they went, running for their lives and, to Slaughter’s great relief, to a man they made it to the base of the bluff.
A little further to the east Captain John Raaen and his HQ Company of Rangers were now taking cover by the sea wall, which here was made of wood with groynes stretching at right angles towards the water. Of some 450 men, only four or five had been hit. To his left, some of the Company C men of the 116th Infantry were already climbing up the bluffs and at various points gaps had been blown through the wire. Colonel Max Schneider, the 5th Rangers commander, was by this time also ashore and ordered Raaen and his men to come along the beach and follow him through the wire to the foot of the bluffs. As Raaen was moving out, one of his men said, ‘Hey, Captain, look at that crazy guy on the beach there!12 Raaen looked and beyond the sea wall saw a soldier waving a cigar, walking down the beach towards them, yelling at the men still stuck on the beach.
Raaen hurried towards him. As he got close, he saw the man’s collar tabs and realized he was a brigadier-general, and so had to be Brigadier-General Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota, executive officer of the 29th Division. During the planning of OVERLORD, Cota, fifty-one years old, had pleaded for a nighttime assault, but had been overruled because of the need to tie in both the air and naval bombardments at first light. Now, he was the first general on Omaha Beach and was exhorting his men to get off their backsides and keep moving forward.
Raaen saluted.
‘What’s the situation here?’13 Cota asked him.
‘Sir, the 5th Ranger Battalion has landed intact over a 200-yard front.’
After asking where Colonel Schneider was, Cota strode along the line of Rangers, shouting, ‘You men are Rangers. I know you won’t let me down. You gotta lead the way.’ In fact, neither Raaen nor any of his men needed much encouraging. ‘Our attitude,’ said Raaen, ‘was let’s get on with the job.14 We’d trained for it, we’re fed up with being shot at, let’s do some shooting.’
At that part of the beach, though, no Germans were shooting at any of them. Mortars were still falling on to the beach itself, while further along, on either side, men were still being hit, but at no point was there any consistency of enemy fire. Even at Dog Green and Easy Red, enemy fire was lessening. It is not true that all Americans arriving on the beaches faced the same intense fire as had faced Company A of the 116th in the first wave. Weight of numbers, even by 8 a.m., was starting to count. By 8.45, men from Company A, 16th Infantry, down at Easy Red, had even managed to climb the summit of the bluffs that dominated the beach.
For the actual attack, rifle companies had been restructured and split into two assault platoons, and then two assault sections, each of twenty-nine men and one officer, the number determined by the size of the Higgins boats and LCAs. Each assault platoon, which would be carried to the shore in two landing craft, included rifle teams, a wire-cutting team, a bazooka team, a flame-throwing team, a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) team, a 60mm mortar team and a demolition team. A third platoon in each company was similarly organized, but with an 81mm rather than a 60mm mortar team. This was quite a bit different to their normal make-up, in which a platoon consisted of two rifle squads of ten men each, a heavy weapons squad and a six-man platoon headquarters. Men were grouped together in new ways, sometimes with different NCOs and even officers. Since officers and NCOs tended to be the first off the landing craft, they were proportionally more likely to be killed or wounded.
One of the consequences of this was that, once on the beach, many of the men found themselves leaderless. Fear certainly played a part, but what was keeping men of the 116th Infantry bunched up behind the sea wall was not decimating enemy fire,
but a lack of leadership. General Dutch Cota had realized this; someone needed to get a grip of the situation, show some leadership and get them moving fast. This was what he was doing on the beach. It worked, and, with the men attacking once more, the German defence began to unravel. All those strongpoints were mutually supporting, but the moment one fell, a domino effect was set in motion.
By around 8.30 a.m., Raaen and the men of the 5th Rangers had got through the wire, across the marshy area and were climbing the bluffs, straight up to the top. They encountered no opposition whatsoever. ‘Absolutely none,’ said Raaen.15 ‘We didn’t take any fire at all going up the bluff.’ The combination of smoke and the little folds in the terrain had masked their climb, but they also faced few defenders. Glancing back, Raaen saw more boats arriving, men running across the beach, more pushing through the four gaps that had been blasted through the wire. At the top, the Rangers found a trench system and began moving eastwards, clearing it, before reaching an MG post that was still firing. A few carefully lobbed grenades and the position was destroyed, the enemy gunners, part of WN66, killed. By this point, the men from the 2nd Rangers had also climbed the bluffs a few hundred yards to the west and had knocked out WN70 at Hamel-au-Prêtre. By 9 a.m., Colonel Charles Canham, the CO of the 116th, and General Cota were also both at the top of the bluffs. So too was Colonel Schneider, who sent out orders that they would now pause, wait for stragglers to catch up and then attack as a battalion, rather than infiltrate as platoons. Crucially, there were now plenty of men, and leaders, up there and so began the operations to spread along the top of the bluffs, clearing one strongpoint after another. Down below, more men were arriving.
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