* * *
Heavy chains rattled through hawse pipes across the bay, followed by splash after mighty splash as anchors slapped the sea and sank from sight. An anguished voice cried from a darkened deck, “For Chrissake, why in the hell don’t we send the Krauts a telegram and let them know we’re here?” Another voice called out: “Anchor holding, sir, in seventeen fathoms.”
Aboard Princess Astrid, six miles from Sword Beach, a loudspeaker summons—“Troops to parade, troops to parade”—brought assault platoons to the mess deck. On ships eleven miles off Omaha, GIs in the 116th Infantry pushed single file through double blackout curtains to climb to the weather decks. Landing craft, described as “oversized metal shoeboxes,” swung from davits, waiting to be loaded with soldiers; others would be lowered empty, smacking against the steel hulls, to be boarded by GIs creeping down the cargo nets that sailors now spread over the sides. A Coast Guard lieutenant on Bayfield watched troops “adjusting their packs, fitting bayonets to their rifles and puffing on cigarettes as if that would be their last. There was complete silence.” Scribbling in his diary he added, “One has the feeling of approaching a great abyss.”
Nautical twilight arrived in Normandy on June 6 at 5:16 A.M., when the ascending sun was twelve degrees below the eastern horizon. For the next forty-two minutes, until sunrise at 5:58, the dawning day revealed what enemy radar had not. To a German soldier near Vierville, the fleet materialized “like a gigantic town” afloat, while a French boy peering from his window in Grandcamp saw “more ships than sea.”
Minesweepers nosed close to shore, clearing bombardment lanes for 140 warships preparing to drench the coast with gunfire. Blinkered messages from sweeps just two miles off the British beaches reported no hint of enemy stirrings, and Omaha too appeared placid. But at 5:30 A.M., on the approaches to Utah, black splashes abruptly leaped mast-high fore and aft of the cruisers H.M.S. Black Prince and U.S.S. Quincy, followed by the distant bark of shore guns. Two destroyers also took fire three miles from the shingle, and a minesweeper fled seaward, chased by large shells thrown from St.-Vaast. At 5:36 A.M., after allowing Mustang and Spitfire spotter planes time to pinpoint German muzzle flashes, Admiral Deyo ordered, “Commence counterbattery bombardment.”
Soon enough eight hundred naval guns thundered along a fifty-mile firing line. Sailors packed cotton in their ears; concussion ghosts rippled their dungarees. “The air vibrated,” wrote the reporter Don Whitehead. Ammunition cars sped upward from magazines with an ascending hum, followed by the heavy thump of shells dropped into loading trays before being rammed into the breech. Turrets slewed landward with theatrical menace. Two sharp buzzes signaled Stand by, then a single buzz for Fire! “Clouds of yellow cordite smoke billowed up,” wrote A. J. Liebling as he watched the battleship Arkansas from LCI-88. “There was something leonine in their tint as well as in the roar that followed.” The 12- and 14-inch shells from the murderous queens Arkansas and Texas sounded “like railway trains thrown skyward,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, watching through Zeiss binoculars as a war correspondent aboard H.M.S. Empire Anvil. Paint peeled from Nevada’s scorched gun barrels, baring blue steel, and sailors swept cork shell casings and the burned silk from powder bags into the sea. David K. E. Bruce, an Office of Strategic Services operative who would later serve as U.S. ambassador in three European capitals, wrote in his diary aboard U.S.S. Tuscaloosa:
There is cannonading on all sides as well as from the shore.… The air is acrid with powder, and a fine spray of disintegrated wadding comes down on us like lava ash.… The deck trembles under our feet, and the joints of the ship seem to creak and stretch.… Repeated concussions have driven the screws out of their sockets [and] shattered light bulbs.
German shells soared over the bay in crimson parabolas. “The arc at its zenith looks as if it would end up on the Quincy,” wrote an officer eyeing an approaching round. “I am wrong, happily wrong.” Ships zigged, zagged, and zigged some more, their battle ensigns snapping and their wakes boiling white. Seasoned tars could gauge the size of an enemy shell from the height of the splash, including the 210mm ship-killers thrown from the three-gun battery at St.-Marcouf. “It is a terrible and monstrous thing to have to fire on our homeland,” an admiral on the French cruiser Montcalm advised his crew, “but I want you to do it this day.” A French woman ashore wrote in her diary, “It is raining iron. The windows are exploding, the floor is shaking, we are choking in the smell of gunpowder.” She piled her children and mattresses onto a horse cart and fled inland.
Allied planes swaddled the bombardment lanes with white smoke to blind German gunners. The destroyer U.S.S. Corry, which had fired four hundred rounds in an hour, slowed momentarily as sailors hosed down her sizzling 5-inch barrels. At that moment, the breeze tugged away the smoke screen long enough for St.-Marcouf to lay four shells in a neat line 150 yards to port. Corry’s skipper had just ordered twenty-five knots at hard right rudder when a stupefying explosion knocked the ship’s company to the deck if not overboard.
“We seemed to jump clear of the water,” a sailor later recalled. “A large fissure crossed the main deck and around through the hull.” The blast cracked the destroyer like an eggshell, opening a foot-wide gap across the keel and between her stacks, flooding the engine and fire rooms, and scalding sailors to death with steam from a ruptured boiler. Crushed bulkheads and debris trapped other men belowdecks. With power and light gone, the rudder jammed. Both the fantail and bow levitated above Corry’s broken back. Crewmen hoisted a signal: “This ship needs help.”
Most sailors on the destroyer believed that a salvo from German shore guns had struck the mortal blow, but subsequent reports blamed a sea mine. Eighty sweepers would trawl the Utah approaches, eventually finding two hundred mines; none, however, had yet discovered the enemy field across the boat lanes on Cardonnet Bank. An Ultra warning of the minefield had been sent to senior U.S. Navy commanders, “who appeared to have overlooked it,” a British intelligence study later concluded.
Eight minutes after the first explosion, with the main deck awash knee-deep, Corry’s captain ordered her abandoned. Radio codes were slung overboard in weighted bags. For two hours, until rescue vessels pulled close, survivors thrashed about in fifty-four-degree water; an ensign dying of exposure tried to lash himself to a raft with his uniform necktie. German shells pummeled the wreckage, rupturing Corry’s smoke generator, detonating 40mm shells, and killing more men. She sank in six fathoms, with her prow and mainmast—an American flag still flying—visible at low water three miles from shore. The mishap killed twenty-two and injured thirty-three. Five more vessels were sunk and two dozen damaged near Cardonnet Bank in the next ten days.
Experience from the Pacific suggested that naval bombardment against stout coastal defenses should last days, even weeks. But profound differences existed between battering an isolated island and shelling, from the shallow, cramped English Channel, a long coastline with interior lines that permitted quick enemy reinforcement. The job was the tougher because German gun casemates had concrete walls and ceilings up to twelve feet thick. Consequently the preparatory bombardment for the American beaches in OVERLORD lasted barely half an hour in order to get on with the landings. Allied ships on June 6 fired 140,000 shells, but few enemy casemates were destroyed. Of 218 huge shells and almost 1,000 6-inch rounds flung at the Houlgate battery, for example, only one direct hit was recorded. Of 28 batteries capable of ranging Utah Beach with 111 guns, none were completely knocked out in the dawn barrage. And despite being hammered by three battleships, a heavy cruiser, and sundry lesser vessels, that pesky St.-Marcouf battery would hold out until June 12. As with the air bombardment, the extent to which German defenders were unmanned by the naval pummeling would be revealed only by making land.
* * *
Brigadier General Roosevelt intended to see with his own congenitally weak, vaguely crossed eyes just how stout the enemy defenses remained.
The Channel’s idiosyncratic tidal flow req
uired staggering the five beach landings over the space of an hour; Utah, the westernmost, would be first, and Roosevelt would be first among the first, landing with the initial twenty assault boats of the 4th Infantry Division. After a peevish colloquy aboard U.S.S. Barnett over his missing life belt—“I’ve already given you three,” an exasperated aide complained—he stumped to the ship’s wet rail, patting his shoulder holster. “I’ve got my pistol, one clip of ammunition, and my walking cane,” he announced in his foghorn bass. “That’s all I expect to need.” When a soldier leaned across from the dangling landing craft to offer a hand, Roosevelt swatted it aside. “Get the hell out of my way. I can jump in there by myself. You know I can take it as well as any of you.” Springing five feet into the boat, he steadied himself with his cane as whirring windlasses lowered the craft into the heaving chop. Sailors cast off the shackles as Roosevelt bantered with the pale, wide-eyed men around him because, as he had written Eleanor, “there are shadows when they stop to think.”
“Away all boats,” a voice called from above. Icy water sloshed around the ankles of thirty soldiers, already shivering and vomiting, packed like herring in the thirty-six-foot hull. A coxswain gunned the diesel engine, swinging the blunt bow into the swell, and Ted Roosevelt headed back to the war.
He was an unlikely vanguard, even if he had stormed ashore with the assault waves at Oran and Gela, even if he had won Distinguished Service Crosses in the Great War and for heroics against German panzers at El Guettar, and even if, as A. J. Liebling warranted, he was “as nearly fearless as it is given to man to be.” Short, gnarled, and bandy-legged, he reminded one GI of “some frazzle-assed old sergeant.” Gassed in the eyes and lungs at Cantigny in 1918, then left with a permanent limp after being shot at Soissons, Roosevelt more recently had been hospitalized in England for three weeks after returning from the Mediterranean with pneumonia. He liked to quote from The Pilgrim’s Progress, always tucked into his kit bag: “My marks and scars I carry with me.” To no one had he disclosed the chest pains gnawing beneath his service ribbons.
His greatest ambition, according to his mother, was “to achieve the same heights as his father,” the twenty-sixth president, whose famous crowded hour in combat—he had charged off to San Juan Hill in a Brooks Brothers cavalry uniform with a dozen spare pairs of steel-rimmed spectacles—seemed to haunt his son’s own crowded hours. If Ted was unlikely to join Theodore on Mount Rushmore, his achievements were impressive enough given that he had nearly flunked out of Harvard before working as a mill hand in a Connecticut carpet factory. A wealthy investment banker by age thirty, he had served as assistant secretary of the Navy, chairman of American Express, governor-general of the Philippines, and governor of Puerto Rico, where he learned Spanish, attacked the island’s health problems, and helped forestall a run on the banks by ponying up $100,000 of his own money. His many books included Three Kingdoms of Indo-China, and Hemingway included one of his World War I yarns in Men at War: Best War Stories of All Time. His correspondents ranged from Irving Berlin and Robert Frost to Orville Wright, Rudyard Kipling, and Babe Ruth. Roosevelt’s political career stalled when he lost the 1924 New York gubernatorial election to Al Smith; the other Eleanor in the family, the wife of his distant cousin Franklin, had campaigned against him by touring the state in a truck shaped like a huge steaming teapot, implicating him in the Teapot Dome scandal. He was in fact guiltless.
“What man of spirit does not envy you?” Theodore had written to his son in France in 1917. Military life, then as now, proved Ted’s “first, best destiny all along,” one admirer wrote. Returning to uniform in 1941, he became assistant commander of the 1st Infantry Division, but his tolerance of rowdy indiscipline in a unit given to rampages ran afoul of Omar Bradley: Roosevelt and the division commander, Terry de la Mesa Allen, were sacked toward the end of the Sicilian campaign. Roosevelt wept at this “great grief,” then promptly campaigned for another combat billet. “As long as I can fight in the front lines,” he wrote, “I’ve still got manhood.” After pestering Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Beetle Smith, he asked his wife to petition George Marshall, reasoning that it was “all right to pull strings … if what you wanted was a more dangerous job than the one you had.” Failing to move Marshall in a personal visit, Eleanor persisted with a note: “Is the matter considered so serious that he is not to be given another chance to command troops?”
The Army’s chief capitulated. Roosevelt joined the 4th Division in early spring and immediately agitated to lead the Utah assault. Twice refused by the division commander, Major General Raymond O. “Tubby” Barton, Roosevelt on May 26 tried again with a six-point memorandum, arguing that “the behavior pattern of all is apt to be set by those first engaged.” He added, “They’ll figure that if a general is with them, it can’t be that rough.” Barton relented as well, and now, at 6:30 A.M., the boat ramp dropped one hundred yards from shore. Drenched, cold, and exhilarated, Roosevelt waded waist-deep through the surf and onto France.
He was on the wrong beach. Billowing dust from the air and naval bombardment hid what few landmarks existed on the flat coastline, and the two guide boats leading the cockleshell flotilla had fallen back, one with a fouled propeller, the other sunk with a hole in the port bow from a Cardonnet Bank mine. Rather than landing opposite beach Exit 3 and its adjacent causeway over the flooded marshlands, Roosevelt and his spearhead of six hundred men had come ashore almost two thousand yards south, near Exit 2. Worse still, eight LCTs carrying thirty-two Sherman tanks, outfitted with propellers and inflatable canvas bloomers allowing them to putter to shore, had been delayed when one vessel tripped another mine. “Higher than her length she rises,” wrote Admiral Deyo on Tuscaloosa, “turns slowly, stern downward and crashes back into the bay.” Four tanks went to the bottom and some twenty men to their graves. Rather than beaching just behind the assault infantry as intended, the remaining Shermans would arrive twenty minutes late.
Weak eyes or no, Roosevelt recognized his plight. Hobbling into the dunes, he spied a windmill and other structures far to the north. “We’re not where we’re supposed to be,” he told the 8th Infantry commander, Colonel James A. Van Fleet, who arrived at seven A.M. “You see that brick building over there to our right front? It always showed up in those aerial photographs, and it was always on the left.… I’m sure we’re about a mile or two miles farther south.”
The accidental beach proved pleasingly benign, with few fortifications, fewer beach obstacles, and little enemy artillery; German defenders did indeed seem dazed by the air and naval pummeling. Wave followed wave of landing craft, jammed with standing troops who reminded Hemingway of “medieval pikemen.” Roosevelt worked the waterline “with a cane in one hand, a map in the other, walking around as if he was looking over some real estate,” as one sergeant recalled. Occasional enemy shells detonated in the dunes with a concussion likened by Hemingway to “a punch with a heavy, dry glove.” Few of the shells fell with precision.
“How do you boys like the beach?” Roosevelt roared at arriving 12th Infantry troops. “It’s a great day for hunting. Glad you made it!” Engineers swarmed ashore, blowing beach obstacles and gaps in the masonry seawall with “Hell Box” charges and cries of “Fire in the hole!” Demolition teams had hoped to clear the beaches in twelve hours; instead, ninety minutes after Roosevelt first sloshed ashore the fleet was advised that all boats could land with “no fear of impaling themselves on the obstacles.”
Through the dunes and across the beach road, several thousand GIs—the first of 32,000 in Force U—cleared resistance nests with grenades, tommy guns, and tank fire. A German corpse crushed beneath a Sherman’s tracks lay “ironed flat like a figure in a comic book,” according to a staff officer’s description, with “the arms of its gray uniform at right angles to its pressed and flattened coat, [and] black boots and the legs that were in them just as flat and thin as if they had been cut from a sheet of dirty cardboard.” Four causeways leading to the Cotentin interior would be s
eized and exploited on June 6, including one under a foot of water. To avoid clogging the narrow roads, swimmers and nonswimmers from the 12th Infantry paired off to cross the flooded fields. “I gave an arm signal,” the regimental commander reported, “and three thousand heavily burdened infantrymen walked into the man-made lake.”
The mutter of gunfire sounded along a three-mile front, scarlet tracers skipping like hot stones across the water. Soldiers waggled swatches of orange cloth, peering westward through the haze for answering waggles from the 101st Airborne. Near Exit 1, in the far south, a tank lieutenant hopped down from his Sherman to help a wounded paratrooper only to trip a mine, blowing off both feet; his crew dragged both damaged men to safety with ropes. A dead German soldier was found stripped to the waist, shaving cream still on his chin. Others were mowed down or captured, including fifty gunners with three horse-drawn 88mm guns. An enemy soldier burned by a flamethrower was evacuated to the beach, charred, blistered, but still breathing. “It sure takes a lot to kill a German,” a Coast Guard lieutenant told his diary. GIs snipped the unit flashes from enemy sleeves and gave the patches to intelligence analysts.
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