Descending from the Clouds

by Wurst, Spencer F. ; Wurst, Gayle;

  Although there was no way for us to realize it down at my level, Colonel Vandervoort had been surveying the entire scene with a forward artillery observer as we moved into positions overlooking St. Sauveur. From his elevated vantage point on the southeast bluff of the river, the colonel had an excellent view of the major highway—and he discovered it was crammed with withdrawing German troops. He contacted Major Norton, the regimental S-3, who in turn called Colonel Ekman, who communicated this news to General Ridgway. Ridgway came up to Vandervoort’s position with the First Army commander, General Omar Bradley, who seized the occasion in the absence of General Collins and gave the 82d permission to cross the Douve.

  And so the mission of the 505 changed again: we were now to attack down the slope and across the river, secure the bridge, and clean out St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte. The artillery fire we heard as we moved toward the bridge was a TOT, a huge barrage timed on target and well aimed at the withdrawing Germans, that also blew up half the town. This was a spectacular, devastating, and highly demoralizing attack for the enemy as the shells from every gun in every artillery battalion landed at the same instant.

  As the barrage lifted, the 2d Battalion started down the slope in column formation, with Company F leading. The 3d Platoon was in front, and my 1st Squad was in the lead. The 1st Battalion was close behind the 2d. There were houses in the valley two hundred or two hundred fifty yards to our right and left, and brushy terrain to both sides of our front on the opposite side of the river. We moved along the edge of the road, attempting to use a ditch as cover. We were taking considerable small arms fire, which was particularly deadly in our situation. The Germans had us in sight and were firing rifles and machine guns directly on us.

  About a hundred fifty yards from the bridge, we were also taken under very heavy direct artillery fire. This was a minimum of 75mm, and probably larger, most likely from self-propelled guns. These were HE—high explosive—shells, not antitank. The weapons were firing at point-blank range or “over the sights”—right over the barrel—and the shells were on us before we heard the report of the guns.

  The Germans had taken position on the other side of the river to our left and right front, on slightly higher ground. They let us get almost fully deployed along that open road before they opened up. We hit the dirt as the shells skimmed the top of the roadbed, passing over our heads by two or three feet. The best we could do was get the hell out of there as fast as possible. We had to jump up and run across the bridge. The instant before we made our dash, Corti, a BAR man in my squad, was severely wounded. He had been in a prone position close to a cement power pole, which was hit by one of the shells. As we made our rush, we couldn’t stop, but the medic did. If at that instant the Germans had concentrated their fire on the bridge, we would have had very heavy casualties.

  As paratroopers, we only carried armor-piercing ammunition in airborne operations. But in some cases, our .30-caliber ammunition could also penetrate the thinly clad German self-propelled guns and armored personnel carriers. At the very least, armor-piercing fire would discourage them. As we crossed the bridge, I tried to find the guns so we could put small arms fire on them. That’s how close they were—actually within effective range of small arms fire. But I couldn’t pick up their positions, so we got across as best we could and up the other side.

  We lost a number of men on the rush across the bridge, but Corti was the only one from my squad who was hit. The shells were coming heavily but still high, skimming the top of the road and hitting trees or the walls of houses scattered on the other side. They exploded far enough away that the shrapnel didn’t do much damage, at least to us. I read later that as we forged our way across in the middle of all that artillery, General Bradley, watching from afar with General Ridgway, complimented us on our work. “My God, Matt,” he is reputed to have said. “Can’t anything stop those men?” Reading this, I felt pretty good even fifty years after the fact.

  After we got across the bridge, the 2d Battalion fanned out, with Company F on the right. Our mission was to skirt the town and move ahead until we could cut across and block the road coming in from the west. As we moved off, our own planes took the bridge under very heavy attack. Evidently, the Air Corps had not received the news that we had taken the bridge and were already on the outskirts of town. They actually tried to dive-bomb the bridge.

  We released orange smoke. I was far enough away not to throw any out, but I saw it billowing up all around the bridge and the road. This did not deter the planes. I honestly believe the Air Corps used the damn smoke clouds as aiming points. From a distance, I could see Colonel Vandervoort, who had crossed shortly after we did, standing out in an opening with a huge orange blanket or panel. He was waving it like mad, standing there with orange smoke everywhere, trying to deter the planes. The bombs missed the bridge, but the planes also made some strafing runs. My unit did not suffer any casualties from these, but others did. In defense of the Air Corps, I note the bridge and the 505’s position on June 16 were beyond that day’s bomb line, the line used to control air strikes. The 505 had moved so fast that the rear-area planners couldn’t conceive that we had already reached the line.

  As we continued to skirt to the right, we shortly came into a built-up area of houses. We got held up by sniper fire and light small arms fire coming from the houses in town. Tommy Watro moved off some distance from our position to stalk some of the enemy snipers and riflemen. He came back a little while later with another one of his big grins on his face and held up a couple fingers to signify he had gotten the Germans who were firing at us. He later swore they were five hundred to six hundred yards out. I didn’t dismiss his claim. All men armed with the M1 used to fire courses at two hundred to three hundred yards without a scope and got good scores. Watro, using an M1903 rifle with a scope, could do much better.

  We swung a little more to the right to get out of the built-up areas and back into hedgerow country. Bill Hodge was acting as first scout, and I was second scout. We tried to rotate the scout jobs to give the designated men a little relief. We had sustained some small arms fire, so Bill and I worked our way along a hedgerow. I glanced across it, out into the field, and saw three Germans ahead, walking along the inner side of the hedgerow perpendicular to ours. I think Bill and I both spotted them at the same time. They were walking upright, very close together, and they could not see us.

  I aimed at one and fired, and then put my sights on a second one. Just as I was about to shoot, Bill opened up with his .45-caliber Tommy gun. One instant the German was in my sights, and the next he was flat on the ground. He must have been hit by a number of the .45 slugs, because he went down very fast. The other German threw his hands up in surrender, and we approached him after an intense visual search of the surrounding area. Bill and I moved up to where the bodies were lying, and Lieutenant Carroll came up with a few others from the platoon. One of the Germans was dead, and three or four of our men gathered around to watch the other one die.

  This is one of the few times I actually saw at close range the result of my own fire, or that of my squad. I thought the German was suffering terribly, and without thinking, I asked the lieutenant whether I should finish him off. Much to his credit, he absolutely refused. The sight of that man lying there slowly dying lingers in my mind to this day. He has been the subject of many nightmares over the years. I hesitate to think what kind of dreams I’d have now, if I’d put the man out of his misery.

  We advanced a couple of hedgerows and got into a position where we could see across a depression to higher ground to our front. From there, we caught sight of the road and spied a mixed group of enemy trucks and smaller vehicles heading toward town. Although they were quite a ways out, six hundred to seven hundred yards in front of us, we took them under machine gun and rifle fire. The mortars dropped a few rounds onto the road close to the vehicles. They came to a very sudden stop and the personnel bailed out on the far side of the road.

  We had been firing for a few minutes
, when someone hollered that he could see some enemy to our right rear. This soldier should have fired first and then warned us, rather than hollering and not doing much about it. I asked where the Germans were, and he pointed to a section of the hedgerow. I was afraid we had gotten caught on the wrong side of it, so we fired for a few minutes in that direction, but we didn’t get any return fire. We were lucky.

  We continued until we crossed the road and blocked it. Other units of the regiment and battalion had cleared the town. At the roadblock, we heard we were going to be relieved in place. During the night of June 16–17, part of the 47th Infantry Regiment from the 9th Infantry Division passed through our position and took up the attack. By the end of the day, they had cut the peninsula at Canville.

  After June 16, we were left in a reserve or supporting position at the St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte bridgehead. Until this time, even when the platoon was in a supporting role for the company, or the company was in reserve for the battalion, we had always been well within German artillery or mortar range. At last we were going to get the chance to relax.

  We still weren’t getting our rations regularly, and those we did get were K rations. We were bivouacked right along the side of the road, so every time we heard vehicles, we went out, attempted to slow them down, and asked what they had in the way of chow. A lot of the 9th Division soldiers gave us some of their rations. They were riding on vehicles so they were able to carry the larger, bulkier 5&1s or 10&1s, which were much better than our K or C rations. We remained out of contact with the enemy in this area until June 19. Finally we could use our B bags, the first barracks bags that followed us. We had clean clothes, a bedding roll, and for the first time in many, many nights, G.I. blankets to throw over ourselves.

  On June 19, the unit was trucked from the St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte bridgehead to the area around Etienville. The 82d Airborne Division had been detached from VII Corps and attached to VIII Corps, with the objective of clearing the Bois de Limors. This, in turn, would serve as a jump-off point for an attack on the Germans at La-Haye-du-Puits. At my level, once again, we were not aware of our objective. All we knew was that whenever there were hot spots at any part of the bridgehead, that’s where they sent the 82d.

  Our trucks passed some of the areas of the peninsula the Germans had flooded. They had closed the locks at Carentan, a larger town located to our southwest, to dam the Douve. This, in turn, made the Merderet, a tributary of the Douve, overflow its banks, turning the fields into a swamp. The flooding had not shown up in our aerial reconnaissance photographs, and a lot of our troopers came down in these fields, landing in two to six feet of water. Many were drowned before they could get out of their chutes or get their heads above the surface. Even at this late date, the bodies of our troopers were still lying in the water. It was one of the most demoralizing sights I have ever seen. One trooper was lying with his head and left shoulder just out of the water. His bright red 82d Airborne Division patch was sticking out about six inches above the surface. I’ll never forget the way that patch stood out.

  When we got into the forest, we moved very slowly. The Germans had good observation, and they dropped artillery rounds in around the convoy. The trucks came to a screeching halt. The order was passed to unload and move to the head of the column formation. The drivers started backing the trucks off the road. Every time a shell landed, it speeded up their movement. They were trying to turn those trucks around so fast, they practically ran over us.

  We moved in column formation, with squads on either side of the road. The Germans had very good visibility from one of the highest hills on the Normandy peninsula, dubbed Hill 131 on our military maps. As we continued, artillery fire increased, and we began to get a lot of tree bursts. We had experienced these before, and they were nasty. The trees were very tall, so the shell would hit high up, magnifying the effect of the fragments.

  We advanced for hours through swampy ground and into regular hedgerow areas. Hill 131 rose up to our front. We were all very tired. We were told to halt and go into a hasty defense. For once the 3d Platoon was in support. We were in a sloping ravine, neither on the main line of resistance nor too far back, which provided a little cover. No sooner had we gotten into place than our platoon was given an attack order. We moved out again.

  We started off through some brush, came out of the ravine, and started up a small slope on which the brush was very thick, similar to a field of goldenrod.

  The only orders we had received were to attack through two or three more fields, then hold. I had no idea of what we were supposed to do next, and I had a bad feeling about this hasty attack. We started attacking in a column of squads. My squad, the 1st, was following the 2d, with the mortar squad in the rear. Lieutenant Carroll was up front to lead the attack, right behind the first and second scouts. They got to the corner of the first hedgerow to our front. The scouts got through it, and Lieutenant Carroll was just starting through when we were taken under heavy small arms and machine gun fire. This was coming from our left front, so there was a hedgerow between us and the German firing positions. The only thing we could do was go as flat as possible. It was a low hedgerow, and the machine gun fire was skipping over the bank, clearing our bodies by twelve or eighteen inches. I lay there, prone, as the slugs impacted out in the field to our right rear.

  A few minutes after we were taken under fire, some of us tried to move in order to shoot back in the direction of the enemy. Soon the word was passed down from the front to send Minica forward. This was an odd order, for Minica was a mortarman in the squad behind us, and would usually not be called up front. But Minica started moving up, all the while swearing and cursing and desperately trying to time his movements with lulls in the bursts of fire. As he passed me he growled, “What the hell do they want with me?”

  As it turned out, the scouts had hollered medic, not Minica. Lieutenant Carroll had been hit and was one big bloody mess. A slug had penetrated the front of his helmet, bounced off his skull, gone around the inside of his helmet, and then dropped out. Minica made it through. So, eventually, did the medic.

  The rest of us tried to stay alive and return fire. The enemy continued to fire, but it was still going high. Finally, the word came from the front to withdraw to our original company support area. I have often wondered how we got it, for we hadn’t seen our platoon sergeant going up to the front to take command. I led the platoon back, crawling through the hedgerow to our rear. We made it around the corner, got around the hedgerow bank, set up a hasty defense, and stayed there. I reported to the company commander. I was distressed and depressed, because I thought we had lost Lieutenant Carroll. As it turned out, he returned for our next mission.

  Back in our support area, we continued to dig in. We didn’t have to be on 50 percent alert, so all of us got a few hours sleep that night. As the sun was coming up, I heard someone singing songs from Oklahoma. It was Neipling, belting out “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” at the top of his lungs! What a cockeyed optimist. This was the first time I’d ever heard the song, and it remains one of my most distinct memories of the war.

  The platoon moved back to the line of departure for our previous day’s attack and went into a defensive position. For once, we really had time to dig our foxholes and place our automatic weapons in the best possible positions. Usually, we tried to dig in along a hedgerow and set an outpost a field or two farther out. At night, we pushed it out even farther and called it a listening post. Now, though, we were in very close contact with the enemy, who occupied the hedgerow to our immediate front. This is where Lieutenant Carroll had been wounded and we had been stopped, so we didn’t have the luxury of a listening post.

  Our position was at the bottom of Hill 131. We had plenty of time to contemplate that hill; we stayed in position for the longest spell I can remember ever having gone without attacking in Normandy, and we were obsessed with a single thought: “When that hill has to be taken, we’ll be the poor bastards who will have to take it.”

  Bec
ause the Germans were very close, we kept on 50 percent alert every night. Just as dusk was falling, we heard the Germans bring up chow by horse-drawn wagons, the creak of the wheels and their voices carrying clearly in the cool evening air. Once in a while, our mortars got antsy and tried to drop some rounds on their chow wagon. In return, they moved either to our right or left flank and fired a couple belts of ammunition into our position. We tried on a number of occasions to eliminate these guns but never succeeded. I often lay or crouched in my foxhole, which was quite elaborate by that time, watching tracers going six to eight feet over my head.

  I was mighty glad to have my shoulder holster. Crouching or lying prone in a foxhole, you can get to a pistol at your shoulder a whole lot quicker than one at your waist, although I never actually had to do this. We kept our rifles on the ground at the edge of the foxhole with several hand grenades alongside, ready for use at any moment. But we all had nightmares of looking up and seeing a German staring down into the foxhole, with our rifles up on top. The pistol was like a security blanket that children need to go to sleep.

  The weather at the end of June was horrible. On June 19, one of the worst storms of the century hit the beaches, and VIII Corps had to suspend its offensive operation for La-Haye-du-Puits. This left us holding in place in wet, miserable, muddy conditions, constantly barraged with artillery and mortar fire. While we were holed up in the Bois de Limors, a period of about two weeks, tree bursts caused 293 casualties—half the total for the regiment in the entire Normandy campaign.

  The storm lasted four days. It damaged the installations on the beaches and supply dumps, which caused items like artillery and mortar rounds to be rationed. This was immediately before one of our major offenses, and the shortage of ammunition called for a new diversionary tactic. The idea was to deceive the Germans about the true location of the attack, in order to make them switch their reserves away from it. First, we made an accurate count of our machine gun and rifle ammunition. Then they ordered us to fire a number of rounds to put on the appearance of an attack. I believe the main attack was to take place on our right, between our position and the beaches. Our orders included the exact time we were to fire on the enemy position, and the exact number of rounds to use. Everything was calculated so each M1 and machine gun raised as much hell as possible without actually moving.