Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  Few men or vehicles seemed to be moving. Hertz met a very frightened young 18-year-old from the 29th Division who said that he was the only survivor of his squad. The man in front of Hertz, Sergeant Valducci, suddenly fell down, screaming: ‘I’m shot!’ A beachmaster ran to the group and demanded: ‘Who are you people?’ Engineers, they said. ‘Sounds good,’ he replied, ‘we’ve got wire to clear here. You got bangalores?’ No, they said. They were aviation engineers. ‘Who the hell sent you in?’ They shrugged: ‘Some sonofabitch.’ And so they joined the clusters of stranded Americans on Omaha, lying behind such shelter as they could find through the hours that followed.6

  Leading Aircraftsman Norman Phillips was one of a party of 158 British RAF personnel who were landed on Omaha: ‘We could see a shambles ahead of us on the beach – burning tanks, jeeps, abandoned vehicles, a terrific crossfire.’7 The captain of their LCT ordered them to offload anyway. The first vehicles found themselves driving into eight feet of water. The men struggled to the shore and formed a human chain to assist the non-swimmers. They landed on a sandspit crowded with wounded soldiers who lacked any medical attention. The British officers organized their men into salvage parties to rescue all the equipment that they could, but most had lost everything. Two RAF men were seized and taken prisoner by nervous Americans who could not identify their uniforms. By nightfall, the air force party had lost eight killed, 35 wounded, and 28 of their 35 vehicles. It was 33 days before they were issued with fresh clothing, 108 days before their lost arms and ammunition were replaced.

  The reports that reached V Corps and General Bradley from Omaha that morning were not merely gloomy, but at times almost panic-stricken. Bradley’s personal aide and Admiral Kirk’s gunnery officer cruised close inshore aboard a PT boat and returned soaked and grim. Bradley considered halting all landings on the eastern beach and diverting the follow-up waves to Utah. A monstrous traffic jam had developed off the beach. By a serious flaw in the timetable, soft-skinned vehicles were beginning to arrive to offload in the middle of the battle. Among many naval crews who displayed exemplary courage, there were others whose lack of experience and determination magnified the confusion. The sailors manning a huge rhino raft loaded with vehicles simply abandoned it, 700 yards out, and the drivers and cargo drifted out of control until the rising tide brought them ashore. The Rangers had developed an early scepticism about naval efficiency when the officer in charge of one of their landing craft rammed a breakwater before getting out of his English harbour, and the skipper of another spent the cross-Channel voyage prostrate with seasickness. Now, one group of Rangers found themselves left to bring their landing craft in to the beach unaided. Its crew simply took to their dinghy and deserted them. In contrast to these episodes, the sailors manning two LCTs with immense courage rammed the beach obstacles head-on, and remained in position using every gun to support the infantry in their plight.

  Lieutenant-Colonel John Williamson, commanding the 2nd/18th Infantry of the 1st Division, led his men into their LCVPs soon after 8.00 a.m., more than an hour late. When some craft began to swamp as they circled waiting for word that the beach was clear, the crews of others sought to begin rescue operations. After some forceful urging from Williamson, the craft began their run-in. They approached the shore not in an orderly wave, line abreast, but in a column, a queue, jostling for position on the sands. ‘The beach was loaded with men, tanks, DUKWs,’ said Williamson. ‘I was surprised that nobody had moved off.’ Major Frank Colacicco, executive officer of the 3rd/18th, stood among his men on the deck of an LCI, watching the spectacle ashore in utter bewilderment: ‘It was like a theatre. We could see it all, we knew that something was knocking the tanks out, but we kept asking, “Why don’t they clear the beach? Why aren’t our people getting off?” ’ When at last their own turn came to approach the sands, Colacicco’s LCI struck an obstacle whose mine blew up. Some men were hurled into the water by the blast, others found themselves struggling in the surf moments later as the craft settled. At last someone on the beach got a lifeline out to them, and the soaking men dragged themselves ashore. The major was told that Brigadier Wyman, the assistant divisional commander, wanted to see him. He reached the command post after being knocked off his feet by a mortar blast. He was told to take over the objectives of the 1st/16th, and returned to his men lying below the sea wall to point out to them, unanswerably: ‘We can’t stay here.’ Slowly they began to work up the hillside, crawling over the immobile figures of men of the 116th Infantry: ‘They were too green to know that the closer you are to the enemy, the better off you will be.’ Colacicco tore a strip off one man he saw firing apparently recklessly along the hillside: ‘Just settle down,’ said the major soothingly. ’That’s our men over there.’ ‘But sir, they have overcoats on,’ insisted the soldier. Indeed they were German riflemen.

  Yet although the defenders possessed the capability to maul the American landing on Omaha seriously, to impede and to disorganize it, they lacked the power to halt it absolutely. Despite the near-total destruction of the first wave of invaders landing on the western flank below Vierville, despite the casualties and the terror inflicted upon thousands of green troops, a great many men survived to reach the sea wall alive – enough, finally, to swamp the vastly outnumbered German defenders. General Marcks’s LXXXIV Corps reserve, the 915th Regiment, had set off in pursuit of the mythical paratroop force of Allied dummies at 4.00 a.m. on 6 June. It was hours after the seaborne landing before the 915th could be reached by dispatch rider, regrouped, and brought back from the Carentan–Isigny area on foot and by commandeered vehicle. The defenders thus lacked any force capable of mounting a co-ordinated counter-attack either against the attackers of Omaha, or against the British threat to Bayeux, further east. At Omaha, the Americans found themselves facing Germans of the 352nd Division as well as the 716th – eight battalions instead of four. The defenders possessed the strength and determination to fight doggedly from fixed positions. But where the Americans, inch by inch, gained ground, they were able to keep it. The toeholds prised out of the heights above the beach that day by a few brave men of the Rangers, the 1st and 29th Divisions could never normally have been held against the quick local counter-attacks at which the German army excelled. But such movements did not develop. Like a trickling stream slipping between pebbles, a handful of courageous leaders and small groups of men found their way around the German strongpoints covering the beach exits, and forced a path for the American army off Omaha beach. The Corps plan for the attack was a failure. But the men on the hillside, spurred by their own desperation, found their own means to gain the high ground.

  The principal problem in almost every attack on every battlefield is to maintain momentum. Every instinct, especially among inexperienced soldiers, is to take cover under fire. Instinct is reinforced when the bodies of others who have failed to do so lie all around. It requires a considerable act of will to persuade limbs to act which have suddenly acquired an immobility of their own. Inexperienced troops find it notoriously difficult to assess the extent of resistance and risk. On some occasions this can be to their advantage – or rather, that of their commanders – because it leads them to perform acts that more seasoned soldiers would not be so foolhardy as to attempt. But on Omaha the 29th Division, in its first experience of combat, deprived in the first hours of many of its officers, dismayed by its losses and confused by its predicament, became dangerously paralysed. The veteran 1st Division, on its left, performed significantly better – indeed, most Americans later agreed that without ‘The Big Red One’ the battle would have been lost.

  It was individuals, not divisions, who determined the outcome of the day. It is arguable that as early as mid-morning, when Bradley and Gerow were still receiving deeply gloomy reports from Omaha, the real situation was much more encouraging than the view of the beach from the ships led the commanders to believe. Barely two hours after H-Hour, when the formidable network of German wire and machine-guns was still blocking all movement
up the five valleys offering vehicle access from the beach, small groups of Americans had already reached the high ground to threaten the German flanks. The survivors of the 2nd Rangers’ A and B Companies reached the sea wall at 7.45 a.m., and immediately began to work up the heights. Staff Sergeant William Courtney and Private First Class William Braher of A Company’s 1 Platoon were probably the first Americans to reach the top of the cliff, around 8.30 a.m. When the Rangers gained the summit, they were too few in number to achieve a decisive success, although they sent word to a company of the 116th Infantry below to follow them up, and one boat section did so. But in the next two hours, a succession of similar small-scale actions took place all along the Omaha front, driving vital wedges into the German defences. 23 men of E Company, 2/16th Infantry, under Lieutenant John Spalding gained the hill and began to attack the German strongpoint which covered the east side of the St Laurent exit from the rear. After two hours of dogged fighting within the network of pillboxes and communicating trenches, the Americans cornered an officer and 20 men and forced their surrender.

  Brigadier-General Norman Cota and his 29th Division command group reached the beach at 7.30 a.m. with the 116th Regiment’s headquarters. The general began to move among the bewildered tangle of infantrymen, Rangers, naval beach maintenance parties and gunner forward observers. He saw one man who attempted to move up the hill shot down. The soldier lay in front of the American positions crying: ‘Medico, I’m hit!’ repeatedly for several minutes. Then he moaned ‘Mama’ and cried for a few moments before he died. Two of the headquarters group were killed within three feet of Cota when he established his first command post, while his signaller was hurled 20 feet up the bluff by blast. But the fiery, inexhaustible brigadier began pushing officers, urging men, seeking routes by which to break the bloody deadlock by the sea wall.

  Mike Rehm of the 5th Rangers had been huddled beneath the shingle bank for two hours or more with a group of men when Cota appeared. In one of his legendary encounters of the day, the general demanded to know who they were. Rangers, he was told. ‘Then, godammit, if you’re Rangers get up and lead the way!’ exploded Cota.8 The men began to thrust four-foot lengths of bangalore torpedo beneath the wire ahead, locking them together until they could blow a gap. In front, the entire hillside was wreathed in smoke from the blazing undergrowth. Coughing and choking, the Rangers realized that they could not run through it, but at last they pulled on their gas masks and groped forward. Some 35 men reached the metalled road at the top of the hill. Covered by 60 mm mortars firing at such short range that the tubes were almost vertical, they began to work slowly westwards. There were now Americans behind some of the most dangerous German positions covering the beach.

  By 11.00 a.m., Vierville was in American hands. When Cota himself reached a house on the edge of the village, he found 70 men sheltering against the wall who shouted ‘Sniper! Sniper!’ as he approached. The brigadier impatiently ordered them to clear the way. They closed in on the German, who threw a stick grenade down the hill towards them before being killed seconds later. Cota began to move back down the draw towards the beach. He met one of his own staff officers, Major William Bretton, clutching a briefcase and looking exceedingly angry. ‘Dammit, I can’t get these people to move,’ complained Bretton. Cota called a young infantry captain and told him to get his men going off the beach. Hesitantly, they began to obey. Then Cota spotted an abandoned bulldozer loaded with TNT, desperately needed to blow obstacles down the beach. He shouted to the men lying around it for a volunteer to drive the explosives to the engineers. At last a red-headed soldier stood up and said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and climbed on the vehicle. Yard by yard, the beach was unsticking.9 At 1.30 p.m., Gerow signalled to Bradley: ‘Troops formerly pinned down on beaches . . . advancing up heights behind beaches.’

  The German strongpoints were being knocked out either by superbly vigorous gunfire from the destroyers steaming as close as 800 yards offshore, or by determined action from Rangers or infantry. Hein Severloh’s battery had long since been reduced to firing single rounds in place of salvoes, for several weeks earlier half its ammunition reserve had been moved further inland as an intended precautionary measure against a direct hit. Now the gunners had no means of bringing shells forward and the only truck driver who attempted to do so was blown up on the journey by an Allied aircraft attack. By noon, Severloh himself had fired 12,000 rounds from his machine-gun, and was reduced to shooting tracer. This was helpful to his aim, for the gun’s sights had been shot off by a stray bullet, but deadly in revealing his position to American spotters. WN 59 and 61 – the neighbouring ‘resistance nests’ – had fallen silent. WN 62 had no field of fire on its west side, where the invaders were already working up to the rear. When their battery had fired all its ammunition, the gunners blew up their pieces and retreated southwards on their horsedrawn limbers. Severloh and the men in the strongpoint decided that enough was enough. They ran crouching from the entrance and began to work their way up the hill towards the rear, and safety. Only Severloh and one signaller escaped alive.

  All that afternoon, Brigadier Cota moved relentlessly up and down the hillside, urging on the men clambering in sluggish files through the minefields and over the bodies of the dead. There were still perilously few heavy weapons on the higher ground to support the infantry now beginning to fight through the first hedges and fields of the bocage. When he found a group of Rangers claiming to be pinned down beyond Vierville, Cota himself walked ahead of them across the open ground to demonstrate that a man could move and survive. Many soldiers who attempted to set this sort of example on 6 June and in the weeks that followed were killed instantly. But Cota lived and the Rangers moved forward. Although persistent shellfire was still falling on the beach behind them, most of the Germans defending the hillside were dead or captured, and their gunnery OPs had been destroyed, removing the batteries’ vital eyes. Medical corpsmen were moving among the wounded, looking out for those who had died so that they might give their blankets to men who were still living, but shivering. One of Cota’s staff marvelled at the spectacle of a group of engineers sitting on the sand eating their K rations, apparently oblivious of the dead and wounded all around them. A dog, which had evidently been the pet of one of the German strongpoints, fell upon men of the 1st Division moving up the bluff with impressive enthusiasm, and had to be driven off with carbine fire. At 4.30 p.m., a staff officer of the 29th Division noted in his diary: ‘Prayed for the fourth time today, asking God – “Why do these things have to be visited upon men?”’ Brigadier Cota and his aide saw a soldier who appeared to be frozen with terror, praying on his knees in the scrub above the beach. But when they reached him, they saw that he was dead.10

  On the high ground, Lieutenant-Colonel Williamson and the 2nd/18th had advanced to within a mile of their designated D-Day objectives. Like every American soldier above Omaha that day, he and his men were cursing the hedges of the bocage, which provided such perfect cover for snipers and were already inflicting interminable delays upon advancing units. Men sought cover whenever firing sounded nearby. Crossing a gap, the young soldier in front of Williamson was shot. The colonel put a Browning automatic rifle on top of the hedge and raked the area with fire. They moved onwards a little way without further casualties, then took up positions for the night just short of Colville. The Omaha beachhead had been secured. The Germans lacked the power and mobility to reverse the verdict of the afternoon. By nightfall, the Americans controlled a perimeter up to a mile deep beyond Omaha, while the 4th Division on Utah had linked up with General Maxwell Taylor and his men of the 82nd Airborne Division west of the causeways from the beach. Gerow of V Corps had not planned to establish his headquarters ashore until the following day. But Bradley, conscious of the urgent need to get a grip on the situation from the beach, told him to get his corps staff offloaded immediately. All the plans for a rapid supply build-up were to be sacrificed to the need to get more men onto the ground. 90 amphibious DUKWs, preloaded wit
h ammunition, provided the vital minimum supply to sustain the forces ashore overnight. Some landing-craft crews, utterly exhausted, dropped their anchors when darkness fell. Naval officers in launches hastened among them, urging the crews back into motion. That night Montgomery discussed with Dempsey the possibility of landing all further troops planned for Omaha on the British beaches. The suggestion was never pursued, but in view of the immensely dangerous gulf that such a change of plan would have exposed in the middle of the Allied line, it is a measure of the alarm surrounding the Omaha situation that it was ever discussed.

  While the Utah landing had gone as nearly in accordance with planning as any commander could have expected, on Omaha the failures and errors of judgement by the staff had only been redeemed by the men on the sand. Many officers, including Brigadier Cota, believed that the American landings would have proved far easier had they been made in darkness, a possibility rejected by the navy and air force, who insisted upon the need for daylight to make best use of their bombardment power. Had elite infantry such as the Rangers led the way ashore before dawn, it is indeed likely that they would have been able to get off the beach and work in among the German positions with or without the bombardment. The events of D-Day emphasized the limited ability of high explosives to destroy strong defensive positions. But the follow-up waves and armour would have suffered immense problems attempting to get ashore under heavy fire before dawn. The timing of the landing was probably sound, although the troops could have profited immensely from continuing support fire until the moment they reached the beach, and from better gunnery forward observation thereafter. American naval reports spoke of the frustration of ships cruising silently offshore, unable to fire because of lack of identified targets.11