The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  At 0309, German radar finally spotted the fleet. Krancke promptly issued orders to the shore batteries to prepare to repel an invasion. He sent the E-boat flotillas and two armed trawlers into battle; they were under way by 0348.

  • •

  In the American transports, the cooks fed the soldiers Spam sandwiches and coffee. On the British LSTs, the men got a friedegg breakfast (swimming in grease) and a tot of rum. Lt. Cmdr. B. T. Whinney (RN), the beachmaster for Gold, was astonished when at 0200 in the officers mess on Empire Arquebus sharply uniformed stewards wearing white gloves proffered menus.10

  Between 0100 and 0400, depending on when the men were due to arrive at the beach, the bos’ns’ whistles sounded on the LSTs: “Now hear this! All Navy hands man your battle stations.” The sailors scurried to their posts. The bos’ns’ whistles sounded again: “Now hear this! All assault troops report to your debarkation areas.” The men climbed into their LCVPs and other craft; when the whistle sounded again, followed by the order “Away all boats!” the heavily loaded craft were swung by the davits over the side and slowly lowered into the water.

  On Empire Javelin, a British transport carrying the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, off Omaha Beach, the davit lowering one craft got stuck for half an hour halfway down the ship’s side, directly beneath the scupper. “During this half-hour, the bowels of the ship’s company made the most of an opportunity that Englishmen have sought since 1776,” recalled Maj. Tom Dallas, the battalion executive officer. “Yells from the boat were unavailing. Streams, colored everything from canary yellow to sienna brown and olive green, continued to flush into the command group, decorating every man aboard. We cursed, we cried, and we laughed, but it kept coming. When we started for shore, we were all covered with shit.”11

  The landing craft that had made the crossing hanging on booms over the sides of the LSTs were lowered into the water with only their coxswains aboard. As the coxswains of the LCVPs (mostly Coast Guard, almost all young, many still teenagers) brought their engines to life and began circling, the LSTs and other transports dropped their rope nets over the side.

  The men descending to their Higgins boats on those scramble nets provide one of the most enduring images of D-Day. Like the paratroopers who had dropped into France during the night, the infantry and combat engineers were grossly overloaded with weapons, ammunition, and rations. Their impregnated clothing and heavy boots added to their cumbersome, awkward feeling. It was dark and the Channel swells raised and lowered the little landing craft by ten feet and more.

  As the coxswains brought them alongside, officers on deck instructed their men to time their jumps off the nets into the boats—jump as the landing craft reached the top of a swell so as to shorten the distance. Many failed: there were more than two dozen broken legs in the first hour alone. A few got caught between the ship and the landing craft: at least three men were squashed to death, others badly injured.

  Seaman Ronald Seaborne, a naval telegraphist going into Gold as a forward observer, was carrying his haversack, a radio, a telescopic aerial, a revolver, and an assortment of pouches. Everything was on his back, which made him top-heavy, except the aerial, which he carried in one hand, leaving only one hand free to scramble down the net. “For me, that scramble was the most difficult part of the entire Normandy operation. But for a lucky wave which almost washed the craft back onto the boat deck of the LST, and thus reduced the distance of my inevitable fall to a small one, I doubt very much whether I would have made the transit.”12 Overall, considering the difficulties, the loading went well.

  On the Higgins boats, assault platoons of thirty men and two officers, carrying bangalore torpedoes, mortars, BARs, rifles, and other weapons, jammed together. They had to stand; there was insufficient room for anyone to sit. The tops of the gunwales were just about at eye level. When the boats were loaded, the coxswains pulled away from the mother ship and began to circle. The circles grew ever larger.

  The boats bobbed up and down—and almost immediately most of the Spam, or eggs and rum, consumed earlier ended up on the decks, which made the decks exceedingly slippery. On Seaman Seaborne’s LCM, a Royal Marine brigadier “sat majestically on the seat of a jeep, whilst the rest of us huddled miserably between the jeep and the sides of the craft trying to avoid the vast quantity of cold sea spray coming over the gunwales.” Men began throwing up; the wind flung the vomit back on the jeep and the brigadier. “He shouted to all on board that anyone feeling sick was to go to the other side of the craft and within seconds the portside was full of green-faced men.”

  As the LCM circled, the wind came in off the port, throwing another wave of vomit on the brigadier and his jeep. “Fortunately, the brigadier then succumbed to the motion and was past caring about the dreadful state he and his jeep got into.”13

  Lt. John Ricker commanded the LCC designated as primary control vessel for Tare Green Beach, Utah. Lt. Howard Vander Beek, commanding LCC 60, set off for the coast, astern of Ricker’s PC 1176. Along with the boats carrying underwater demolition teams from the Navy and the LCTs, the LCCs were in the van.

  Waiting for the LCVPs and other craft to join up for the run into the beach, Vander Beek said, “We felt naked, defenseless. Although hundreds of friendly guns on U.S. battleships, cruisers, and destroyers behind us were poised and silent, ready to begin their onslaught, there were Wehrmacht batteries ahead, waiting for enough light to fire.”14

  • •

  It was a cool night and the spray hitting the men in the face was cold, but the soldiers and sailors gathered off the Normandy coast were sweating. Tension, fear, and anticipation were the dominant emotions. The drone of the engines of the landing craft began to be overwhelmed by the drone of the first waves of bombers. Behind the forward naval elements the ten swept channels were jammed bow to stern with follow-up forces. The sailors manning the 5-, 10-, 12-, and 14-inch guns on the warships were at their battle stations, ready to commence firing.

  What the airborne troops had started the seaborne armada was about to continue. What Hitler had sown he was now to reap. The free peoples of the world were sending the best of their young men and the products of their industry to liberate Western Europe and crush him and his Nazi Party.

  Shortly after 0520 the light began to come up in the east. Bombers began to drop their loads, German antiaircraft gunners to shoot at them. But in the transport and bombardment areas, it was ominously quiet. No German batteries opened fire; the Allied warships were not due to commence firing until 0550 (H-Hour minus forty minutes) unless they were fired upon.

  On the destroyer USS McCook off Omaha, Lt. Jerry Clancy shook his head. “What I can’t understand is why they don’t fire on us,” he told reporter Martin Sommers, standing beside him. “None of us could understand it,” Sommers wrote later, “and we all wished they would start firing, so we could start firing back. That would be much better than waiting.” As the air bombardment increased in intensity, “a reverent chorus of Ah’s ran through the ship. . . . Thunderous explosions rolled along the shore, followed by high bursts of multicolored flak, and then a geyser of flame here, another there. . . . The blasts were coming so fast that they merged into one roar. The shoreline became a broken necklace of flame.”

  Sommers and Clancy tried to make conversation but could scarcely hear each other. “I guess this is about the longest hour in history,” Clancy commented.15

  At 0535, the German batteries commenced firing on the fleet. Off Utah, Lieutenant Olsen on Nevada saw shells hitting all around. It seemed to him that every German gun in France was concentrated on Nevada. “We learned later that we were straddled twenty-seven times by shells and never hit. We had been shelled for what seemed like ages,” he said, “before we saw our main battery of 14-inch guns being trained and ready to open fire.”16

  When the battleships opened fire, it was as if Zeus were hurling thunderbolts at Normandy. The noise, the concussion, the great belches of fire from the muzzles, made an unforge
ttable impression on every man present. Soldiers in Higgins boats could see the huge shells as they passed overhead. Seaman James O’Neal, on an LCI off Juno Beach, noted that each time the battleships let go a salvo, “they would be pushed sideways by the force of their guns, making fairly large waves, and as these waves came in toward the beach they would pass us and rock our craft.”17

  Holdbrook Bradley was a correspondent for the Baltimore Sun on an LST off Omaha. Six years later, he was a correspondent in Korea; twenty-five years later he covered Vietnam. As he put it in his oral history, “The sound of battle is something I’m used to. But this [the opening bombardment on D-Day] was the loudest thing I have ever heard. There was more firepower than I’ve ever heard in my life and most of us felt that this was the moment of our life, the crux of it, the most outstanding.”

  To Bradley, the initial salvo from the warships was one huge explosion, “A hell of an explosion. I never heard anything like it in my life.”18

  On the Bayfield, ship’s stores officer Lt. Cyrus Aydlett hurried on deck to observe. “It was like the fireworks display of a thousand Fourth of Julys rolled into one,” he wrote in his diary. “The heavens seemed to open, spilling a million stars on the coastline before us, each one spattering luminous, tentacle-like branches of flame in every direction. Never before has there been any more perfect coordination of firepower than that unloosed by our air and naval forces on this so-called impregnable coastline which ‘Herr Schickelgruber’ had so painstakingly fortified with every obstacle man is capable of conceiving. Pillows of smoke and flame shot skyward with great force—the resounding blasts even at our distance were terrifying—concussion gremlins gave involuntary, sporadic jerks on your trouser legs—the ship shrugged and quivered as if she knew what was occurring.”

  One of the men watching with Aydlett shouted in his ear, “I’ll bet there are a lot of dirty drawers on this ship right now.”19 There were a lot more among the Germans in the casements taking the pounding.

  • •

  The Allied airborne troopers witnessed the bombardment from the receiving end, some shells falling between them and the beach, others passing overhead. John Howard at Pegasus Bridge described it this way: “The barrage coming in was quite terrific. You could feel the whole ground shaking toward the coast. Soon they lifted the barrage farther inland. They sounded so big, and being poor bloody infantry, we had never been under naval fire before and these damn great shells came sailing over, such a size that you automatically ducked, even in the pillbox, as one went over, and my radio operator was standing next to me, very perturbed about this, and finally he said, ‘Blimey, sir, they’re firing jeeps.’ ”20

  In Vierville, the tiny village atop the bluff at the west end of Omaha, the air bombardment had awakened the populace. When the bombers passed, “a strange calm succeeded.” Pierre and Jacqueline Piprel hurried to the home of M. Clement Marie because they knew he had, despite stern German orders, a pair of binoculars. “From a window in the attic the three of us in turn were able to contemplate the formidable armada, getting bigger and bigger as it closed in. We could not see the sea anymore, only ships all over.”

  Then came the first salvo. Naval shells descended on Vierville. Within minutes, “there was not a single glass left on the windows.” One shell exploded in the upstairs bedroom “and everything fell in the dining room below.” Another shell whistled through the house, coming in one window and going out another. A shell exploded in the baker’s bakehouse, killing the maid and the baker’s baby she was holding in her arms.21

  Every gun in the Allied fleet was blazing away. USS Harding, a destroyer, Comdr. George G. Palmer commanding, opened fire at 0537 on Omaha Beach. The target was a battery east of Port-en-Bessin, range 4,800 yards. Harding sent forty-four rounds of 5-inch shells toward the German guns, temporarily neutralizing them. Meanwhile, near misses from the Germans sent geysers up all around Harding; the nearest miss was seventy-five yards over.

  At 0547 Harding shifted her fire to three pillboxes some 3,000 yards distant, in the Colleville draw. She expended 100 rounds before smoke completely obscured the target. By then the entire shore had disappeared in clouds of smoke, dust, and debris. Commander Palmer could not see his landmarks and began to navigate by radar.

  When the wind made intermittent observation possible, Harding opened fire on a house in the draw; twenty rounds destroyed the place. At 0610 Harding shifted fire to another fortified house and destroyed it after expending forty rounds. Spotting an enemy fieldpiece on Omaha Beach, with a crew preparing to fire at incoming landing craft, at 0615 Harding closed the shore to 1,700 yards and fired six salvos at the German gun. The shelling did not destroy the gun but it did send the German personnel scattering back into the bluffs.22

  All the while German guns ashore blasted back. The men on Harding could hear the whine and scream of the shells as they passed overhead and astern. Lt. William Gentry remembered that the Germans were shooting at the battleships and cruisers seaward of Harding, “but their trajectories were so flat that shells were whizzing by at the level of our stacks. Some members of the crew were sure a couple of shells went between our stacks.”

  At 0620, as the landing craft approached Omaha Beach, the gunnery officer reported “mission completed” and Commander Palmer ordered “Cease fire.”23

  There were sixty-eight Allied destroyers off the five beaches; each of them participated in the prelanding bombardment in a manner similar to Harding, pounding their prearranged targets—mainly pillboxes and other fortified positions, or the spires of the church steeples—and then shifting to targets of opportunity before lifting fire to allow the landing craft to get in.

  Two of the destroyers had bad luck. The Norwegian destroyer Svenner was on the far left flank, nearest Le Havre. At 0537 the half dozen E-boats from Le Havre, ordered into action by Admiral Krancke, dashed in as close to the fleet as they dared and unleashed a volley of torpedoes. The only hit was on Svenner, just off the port bow of Slazak. Captain Nalecz-Tyminski described the result: “A flash of explosion occurred amidships, followed by the sound of detonation and then the burst of fire and smoke that shot high into the air. Svenner broke amidship and sank.”24 Capt. Kenneth Wright, a commando, wrote his parents five days later: “It was rather appalling. The ship just cracked in half, and the two ends folded together as if it were a pocketknife closing.”25

  Svenner was the only Allied ship sunk by the German navy that day. Even as the E-boats fired their torpedoes, HMS Warspite attacked them. The battleship sank one and the remainder did a quick about-face and returned to the relative safety of Le Havre. Thus ended the sole serious attempt by the Kriegsmarine to interfere with the landings.

  • •

  Off Utah Beach, planes laying a smoke screen between the Germans and the bombardment fleet appeared at 0610 to do their job, but the plane which should have hidden USS Corry, a destroyer, was shot down by flak. For a few moments, therefore, Corry was the only Allied ship the German gunners could see. They concentrated a heavy fire on her. Corry began to maneuver rapidly, firing all the while. She was taking a great risk, as only a relatively small area had been swept of mines.

  Machinist Mate Grant Gullickson was down in the forward engine room. The pipes were dripping wet, the turbines hissing steam. “Our job was to give the skipper [Lieutenant Commander Hoffman] whatever he asked for, full speed ahead, emergency astern. Overhead the guns roared.

  “All of a sudden, the ship literally jumped out of the water! As the floor grates came loose, the lights went out and steam filled the space.” Corry had struck a mine amidships.

  “It was total darkness with steam severely hot and choking,” Gullickson said. He was in what must be one of the most terrifying situations known to man, caught in the engine room with bursting turbines, boilers, and pipes in a sinking ship. The water was rising; within minutes it was up to his waist.

  “At this time, there was another rumble from underneath the ship.” Corry had struck another
mine and was all but cut in two. Hoffman headed out for sea by hand-steering his ship, but within minutes Corry lost all power and began to settle. At 0641 Hoffman ordered abandon ship.

  Down in the forward engine room, “we grappled to open the hatch, which we did and began to evacuate,” Gullickson recounted. “By the time we got up on deck, the main deck was awash and ruptured clean across. It was obvious the Corry was dead.

  “I noticed at this time that my life belt and shirt were missing. They had been ripped from my body by the explosion. I abandoned ship on the starboard side about midship. We didn’t jump off, we literally floated off because the ship was underwater.” Two hours later, he and others were picked up by USS Fitch, given coffee laced with the ship’s torpedo alcohol, and eventually transferred to a transport and taken back to a hospital in England.

  “On this ship was Chief Ravinsky, the chief of the forward fire room. He had steam burns over 99 percent of his body. We tended to him and he could talk a little but the burns were too much; he passed away the next day.”26

  Seaman Joseph Dolan was stationed in the combat information center (CIC) of the Bayfield. “I still remember the urgent message that I copied from the Corry. It said Corry was hit and was sinking, and they had many casualties and needed help quickly. Most messages were coded, but this one was in the clear because of the urgency of the situation.”27

  Seaman A. R. Beyer of the Fitch was launched in a whaleboat to pick up survivors. He remembered that Corry’s stern stayed up to the last. He saw a man clinging to the top blade of the Corry’s propeller, but there were a great number of survivors clinging to debris or rafts and he picked them up first. By the time he turned back to Corry, the man on the propeller was gone. Fitch took 223 survivors on board in the course of the morning.28