The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The second wave of thirty-two Higgins boats carrying the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, plus combat engineers and naval demolition teams, was scheduled to land five minutes later. The third wave was timed for H plus fifteen minutes; it included eight LCTs with some bulldozer tanks as well as regular Shermans. Two minutes later the fourth wave, mainly consisting of detachments of the 237th and 299th Engineer Combat Battalions (ECBs), would hit the beach.

  None of this worked out. Some craft landed late, others early, all of them a kilometer or so south of the intended target. But thanks to some quick thinking and decision making by the high command on the beach, and thanks to the initiative and drive of the GIs, what could have been mass confusion or even utter chaos turned into a successful, low-cost landing.

  Tides, wind, waves, and too much smoke were partly responsible for upsetting the schedule and landing in the wrong place, but the main cause was the loss to mines of three of the four control craft. When the LCCs went down it threw everything into confusion. The LCTs skippers were circling, looking for direction. One of them hit a mine and blew sky high. In a matter of seconds the LCT and its four tanks sank.

  At this point Lts. Howard Vander Beek and Sims Gauthier on LCC 60 took charge. They conferred and decided to make up for the time lost by leading the LCTs to within three kilometers of the beach before launching the tanks (which were supposed to launch at five kilometers), giving them a shorter and quicker run to the shore. Using his bullhorn, Vander Beek circled around the LCTs as he shouted out orders to follow him. He went straight for the beach—the wrong one, about half a kilometer south of where the tanks were supposed to land. When the LCTs dropped their ramps and the tanks swam off, they looked to Vander Beek like “odd-shaped sea monsters with their huge, doughnut-like skirts for flotation wallowing through the heavy waves and struggling to keep in formation.”1

  The Higgins boats carrying the first wave of assault teams were supposed to linger behind the swimming tanks, but the tanks were so slow that the coxswains drove their craft right past them. Thus it was that E Company of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, 4th Division, was the first Allied company to hit the beach in the invasion. The tidal current, running from north to south, had carried their craft farther left so they came in a kilometer south of where they should have been.

  General Roosevelt was in the first boat to hit the shore. Maj. Gen. Barton had initially refused Roosevelt’s request to go in with the 8th Infantry, but Roosevelt had argued that having a general land in the first wave would boost morale for the troops. “They’ll figure that if a general is going in, it can’t be that rough.” Roosevelt had also made a personal appeal, saying, “I would love to do this.” Barton had reluctantly agreed.

  Luck was with Company E. The German fixed fortifications at the intended landing site at exit 3 were far more formidable than those where the landing actually happened, at exit 2 opposite La Madeleine, thanks to the Marauder pounding the battery there had taken. The German troops in the area were from the 919th Regiment of the 709th Division. They had been badly battered by the combined air and sea bombardment and were not firing their weapons. There was only some small-arms fire from riflemen in trenches in the sand dune just behind the four-foot concrete seawall.

  • •

  In those trenches were the Germans driven from their fixed positions by the bombardment. Their leader was Lieutenant Jahnke. He looked out to sea and was amazed. “Here was a truly lunatic sight,” he recalled. “I wondered if I were hallucinating as a result of the bombardment.” What he saw was a DD tank. “Amphibious tanks! This must be the Allies’ secret weapon.” He decided to bring his own secret weapon into action, only to discover that his Goliaths would not function—the bombardment had destroyed the radio controls.

  “It looks as though God and the world have forsaken us,” Jahnke said to the runner by his side. “What’s happened to our airmen?”2

  • •

  At that instant, Sgt. Malvin Pike of E Company was coming in on a Higgins boat. He had a scare: “My position was in the right rear of the boat and I could hear the bullets splitting the air over our heads and I looked back and all I could see was two hands on the wheel and a hand on each .50-caliber machine gun, which the Navy guys were firing. I said to my platoon leader, Lieutenant Rebarcheck, ‘These guys aren’t even looking where they are going or shooting.’ About that time the coxswain stood up and looked at the beach and then ducked back down. The machine gunners were doing the same and we just prayed they would get us on the beach.”

  The boat hit a sandbar 200 meters from the shore. (The water was shallower off exit 2 than at exit 3, which was why the Navy had insisted on going in at exit 3.) The coxswain said it was time for the infantry to go, that he was getting out of there.

  Lieutenant Rebarcheck responded, “You are not going to drown these men. Give her another try.” The coxswain backed off the bar, went 100 feet to the left, tried to go in, and hit the bar again. Rebarcheck said, “OK, let’s go,” but then the ramp got stuck.

  “The hell with this,” Rebarcheck called out. He jumped over the side; his men followed.

  “I jumped out in waist-deep water,” Sergeant Pike recalled. “We had 200 feet to go to shore and you couldn’t run, you could just kind of push forward. We finally made it to the edge of the water, then we had 200 yards of open beach to cross, through the obstacles. But fortunately most of the Germans were not able to fight, they were all shook up from the bombing and the shelling and the rockets and most of them just wanted to surrender.”3

  Capt. Howard Lees, commander of E Company, led his men over the seawall to the top of the dunes. “What we saw,” Sergeant Pike remembered, “was nothing like what we saw on the sand table back in England. We said, ‘Hey, this doesn’t look like what they showed us.’ ”4 Roosevelt joined them, walking calmly up to their position, using his cane (he had had a heart attack), wearing a wool-knit hat (he hated helmets), ignoring the fire. About this time (0640) the Germans to the north in the fortifications at Les-Dunes-de-Varreville began shooting at 2nd Battalion with 88mm cannon and machine guns, but not accurately. Roosevelt and Lees conferred, studied their maps, and realized they were at the wrong place.

  Roosevelt returned to the beach. By now the first Sherman tanks had landed and were returning the German fire. Commodore James Arnold, the Navy control officer for Utah, was just landing with the third wave. “German 88s were pounding the beachhead,” he recalled. “Two U.S. tanks were drawn up at the high-water line pumping back. I tried to run to get into the lee of these tanks. I realize now why the infantry likes to have tanks along in a skirmish. They offer a world of security to a man in open terrain who may have a terribly empty sensation in his guts.” Arnold found a shell hole and made it his temporary headquarters.

  “An army officer wearing the single star of a brigadier jumped into my ‘headquarters’ to duck the blast of an 88.

  “ ‘Sonsabuzzards,’ he muttered, as we untangled sufficiently to look at each other. ‘I’m Teddy Roosevelt. You’re Arnold of the Navy. I remember you at the briefing at Plymouth.’ ”5

  Roosevelt was joined by the two battalion commanders of the 8th Infantry, Lt. Cols. Conrad Simmons and Carlton MacNeely. As they studied the map, Colonel Van Fleet, CO of the regiment, came wading ashore. He had landed with the fourth wave, carrying the 237th and 299th ECBs.

  “Van,” Roosevelt exclaimed, “we’re not where we were supposed to be.” He pointed to a building on the beach. It was supposed to be to the left. “Now it’s to our right. I figure we are more than a mile further south.” Van Fleet reflected that ironically they were at the exact spot he had wanted the Navy to land his regiment, but the Navy had insisted it was impossible because the water was too shallow.

  “We faced an immediate and important decision,” Van Fleet wrote. “Should we try to shift our entire landing force more than a mile down the beach, and follow our original plan? Or should we proceed across the causeways immediately opposite where we
had landed?” Already men were crossing the seawall and dunes in front of the officers, while Navy demolition men and engineers were blowing up obstacles behind them.

  Roosevelt became a legend for reportedly saying at this point, “We’ll start the war from right here.” According to Van Fleet that was not the way it happened. In an unpublished memoir, Van Fleet wrote: “I made the decision. ‘Go straight inland,’ I ordered. ‘We’ve caught the enemy at a weak point, so let’s take advantage of it.’ ”6

  The important point was not who made the decision but that it was made without opposition or time-consuming argument. It was the right decision and showed the flexibility of the high command. Simmons and MacNeely immediately set about clearing the German beach opposition, preparing to seize the eastern ends of exits 1 and 2, then cross the causeways to drive west. First, however, they needed to get their men through the seawall and over the dunes.

  • •

  The engineers and naval demolition teams came in right after the first wave, also landing opposite exit 2. They were taking more fire than the first wave and could see that the spot they were headed for was not the place they had studied back in England. They could also see that they were going to be dropped in waistdeep water, so they began to lighten up their packs. The first thing that went, Sgt. Richard Cassiday of the 237th ECB remembered, were cartons of cigarettes. He had six—one man carried ten cartons. Cassiday tore open a carton, grabbed a pack out of it, and threw all the rest away. So did others. “We were wading in cigarettes up to our knees in that boat.”7

  The demolition teams consisted of five Navy Seabees (combat demolition units) and two or three Army engineers. There were ten teams. Each man carried between fifty and seventy-five pounds of explosives on his back, either TNT or composition C (a plastic explosive developed by the British that looked like a bar of laundry soap; it would burn if lit or explode when properly detonated). The Seabee personnel tended to be older than most D-Day men; most of them were trained by miners from the western United States who where explosive experts.

  The Seabees were responsible for the outermost set of obstacles, the ones that would be the first covered by the tide. The Seabees were prepared to work underwater if necessary (although without anything like the special equipment modern “frogmen” use). Orval Wakefield recalled that when the recruiter came around to ask for volunteers for the underwater demolition teams, he said that experience in the Pacific had shown how critical the teams would be to a successful invasion.

  “He also explained that it was extremely hazardous duty and they needed good swimmers and we would have special training physically, mentally, and we would be expendable. We would be working with booby trapped and mined obstacles. The good thing was that we would pull no KP duty. Everything turned out to be true.”

  At Utah, Wakefield’s team prepared the outer obstacles for demolition while incoming 4th Division troops dodged around them. The team set up their charges, got them wired together, shouted “Fire in the hole!” and blew them apart. Wakefield and his buddies then went up to the seawall, where they got into a slit trench and “just watched what was happening on the beach. When we first came in there was nothing there but men running, turning, and dodging. All of a sudden it was like a beehive. Boats were able to come through the obstacles. Bulldozers were pushing sand up against the seawall and half-tracks and tanks were able to go into the interior. It looked like an anthill.”8

  The Army engineers simultaneously went after the next set of obstacles, closer in to the beach. They attached their explosives to the obstacles, whether single poles with mines or Belgian gates, then connected the individual charges by primer cord, so that everything would go up at once. Sgt. Al Pikasiewicz was with a team from the 237th ECB. He and his buddies got their explosives in place on one set of obstacles, all connected, and ran toward the seawall to set off the primer cord. “Fire in the hole!” they shouted.

  “Just before the explosions went off,” Pikasiewicz remembered, “when we were up against the wall, some of the landing craft were coming in. The ramps were dropping and the men ran in and they didn’t realize what they were heading into. When they heard us yelling and screaming at them they laid down behind the obstacles for protection. ‘My God,’ I said to Jimmy Gray, a medic. So I left the wall and ran back and grabbed men by their field packs and started screaming, ‘Get the hell out of here because this is ready to blow.’ I pulled about six men and yelled at the rest and headed back toward the wall. I was fifteen to twenty feet away when everything blew and a piece of shrapnel hit me in the helmet.”

  The team went to work closer to the seawall, hurrying to get the job done before the tide came in and covered the obstacles. “And General Roosevelt was standing there,” Sergeant Cassiday said, “walking up and down the beach with his cane, and I called out, ‘Go knock that bastard down, he’s going to get killed!’ And somebody said, ‘Do you know who that is?’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s Roosevelt, and he is going to get killed.’ ” Roosevelt moved on and the team blew the obstacles.9 Within less than an hour the teams had cleared eight fifty-yard gaps in the obstacles and were going after the ones still standing.

  Next, the 237th went to work blasting holes in the seawall. Tank dozers from the 70th Tank Battalion cleared the debris after the blasts. All the while 88 shells were coming in, but most of them were splashing into the water as the Germans continued to concentrate, not very effectively, on the wave after wave of landing craft.

  Seaman Martin Gutekunst was a communications expert attached to the Seabees. He recalled that after the obstacles were cleared and the holes blown, “a number of the more adventurous and brave demolition men moved along the far side of the wall and got Germans to surrender.” He joined them. “We could see many German gun emplacements protected by their concrete walls and roofs. Inside the bunkers they had scenery painted along the walls that represented the area as you would see it if you were outside, and narrow slits through which they could spot their fire.” But no one was there to fire; the Wehrmacht soldiers had either surrendered or fled inland along the causeways.10

  The men from the 237th ECB followed the dozers through the holes in the seawall, climbed over the dune, and saw signs saying “Achtung Meinen. “The pressure from behind of men and tanks trying to get off the beach to move inland was such that the engineers were more or less forced to move forward. “Those were the first men inland,” Sgt. Vincent Powell of the 237th said. “And suddenly they started stepping on mines, S- mines, Bouncing Betties. These mines bounced up and exploded. These men began screaming and running back to the beach with the blood just flowing. And that’s when the tanks started in.”11

  • •

  At 0645 the swimming tanks were still chugging their way to the beach. They had been scheduled to land before the assault teams but they were not even the first tanks ashore; LCTs carrying C Company of the 70th Tank Battalion under the command of Capt. John Ahearn touched down before the DD tanks arrived. The Shermans were firing as they came in. Ahearn was in the second tank in the first LCT; Lt. Owen Gavigan commanded the tank that preceded Ahearn’s. They drove through five feet of water in their waterproofed Shermans. Ahearn turned over control of the four dozer tanks to the engineers and divided the remaining fourteen Shermans into two groups, retaining control of one and giving Lieutenant Yeoman command of the other.

  Ahearn turned his group left, looking for an opening through the seawall, while Yeoman turned right. Ahearn found an opening, turned toward it, and confronted a Goliath. They had been used at Anzio, but Ahearn had not been in Italy and no one had told him about the Goliaths; he could not figure out what on earth it was. Fortunately, the Goliath he faced just sat there; he later learned that the radio-control device had been blown up in the bombardment.

  Ahearn got his tanks through the opening in the seawall. Looking south, he saw a German fortification. He fired some shells at the bunker. With that a couple of dozen Werhmacht troops emerged, hands above their heads, and b
egan running toward Ahearn. He dismounted to take them in as prisoners. “They began yelling to me and gesturing at me to stay put; they were yelling ’Achtung Meinen. ’With this I gestured to them to move toward the road inland, where we took them prisoner and turned them over to the infantry.” They were not Germans at all, but Ost battalion troops from Georgia in the Soviet Union.

  Ahearn drove south on the beach road. It turned inland, toward Pouppeville, while a dirt road continued to parallel the dunes. He detached Lieutenant Tighe with five tanks to head toward Pouppeville, which he hoped was in the hands of the 101st Airborne, and proceeded south with two tanks to see if there were any more fortifications he could assault.

  His tank hit a land mine that blew the front left bogie. Ahearn radioed to Tighe to report that he was immobilized, climbed out of his tank, and proceeded on foot to scout the area. He stepped on an S-mine. The explosion threw him into the bank of a hedgerow, unconscious, his legs mangled. His crew searched for him. When he came too and yelled, they spotted him, but he cautioned them not to come up because of the mines. The crew returned to the tank, got a long rope, threw it to him, then dragged him out. Stretcher-bearers got him to a makeshift field hospital, where his foot was amputated. Engineers told him later that they removed 15,000 S-mines from that area.12

  Lt. Elliot Richardson was CO of a medic detachment that landed with the fourth wave. “I waded ashore with my guys. There were occasional shell bursts on the beach but it didn’t amount to much as most of the German guns had been put out of action. I walked up to the top of the dune and looked around. There was this barbed wire area and a wounded officer who had stepped on an antipersonnel mine calling for help.”