The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Heydte dashed down the circular stairs from the steeple and got on his radio. He ordered his 1st Battalion to get to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and Holdy as quickly as possible to hold the villages and get those guns shooting.

  Thus did the Wehrmacht pay the price for overextending itself. Its best troops were either dead or POWs or invalids or fighting on the Eastern Front. The garrison troops in the Cotentin were almost useless, even a detriment. Heydte’s clear mission was to open the road from Carentan to Ste.-Mère-Église, concentrate his regiment to drive the small 82nd Airborne force in Ste.-Mère-Église out of town, and by such a counterattack throw the Americans on the defensive. That was what he had intended to do, but the sad state of affairs at the batteries at Brecourt Manor and Holdy forced him to divide his force and put one of his battalions on a defensive mission.

  Heydte was the only German regimental commander doing his job that morning. The others were in Rennes for the war game. That was one reason for the failure of the Wehrmacht to launch any coordinated counterattacks, even though it had been preparing for this day for the past six months and even though Rommel had insisted on the absolute necessity of immediate strong counterattacks while the invaders were still on the beaches.

  But the war game at Rennes was only one small part of the abysmal failure of the Wehrmacht. Paralysis in the high command permeated everything. The BBC radio messages to the French Resistance were more or less ignored (for this failure at least there was an excuse; there had been so many false alarms in the preceding weeks that the German coastal units had become exhausted and exasperated by the continuous alerts; further, the messages did not indicate where the invasion was coming). The dummy paratroopers dropped by SAS convinced some German commanders that the whole operation was a bluff. But the major factor in the Wehrmacht’s failure appears to have been a consequence of the soft life of occupation.

  As early as 0615 Gen. Max Pemsel, chief of staff to General Dollmann’s Seventh Army, told General Speidel at La Roche-Guyon of the massive air and naval bombardment; a half hour later Pemsel reported to Rundstedt’s headquarters that the landings were beginning—but he added that Seventh Army would be able to cope with the situation from its own resources. With that news General Salmuth, commanding the Fifteenth Army, went back to bed. So did Speidel and most of Rommel’s staff at La Roche-Guyon. General Blumentritt from Rundstedt’s headquarters told General Jodl at Hitler’s headquarters in Berchtesgaden that a major invasion appeared to be taking place and asked for the release of the armored reserve, I SS Panzer Corps outside Paris. Jodl refused to wake Hitler; permission was denied. General Bayerlein, commanding the Panzer Lehr division, had his tanks ready to move to the coast by 0600, but did not receive permission to do so until late afternoon.

  Berlin radio reported landings in Normandy at 0700; SHAEF released its first communiqué announcing the invasion at 0930; but not until 1030 did word reach Rommel at his home in Herrlingen. He left immediately for the long drive to La Roche-Guyon but did not arrive until after dark.14

  The cause of all this mess, beyond complacency and divided command responsibility, was the success of Operation Fortitude. As Max Hastings notes, “Every key German commander greeted the news of operations in Normandy as evidence of an invasion, not of the invasion.”15 The Calvados and Cotentin coasts were a long way from La Roche-Guyon, a longer way from Paris, an even longer way from the Pas-de-Calais, and a long, long way from the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland. Despite all their postwar claims to the contrary, the Germans just could not believe that the Allies would make their major, much less their sole, landing west of the Seine River. So they decided to wait for the real thing, at the Pas-de-Calais. They were still waiting three months later as the Allied armies overran France and moved into Belgium.

  This from an army that claimed to be the best and most professional in the world. In fact, from the supreme commander in Berchtesgaden on down to the field officers in France to the local commanders in Normandy to the men in the barracks at WXYZ, it was an army inferior in all respects (except for weaponry, especially the 88s and the machine guns) to its Allied opponents.

  • •

  The inferiority was shown again and again on D-Day. At Brecourt Manor, at 0830, just about the time Sergeant Summers started his attack at WXYZ, Lt. Richard Winters and ten men from E Company of the 506th PIR attacked the fifty-man guard at the battery of 105mms. The Germans were dug in behind hedgerows; they had extensive interconnecting trenches; they had machine guns and mortars and clear fields of fire. Winters’s squad-size group had one light mortar, two light machine guns, two tommy guns, and five rifles. But although Winters was outnumbered five to one and was attacking an entrenched enemy, he and his men prevailed. They did so because they used tactics they had learned in training, plus common sense and some calculated courage.

  At a cost of four dead, two wounded, Winters and his men killed fifteen Germans, wounded many more, took twelve prisoners, and destroyed four German 105mm cannon. The Americans had done the job through the quickness and audacity of a flanking attack, led by Winters, supported by suppressing fire from mortars and machine guns. One factor in their success was that this was their first combat experience. As Sgt. Carwood Lipton said, he took chances that morning he would never take again. “But we were so full of fire that day. I was sure I would not be killed. I felt that if a bullet was headed for me it would be deflected or I would move.”16

  After destroying the guns, Winters’s small group disengaged. Surviving Germans still held the hedgerows around the manor house and were using their machine guns to lay down harassing fire. At about 1200, two Sherman tanks came up from the beach. Winters climbed onto the back of the first tank and told the commander, “I want fire along those hedgerows over there, and there, and there, and against the manor. Clean out anything that’s left.”

  The tanks roared ahead. For the tankers, this was their first chance to fire their weapons at the enemy. They had a full load of ammunition for their .50-caliber and the .30-caliber machine guns and for their 75mm cannon.

  “They just cut those hedgerows to pieces,” Lt. Harry Welsh of Winters’s company remembered. “You thought they would never stop shooting.”17

  At Holdy, members of the 1st Battalion of the 506th carried out a similar attack and destroyed that battery. Then the 506th drove Colonel Heydte’s battalion out of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont. With that, the way was clear for the 4th Infantry Division to move further inland and get on with the war. The 101st had carried out its main mission—even though at no place were there more than a platoon of men from the same company gathered together. Taylor, Cassidy, Winters, Summers, and many others had seized the initiative and got the job done.

  • •

  The 101st did not do so well in carrying out its second major mission, to secure the southern flank by taking the bridges over the Douve and opening the way to Carentan. This was due to the scattered drop; no sizable force of Americans was able to form up to attack. Colonel Johnson did manage to take the lock at La Barquette and establish a small bridgehead on the south bank, but he could not expand it and was pinned down by fire coming from Heydte’s paratroopers in St.-Côme-du-Mont. He had no contact with any other 101st unit.

  Capt. Sam Gibbons of the 501st PIR, operating independently, led a small patrol toward St.-Côme-du-Mont. He believed the village was in 501st hands, but he moved cautiously as his visibility was limited by the hedgerows. Before setting out, he shared the two cans of beer he had brought with him, then left the empty cans in the middle of the road “as a monument to the first cans of Schlitz consumed in France.”

  The patrol reached the bottom of the hill, with St.-Côme-du-Mont sitting at the crest. Gibbons heard a gun bolt move on the other side of a hedgerow. He looked toward the sound and saw a rifle muzzle pointed at him. “As I dove for the ditch, all hell broke loose. We had been ambushed. The German behind the hedge had his weapon set on full automatic and it sprayed bullets all over the area. Instantaneously, sh
ots started coming from the buildings in St.-Côme-du Mont and from the hedges.”

  Gibbons dove to the ground. The German on the other side could not get at him without exposing himself. Gibbons lobbed a grenade over the hedge and the firing stopped. Still Gibbons could not raise his head because when he did he drew fire from the village. His patrol began returning fire, slowly at first but building up the volume as the men got into firing positions.

  Gibbons made a dash for a concrete telephone pole, tried to hide behind it, found it did not give him sufficient protection, and made another dash to dive into a ditch. It was deep enough to give him protection so long as he stayed flat on his belly. He began crawling: “I had received such a shot of adrenaline I could have crawled a mile.”

  He did not have to go that far. After fifty meters, he found cover and was able to tell his men to slow their fire to conserve ammunition. “It was obvious that we were badly outnumbered and that the Germans were well emplaced and planned to defend St.-Côme-du-Mont stubbornly. So there we were, 200 yards north of St.-Côme-du-Mont meeting superior fire from a major force. We had no automatic weapons, no radios, only our semiautomatic rifles and a few pistols. We hardly knew each other, but we were getting well acquainted, and we were working well together.”

  Gibbons consulted with two lieutenants. They decided to break off the action and head north, toward Ste.-Mère-Église, in search of some friendly force. On the way, they discovered that the beer cans were gone, probably picked up by Heydte’s men. At the hamlet of Blosville, although firefights small and big were going on all around the countryside, everything was quiet. “Doors all closed; windows all shuttered; cows in the field; no one stirred. The firing didn’t seem to bother the cows. They just kept on eating. Occasionally one would lift its head and look at us. No one bothered us so we didn’t stop.” Gibbons led his patrol on toward Ste.-Mère-Église.18

  Heydte’s paratroopers had beaten off the attack and retained possession of St.-Côme-du-Mont, which blocked the road to Carentan. That was a significant victory for the Germans, as it kept them in possession of the railway and road bridges over the Douve north of Carentan, which made it possible for them to move reinforcements into the eastern Cotentin. Heydte was also able to get his 2nd Battalion to the intersection where the road from Chef-du-Pont to Ste.-Marie-du-Mont crossed the highway from Carentan to Ste.-Mère-Église.

  Otherwise, as Heydte said in 1991, “The day did not work out as I expected.” His 1st Battalion was forced out of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and pushed south, where many men drowned in the floods around the mouth of the Douve. With the best regiment in the Cotentin, he was on the defensive, holding crossroads, not launching any coordinated counterattacks.19

  One company of Heydte’s men managed to get a battery of 88mms at Beaumont working. They opened fire on Colonel Johnson’s position at La Barquette. Fortunately for Johnson, Lieutenant Farrell, a naval shore-fire-control officer who had jumped with the 501st, had through dogged persistence found an SCR-609 radio. With Farrell was Lt. Parker Alford, a forward observer for the 101st artillery. They tried to contact the cruiser USS Quincy directly, but the Germans jammed the frequency; Alford then discovered that he could reach a shore party at Utah. He asked that it relay a request to Quincy to lay on a barrage against Beaumont.

  Quincy asked for verification of Alford’s identity. He replied that he knew a naval officer who had played linebacker with the Nebraska team in the 1940 Rose Bowl game. Name him, Quincy called back through the shore party. Easy, Alford replied; “He is K. C. Roberts and he is a member of the shore party we are speaking through.”

  “Roger, Roger, where do you want the fire?” Alford gave the coordinates, Quincy blasted away, Beaumont was obliterated, the 88s fell silent.20

  Captain Shettle’s small group from 3rd Battalion, 506th PIR, spent the day isolated at the bridges along the lower Douve. He could not advance; the Germans made no effort to push him back. His only contact with the beach came in the late afternoon when a platoon-sized German force was seen to the rear. Shettle took about half his force and deployed to ambush the enemy. When the Americans opened fire, the “Germans” made no attempt to fight back; they threw up their hands and surrendered. “They turned out to be a Hungarian labor force fleeing from the beachhead.”

  As the day was ending, a German patrol came after Shettle’s group. The Americans threw grenades at them. Shettle jumped up to throw one, forgetting that he had dislocated his right shoulder on a practice jump in May: “When I threw my grenade, my shoulder came out of its socket and the grenade landed in my foxhole. Fortunately, the banks of the foxhole protected me, but the next morning I found that I had blown up my prized ‘Bond Street’ trench coat, which was so much lighter and protective than our issue heavy rubber gear. So ended D-Day. Very little sleep, worry about our exposed position, lack of ammunition, and only hard chocolate bars for food.”21

  • •

  Those D-ration chocolate bars sustained many American paratroopers on June 6, but some found they craved real food. Pvt. Herbert James of the 508th PIR approached a Norman farmer to do some trading. James indicated he wanted eggs, but the farmer did not understand and appeared frightened.

  “So I started making noises like a chicken and I hopped around and he thought I wanted a whole chicken and tried to catch one.” James shook his head no and made the shape of an egg with his fingers. The farmer got some eggs; James gave him a chocolate bar in trade. Pleased with the exchange, the farmer called his small daughter from the house and gave her the bar, saying “Chocolate, chocolate” over and over. The girl took her first taste of chocolate ever and was delighted. James went back into the woods and poached his eggs on his entrenching shovel and was delighted.22

  Lt. Carl Cartledge of the 501st PIR was even luckier. He and a few members of his platoon drove some Germans out of a farmhouse, killing six or seven of them in the process. Inside, Cartledge found the dining-room table covered with half-eaten food—Norman cheese, apples, cold meats, and cider. After bolting some food, he searched the dead Germans, looking for paybooks, unit identification, and the like. To get at one paybook, he had to open a dead German’s belt buckle. “I looked at the flying-eagle belt buckle, and on it was inscribed ‘Gott Mit Uns.’ And I said, ‘The hell He is!’ ”

  Cartledge was in the Vierville area, northeast of St.-Côme-du-Mont. There he found his company medic, a man named Anderson, who had been caught by the Germans as he came down. “He was hanging in a tree by his feet, his arms down, throat cut, genitals stuffed in his mouth. His medic’s red-cross armband was stained with the blood that had flowed from his hair.”23

  The sight infuriated the Americans, but the Germans were not the only ones to commit atrocities that day. Pvt. William Sawyer of the 508th remembered running into one of his buddies. “We had all been issued yellow horsehide gloves. This fellow had on red gloves, and I asked him where he got the red gloves from, and he reached down in his jumppants and pulled out a whole string of ears. He had been ear-hunting all night and had them sewed on an old bootlace.”24

  About midmorning, Lt. Jack Isaacs of the 505th PIR pulled three wounded gliderborne Americans into a farmhouse. “Shortly thereafter, we noticed a German soldier step out into the field and approach an injured man that we had left there, intending to go back for him. The German looked him over and then shot him. That Kraut didn’t survive his trip back to the hedgerow.”25

  Getting help to the wounded was a major problem. Every trooper carried a first-aid kit, but it contained only bandages, sulfa tablets, and two morphine Syrettes. There were only a handful of doctors who jumped with the troops, and they had precious little equipment. Maj. David Thomas, regimental surgeon for the 508th PIR, set up his aid station in a ditch near the Merderet River.

  “The thing that I remember most was a soldier who had his leg blown off right by the knee and the only thing left attached was his patellar tendon. And I had him down there in this ditch and I said, ‘Son, I’m gonna hav
e to cut the rest of your leg off and you’re back to bullet-biting time because I don’t have anything to use for an anesthetic.’ And he said, ‘Go ahead, Doc.’ I cut the patellar tendon and he didn’t even whimper.”26

  • •

  The confusion that characterized all airborne operations on June 6 was badly compounded for the 82nd Division because it landed astride the Merderet River. As a result of the extensive flooding, the Merderet was more a shallow lake (a kilometer or more wide and ten kilometers long) than a river. There were two crossings, one a raised road (or causeway) and bridge at La Fière, about a kilometer west of Ste.-Mère-Église, and the other a causeway and bridge at Chef-du-Pont, two kilometers south of La Fière. The 82nd had hoped to take La Fière and Chef-du-Pont during the night, then spend the day attacking westward to secure the line of the upper Douve River, but in the event the division had a terrific daylong fight for the two positions. Many of its units were isolated west of the Merderet; some of them remained surrounded and isolated for as long as four days, fighting off German tank and artillery attacks with their hand-held weapons.

  Shortly after dawn, Gen. James Gavin, assistant division commander of the 82nd, had assembled nearly 300 men, mainly from the 507th PIR—about as large a group as the Americans had that morning. Gavin moved south along the railroad embankment on the edge of the flooded area to La Fière, decided that the American position on the east bank of the causeway was secure, left part of his force there, and continued on south to Chef-du-Pont with the remainder.