The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  One German private who was manning an MG 42 on top of the bluff put it this way, in a 1964 radio interview: “It was the first time I shoot at living men. I don’t remember exactly how it was: the only thing I know is that I went to my machine gun and I shoot, I shoot, I shoot.”28

  • •

  The sacrifice of good men that morning was just appalling. Capt. Walter Schilling of D Company, who had given a magnificent briefing to his magnificently trained men, was in the lead boat in the third wave. He was as good a company CO as there was in the U.S. Army. The company was coming into a section of the beach that had no one on it; there was no fire; Schilling remarked to Pvt. George Kobe, “See, I told you it was going to be easy.” Moments later, before the ramp went down, Schilling was killed by a shell.29

  Lt. William Gardner was the company executive officer, a West Point graduate described by Sgt. John Robert Slaughter as “young, articulate, handsome, tough, and aggressive. He possessed all the qualities to become a high-ranking officer in the Army.”30 The ramp went down on his boat some 150 meters from shore. The men got off without loss. Gardner ordered them to spread out and keep low. He was killed by machine-gun fire before he made the shore.

  Sgt. Slaughter’s boat was bracketed by German artillery fire. At 100 meters from shore, the British coxswain said he had to lower the ramp and everyone should get out quickly. Sgt. Willard Norfleet told him to keep going: “These men have heavy equipment and you will take them all the way in.”

  The coxswain begged, “But we’ll all be killed!”

  Norfleet unholstered his .45 Colt pistol, put it to the sailor’s head and ordered, “All the way in!” The coxswain proceeded.

  Sergeant Slaughter, up at the front of the boat, was thinking, If this boat don’t hurry up and get us in, I’m going to die from seasickness. The boat hit a sandbar and stopped.

  “I watched the movie The Longest Day,” Slaughter recalled, “and they came charging off those boats and across the beach like banshees but that isn’t the way it happened. You came off the craft, you hit the water, and if you didn’t get down in it you were going to get shot.”

  The incoming fire was horrendous. “This turned the boys into men,” Slaughter commented. “Some would be very brave men, others would soon be dead men, but all of those who survived would be frightened men. Some wet their britches, others cried unashamedly, and many just had to find it within themselves to get the job done.” In a fine tribute to Captain Shilling, Slaughter concluded, “This is where the discipline and training took over.”

  Slaughter made his way toward shore. “There were dead men floating in the water and there were live men acting dead, letting the tide take them in.” Most of Company D was in the water a full hour, working forward. Once he reached shore, for Slaughter “getting across the beach to the shingle became an obsession.” He made it. “The first thing I did was to take off my assault jacket and spread my raincoat so I could clean my rifle. It was then I saw bullet holes in my raincoat. I lit my first cigarette [they were wrapped in plastic]. I had to rest and compose myself because I became weak in my knees.

  “Colonel Canham came by with his right arm in a sling and a .45 Colt in his left hand. He was yelling and screaming for the officers to get the men off the beach. ‘Get the hell off this damn beach and go kill some Germans.’ There was an officer taking refuge from an enemy mortar barrage in a pillbox. Right in front of me Colonel Canham screamed, ‘Get your ass out of there and show some leadership.’ ” To another lieutenant he roared, “Get these men off their dead asses and over that wall.”31

  • •

  This was the critical moment in the battle. It was an ultimate test: could a democracy produce young men tough enough to take charge, to lead? As Pvt. Carl Weast put it, “It was simple fear that stopped us at that shingle and we lay there and we got butchered by rocket fire and by mortars for no damn reason other than the fact that there was nobody there to lead us off that goddamn beach. Like I say, hey man, I did my job, but somebody had to lead me.”32

  Sgt. William Lewis remembered cowering behind the shingle. Pvt. Larry Rote piled in on top of Lewis. He asked, “Is that you shaking, Sarge?”

  “Yeah, damn right!”

  “My God,” Rote said. “I thought it was me!” Lewis commented, “Rote was shaking all right.”

  They huddled together with some other men, “just trying to stay alive. There was nothing we could do except keep our butts down. Others took cover behind the wall.”

  All across Omaha, the men who had made it to the shingle hid behind it. Then Cota, or Canham, or a captain here, a lieutenant there, a sergeant someplace else, began to lead. They would cry out, “Follow me!” and start moving up the bluff.

  In Sergeant Lewis’s case, “Lt. Leo Van de Voort said, ‘Let’s go, goddamn, there ain’t no use staying here, we’re all going to get killed!’ The first thing he did was to run up to a gun emplacement and throw a grenade in the embrasure. He returned with five or six prisoners. So then we thought, hell, if he can do that, why can’t we. That’s how we got off the beach.”33

  That was how most men got off the beach. Pvt. Raymond Howell, an engineer attached to D Company, described his thought process. He took some shrapnel in helmet and hand. “That’s when I said, bullshit, if I’m going to die, to hell with it I’m not going to die here. The next bunch of guys that go over that goddamn wall, I’m going with them. If I’m gonna be infantry, I’m gonna be infantry. So I don’t know who else, I guess all of us decided well, it is time to start.”34

  * * *

  I. At the pre-assault briefing, Walker had been told, “This mock-up shows the land behind the beach as green, but it won’t look that way on D-Day. The pulverizing from the bombing, naval shells, and rockets will turn it brown. And don’t depend on those village church steeples as landmarks, because all buildings will be flattened.”

  II. “On our recent 1987 annual reunion,” Hamlett said, “O. T. told me his back still hurt because of my heavy boot.”

  III. Pvt. Charles Neighbor, of E Company, was an assistant flamethrower who made it ashore and took over when his No. 1 became a casualty.

  IV. Baumgarten was wounded five times that day, the last time by a bullet in his right knee as he was being carried on a stretcher to the beach for evacuation. He went on to medical school and became a practicing physician. He concluded his oral history, “Happily, in recent years when I’ve been back to Normandy, especially on Sept. 17, 1988, when we dedicated a monument to the 29th Division in Vierville, I noted that the French people really appreciated us freeing them from the Germans, so it made it all worthwhile.”

  18

  UTTER CHAOS REIGNED

  The 16th Regiment at Omaha

  THE 16TH INFANTRY REGIMENT of the 1st Division (the Big Red One) was the only first-wave assault unit on D-Day with combat experience. It didn’t help much. Nothing the 16th had seen in the North Africa (1942) and Sicily (1943) landings compared to what it encountered at Easy Red, Fox Green, and Fox Red on June 6, 1944.

  Like the 116th, the 16th landed in a state of confusion, off-target, badly intermingled (except L Company, the only one of the eight assault companies that could be considered a unit as it hit the beach), under intense machine-gun, rifle, mortar, and artillery fire from both flanks and the front. Schedules were screwed up, paths through the obstacles were not cleared, most officers—the first men off the boats—were wounded or killed before they could take even one step on the beach.

  The naval gunfire support lifted as the Higgins boats moved in and would not resume until the smoke and haze revealed definite targets or until Navy fire-control officers ashore radioed back specific coordinates (few of those officers made it and those that did had no working radios). Most of the DD tanks had gone down in the Channel; the few that made it were disabled.

  As a consequence, the German defenders were able to fire at presited targets from behind their fortifications unimpeded by incoming fire. The American infan
try struggled ashore with no support whatsoever. Casualties were extremely heavy, especially in the water and in the 200 meters or so of open beach. As with the 116th to the right, for the 16th Regiment first and second waves D-Day was more reminiscent of an infantry charge across no-man’s-land at the Somme in World War I than a typical World War II action.

  “Our life expectancy was about zero,” Pvt. John MacPhee declared. “We were burdened down with too much weight. We were just pack mules. I was very young, in excellent shape. I could walk for miles, endure a great deal of physical hardship, but I was so seasick I thought I would die. In fact, I wished I had. I was totally exhausted.”

  Jumping off the ramp into chest-deep water, MacPhee barely made it to the beach. There, “I fell and for what seemed an eternity I lay there.” He was hit three times, once in the lower back, twice in the left leg. His arm was paralyzed. “That did it. I lost all my fear and knew I was about to die. I made peace with my Maker and was just waiting.”

  MacPhee was lucky. Two of his buddies dragged him to the shelter of the seawall; eventually he was evacuated. He was told he had a million-dollar wound. For him the war was over.1

  As the ramp on his Higgins boat went down, Sgt. Clayton Hanks had a flashback. When he was five years old he had seen a World War I photograph in a Boston newspaper. He had said to his mother, “I wish I could be a war soldier someday.”

  “Don’t ever say that again,” his mother had replied.

  He didn’t, but at age seventeen he joined the Regular Army. He had been in ten years when the ramp went down and he recalled his mother’s words. “I volunteered,” he said to himself. “I asked for this or whatever was to come.” He leaped into the water and struggled forward.2

  Pvt. Warren Rulien came in with the second wave. Dead soldiers floated around in the water, which had risen past the first obstacles. He ducked behind a steel rail in waist-deep water. His platoon leader, a nineteen-year-old lieutenant, was behind another rail.

  The lieutenant yelled, “Hey, Rulien, here I go!” and began attempting to run to the shore. A machine gun cut him down. Rulien grabbed one of the bodies floating in the water and pushed it in front of him as he made his way to the shore.

  “I had only gone a short distance when three or four soldiers began lining up behind me. I shouted, ‘Don’t bunch up!’ and moved out, leaving them with the body. I got as low as I could in the water until I reached a sandbar and crossed it on my belly.” On the inland side of the sandbar the water was up to his chest. He moved forward. “On the shore, there were officers sitting there, stunned. Nobody was taking command.” He joined other survivors at the seawall.3

  The coxswain on Pvt. Charles Thomas’s boat was killed by machine-gun fire as he was taking his craft in. A crew member took over. The platoon leader had his arm shot off trying to open the ramp. Finally the ramp dropped and the assault team leaped into the surf. Thomas had a bangalore torpedo to carry so he was last man in the team.

  “As I was getting off I stopped to pick up a smoke grenade, as if I didn’t have enough to carry. The guy running the boat yelled for me to get off. He was in a hurry, but I turned around and told him that I wasn’t in any hurry.”

  Thomas jumped into chest-deep water. “My helmet fell back on my neck and the strap was choking me. My rifle sling was dragging under the water and I couldn’t stand.” He inflated his Mae West and finally made it to shore. “There I crawled in over wounded and dead but I couldn’t tell who was who and we had orders not to stop for anyone on the edge of the beach, to keep going or we would be hit ourselves.”

  When he reached the seawall, “it was crowded with GIs all being wounded or killed. It was overcrowded with GIs. I laid on my side and opened my fly, I had to urinate. I don’t know why I did that because I was soaking wet anyway and I was under fire, and I guess I was just being neat.”

  Thomas worked his way over to the left, where “I ran into a bunch of my buddies from the company. Most of them didn’t even have a rifle. Some bummed cigarettes off of me because I had three cartons wrapped in waxed paper.” Thomas was at the base of the bluff (just below the site of the American cemetery today). In his opinion, “The Germans could have swept us away with brooms if they knew how few we were and what condition we were in.”4

  Capt. Fred Hall was in the LCVP carrying the 2nd Battalion headquarters group (Lt. Col. Herb Hicks, CO). Hall was battalion S-3. His heart sank when he saw yellow life rafts holding men in life jackets and he realized they were the crews from the DD tanks. He realized “that meant that we would not have tank support on the beach.” The boat was in the E Company sector of Easy Red. E Company was supposed to be on the far right of the 16th, linking up with the 116th at the boundary between Easy Green and Easy Red, but it came in near the boundary between Easy Red and Fox Green, a full kilometer from the nearest 116th unit on its right (and with sections of the badly mislanded E Company of the 116th on its left).

  There was nothing to be done about the mistake. The officers and men jumped into the water and “it was every man for himself crossing the open beach where we were under fire.” Fourteen of the thirty failed to make it. Hall got up to the seawall with Hicks and “we opened our map case wrapped in canvas, containing our assault maps showing unit boundaries, phase lines, and objectives. I remember it seemed a bit incongruous under the circumstances.”

  The incoming fire was murderous. “And the noise—always the noise, naval gunfire, small arms, artillery, and mortar fire, aircraft overhead, engine noises, the shouting and the cries of the wounded, no wonder some people couldn’t handle it.” The assistant regimental commander and the forward artillery observer were killed by rifle fire. Lieutenant Colonel Hicks shouted to Hall to find the company commanders. To Hall, “It was a matter of survival. I was so busy trying to round up the COs to organize their men to move off the beach that there wasn’t much time to think except to do what had to be done.”

  Hicks wanted to move his men to the right, where the battalion was supposed to be, opposite the draw that led up the bluff between St.-Laurent and Colleville, but movement was almost impossible. The tide was coming in rapidly, follow-up waves were landing, the beach was narrowing from the incoming tide, “it became very crowded and the confusion increased.” So far as Hall could make out, “there was no movement off the beach.”5

  • •

  In fact, one platoon from E Company, 16th Regiment, was making its way up to the top of the bluff. It was led by Lt. John Spaulding of E Company. He was one of the first junior officers to make it across the seawall, through the swamp and beach flat, and up the bluff.

  At 0630, Spaulding’s boat hit a sandbar. He and Sgt. Fred Bisco kicked the ramp down in the face of machine-gun, mortar, and artillery fire. Spaulding jumped into the water. To his left he could see other E Company boats, but to his right there was nothing. His platoon was the far-right flank of the 16th Regiment.

  He spread his men and moved toward shore. The water depth at the sandbar was about a meter, but moving inland the platoon ran into a runnel where the water was over the men’s heads. A strong undercurrent was carrying them to the left (Spaulding said he had learned to swim in the Ohio River; he found the current at Omaha was much stronger). Sergeant Streczyk and medic George Bowen were carrying an eighteen-foot ladder to be used for crossing the antitank ditch. Spaulding grabbed it. “Streczyk yelled at me, ‘Lieutenant, we don’t need any help,’ but hell I was trying to get help, not to give it.”

  In these desperate circumstances, Spaulding ordered his men to abandon their heavy equipment and get ashore. There went the ladder, the flamethrower, the mortars, one of the two bazookas, and some of the ammunition. Most men were able to hold onto their rifles; to Spaulding’s surprise, they were able to fire as soon as they came ashore: “It shows that the M-1 is an excellent weapon,” he commented.

  The platoon took only a couple of casualties getting ashore. Luck was with Spaulding; he had come in at a spot where the German defenses were no
t particularly heavy, and besides the Germans had bigger targets than an isolated platoon. Once the men reached the beach, they stood up and started moving across the sand.

  “They were too waterlogged to run,” Spaulding said, “but they went as fast as they could. It looked as if they were walking in the face of a real strong wind.” At the seawall, Sgt. Curtis Colwell blew a hole in the wire with a bangalore. Spaulding and his men picked their way through.

  Spaulding took his 536 radio off his shoulder, pulled the antenna out and tried to contact his CO. The radio didn’t work. The mouthpiece had been shot away. “I should have thrown it away, but training habits were so strong that I carefully took the antenna down as I had always been taught to do and put the 536 back on my shoulder. Your training stays with you even when you are scared.”

  Once across the seawall, the platoon began to take heavier small-arms fire. One man was killed. The swamp and beach flat to the front were mined. Sergeant Streczyk and Pvt. Richard Gallagher went forward to investigate. “We can’t cross here,” they shouted and went to the left where they found a little defilade through the mined area. The platoon crossed to the base of the bluff, then began to climb it, following a faint trail.

  “We could still see no one to the right and there was no one up to us on the left,” Spaulding said. “We didn’t know what had become of the rest of E Company. Back in the water boats were in flames. I saw a tank ashore, knocked out. After a couple of looks back, we decided we wouldn’t look back anymore.”

  There was a pillbox to Spaulding’s left, its machine gun firing down on the beach. “We fired but couldn’t hit them. We were getting terrific small-arms fire ourselves but few were hit.” By this time the platoon was about halfway up the bluff, smack in the middle of the extensive German trench system. Pvt. Gallagher, in the lead, sent word that he had found a path toward the right that was in defilade, behind some trenches in a mined area. Spaulding moved forward.