A wave hit McMath and tumbled him. He was drifting parallel with the shore when a Higgins boat came straight at him. He tried to grab the front of the boat but there was nothing to hold onto, so he slid under and came up behind. “I still don’t know how I missed that prop.III After that ordeal was over I was glad I hadn’t caught onto the boat as it was hit soon after it passed over me.”
McMath finally made shore. He picked up a rifle and cleaned the blood and sand off it. Then he took some dry socks off a dead soldier and changed his socks.
“I found some cigarettes that were dry and wouldn’t have taken any amount of money for them.” He moved up to the seawall. He could find no members of his company. Looking around, “there in a foxhole was a kid I had practically lived with most of my civilian life. What a surprise. I crawled into his hole and we had a little chat about how glad we were that we had both made it.”23
Pvt. Al Littke was a combat engineer who came in with the first wave on an LCM. His initial task was to act as a pack horse; he was to carry demolition charges to the obstacles and drop them there. Then he was to continue to the beach and clear minefields. He draped his demolition charges over one shoulder, his M-1 over another, and carried a suitcase with his mine detector in his hand. He jumped off the ramp into knee-deep water, took a few steps, and fell into a runnel.
“I let go of my suitcase and I hit bottom. I pushed myself off; it was a good thing I had my life preserver on. I did a little dog paddle-breast stroke until my knees hit solid ground, then I got up and started to walk in.”
When he reached the beach, Littke dropped his demolition charges beside an obstacle, then went on to the seawall. “It was pretty crowded there.” Nevertheless, he kept his mind on his job. He fired a clip from his M-1 toward the bluff, reloaded, crossed the seawall, and got to the base of the bluff. When he started to move up, “about a foot in front of me little puffs of dirt flew up, about a dozen.” He dug a foxhole and waited “for how long I do not know.”
Unlike the leaderless infantry behind him, Littke knew what he was supposed to do and he was determined to do it. “I thought I’d better go up and look for mines. I had a roll of tape that brought it to my attention. I tied a stick around the tape and I took off again.” As he moved up the bluff, leaving a trail marked by his tape behind, he went cautiously, watching for prongs sticking above the surface indicating Bouncing Betties or for any indentation in the sand indicating possible Teller mines or box mines. When he found some, he probed with his bayonet to dislodge and disarm them. After his tape ran out, he ran back to his foxhole.
Littke looked back at the beach. He saw an LCI unloading, soldiers coming down the two sides. “All of a sudden there was a flash on the portside, it hit right where the GIs were coming down the ladder. GIs fell into the water screaming and hollering for medics. I thought that if I ever got out of this alive, I would never miss going to church on Sundays again.”
Just then an infantryman from the 116th Regiment appeared. He looked down at Littke in the foxhole and asked, “Kid, are you all right?” Littke said he was. The soldier started up the trail Littke had just marked; a half-dozen other GIs followed. Littke said to himself, “Hell, I might as well go with them.”
He jumped up to do so when he heard someone call out, “Fatty!” It was a corporal from his platoon. Littke joined him to help a wounded man into a foxhole, then asked the corporal if he knew where their sergeant was. Back on the beach. Littke started down. He saw a sickening sight; a wounded soldier had crouched behind a tank for shelter. Shells were hitting near the tank. Littke could hear the tank commander yelling, “Let’s get the hell out of here, they’re zeroing in on us!” The tank backed up and crushed the soldier.
Later that morning, on the beach, Littke had what must have been a moment of intense satisfaction. He ran into a brigadier general and a colonel. The general asked him, “Son, how do we get to the top?”
“I just pointed toward my white tape.”24
Pvt. John Mather of the engineers followed Littke’s path. His team was more or less intact, led by a Lieutenant Allen. The men were carrying picks, shovels, bangalore torpedoes, bazookas and rockets, mine detectors, and satchel charges. They had landed at the wrong place, but Allen decided to go through the same gap Littke had used and stick to the marked path. When they reached the top Allen realized they were nowhere near their initial objective. A platoon from the 116th Regiment was exchanging fire with Germans in the next hedgerow. The engineers were not equipped for a firefight. Allen returned to the beach and tried to locate the exit he was supposed to be using. He led the men up another trail, found he was still in the wrong place, and again returned to the beach.
“At this point,” Mather commented, “I started to get angry and frustrated at the lack of action on our part.” He joined Lieutenant Allen, who was in consultation with the company commander. The CO was in a state of shock; he had lost half his men. “He looked like hell and very dispirited. I asked the lieutenant if there wasn’t something we could do but got a negative answer. I’m sure he would have been willing but he couldn’t get the CO to take action. So we sat in our holes and listened to the sound of the mortars swishing overhead and watched the tide go out.”25
Lt. Barnett Hoffner of the 6th ESB came in on the rising tide. “The sight of the waves breaking onshore choked us up. It seemed like thousands of homeless were floating in a long line all around us. When our ramp dropped and we charged out into the water wading toward the beach, we went through what looked like hell itself. On the fifty or so yards of sand between the seawall and the water line lay blasted tanks, trucks, tractors, dozers, tangles, anything, blazing trucks filled with gas, everything was blown up. Of the sixteen teams we had trained for the demolition, only five came in for their assignments and three of them had nothing with them. All their equipment was gone. And only three bulldozers out of sixteen were left and they couldn’t maneuver because the infantrymen were taking cover behind them.”26
Lt. Col. Frank Walk was an assistant beachmaster for the ESB. His responsibility was to serve as traffic patrol officer, to direct incoming vehicles to open exits so they could climb to the top. But there were no open exits, and in any case Walk—who landed at about 0800—could not get off the beach. He and his radioman and his runner were under intense small-arms fire, “and one thing they spent a lot of time teaching us in the Army was how to dig foxholes. That is wasted training time. It is a natural instinct when you’re under fire to dig a hole as fast as you can even if you have to do it with your fingernails. No one has to teach you how to dig a hole.”
When the fire let up a bit, Walk moved to the seawall and located his CO, who had landed with an earlier wave. The CO was shell-shocked. “He was really just not at all in control of himself. He had gone completely berserk.” He had to be evacuated; Walk took command.
By this time, around 0830, more brass was coming ashore. Lieutenant Colonel Walk was awfully junior to be giving assistant division commanders orders, but he did it anyway.
“They were accustomed to having their way,” Walk commented. “So I would say, ‘General, I’m sorry to tell you, you can’t take those units through that exit. You’ve got to go over there.’ ”
“Who says so?”
“Well, General, I say so. I’m the traffic control officer here.”27
Col. Paul Thompson, who had run the assault training center back in England, commanded the 6th ESB. He came in on an LCI at about 0830. Very little was going the way it was supposed to go, the way he had trained the assault units to take a fortified beach.
Thompson wanted to get things moving. He noticed a group of combat engineers held up by barbed wire on the beach road. “Some of the engineer personnel were trying to blow it with bangalore torpedoes, and of course I had conducted that exercise hundreds of times in training and it seemed to me they were going about it kind of clumsy.” Thompson went forward to show them how to shove the bangalore under the wire. He got hit twice by rifl
e fire, one bullet through the right shoulder, the other through the jaw. The wound was unique because it was from the inside of the mouth out: Thompson had been shouting orders when he got hit.28
Thompson had longed to see the divisions he had trained take the beach and move inland. He had longed to see his engineers do the job they had been trained and equipped to do. He had longed to participate in the fight for the first 1,000 yards. It was not to be.
Thompson’s frustration that morning was shared by every survivor of the first two hours of the battle, whether tankers or infantrymen or artillerymen or engineers or demolition teams. Many thought they had failed. When the 0830 order to cease landing came through, men were close to despair. At Omaha at least, Rommel’s fixed defenses seemed to have stopped them cold.
• •
At Widerstandsnest 62, Pvt. Franz Gockel thought so. At 0630 he had opened fire with his machine gun. The sand shaken loose by the naval bombardment caused it to jam. “I tore the belt from the feed tray, shook it clean, and slapped it back into the tray. At that instant the machine gun was torn from my hands by an explosion. I have no idea how I survived.”
Gockel grabbed his rifle and began firing as “the first closely packed landing troops sprang from their boats, some in knee-deep water, others up to their chests. Within seconds the first wave of assault troops collapsed after making only a few meters headway. Assault craft careened leaderless back and forth on the water.
“On came the second waves of assault craft. Again we opened fire. The beach became strewn with dead, wounded and shelter-seeking soldiers. They reached the low stone wall, but the safety offered there was temporary. Our mortar crews had waited for this moment and began to lay deadly fire on preset coordinates along the sea wall. Mortar rounds with impact fuses exploded on target. The shell splinters, wall fragments, and stones inflicted severe casualties. The waves of attackers broke against our defenses.”
Gockel and his comrades had plenty of ammunition for their rifles and machine guns, plenty of hand grenades stored nearby, plenty of mortar rounds. They had taken only light casualties. When at 0830 transports began turning out to sea without unloading their troops, “we believed the Americans were initiating a withdrawal.”29
* * *
I. Six hours later Irwin went back in and got most of his cargo ashore. One sergeant refused to drive his jeep off the ramp; not until D-Day plus one did he go ashore, and then at a British beach.
II. In December 1944, during the crisis of the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower allowed black truck drivers to volunteer for combat infantry posts. Nearly 5,000 did, many of them giving up their stripes for the privilege of fighting for their country. Initially they were segregated into all-black platoons, with white officers. They compiled an outstanding record. A staff officer from the 104th Division remarked on the performance of the black platoons: “Morale: Excellent. Manner of performance: Superior. Men are very eager to close with the enemy and to destroy him. Strict attention to duty, aggressiveness, common sense and judgment under fire has won the admiration of all the men in the company. The colored platoon has a calibre of men equal to any veteran platoon.” A few white officers declared that the black troops were too aggressive and occasionally overextended themselves, but when the black units suffered losses and could no longer function as platoons, the survivors were formed into squads and served in white platoons. This was the beginning of integration in the U.S. Army. Mr. James Cook of Sharon Hills, Pennsylvania, provided information on the 320th.
III. One of the features of the Higgins boat was a protected, enclosed propeller.
20
“I AM A DESTROYER MAN”
The Navy at Omaha Beach
THE SEABEES on the demolition teams, naval beachmasters, and spotters for the warships were the first Navy men on the beach. The beachmasters’ job was to put up flags to guide the landing craft assigned to a particular sector, but twelve of the sixteen beachmaster teams never made it to shore, and the four who did were at the wrong place.1
Seaman Robert Giguere was on an LCI that hit a floating mine as she was going in, wounding or killing about half the men on board. The skipper dropped the ramp on the left side; the one on the right wouldn’t work. A Coast Guardsman swam to shore with a rope; Giguere and infantry from the 16th Regiment used the rope to help themselves get ashore. On the way in, Giguere was hit in the left arm, but it was only a flesh wound. Ashore, he could not find any members of his beach party, so he picked up a rifle as he made his way to the seawall. There he switched from being a sailor assisting a beachmaster to a soldier.
At the seawall, Giguere heard Colonel Taylor say, “We might as well get killed inland as here on the beach.” Giguere pointed to the markings on his helmet indicating that he was a Navy man; Taylor told him to join the infantry. Someone put a bangalore under the barbed wire; Giguere joined a small group from the 16th and crossed the road, only to be pinned down by a pillbox.
“I threw a couple of grenades in the pillbox openings,” Giguere recorded. “I guess that helped to finish it off.” He worked his way up the bluff. Late that morning he participated in a rush on a house that proved to have no Germans in it, but there were five Frenchmen in the cellar. A lieutenant told him to escort them down to the beach for interrogation.
On the beach, Giguere found that “artillery was landing everywhere. I was wounded again. When I came to, I was in the 40th General Hospital in Cirencester, England. It was my eighteenth birthday.”2
The few beachmasters who made it ashore could hardly do their jobs in the chaotic conditions. Still, they tried to help out as best they could. Seaman William O’Neill was on an LCT. He recalled spotting a beach-party member “half crouching, waving his semaphore flags furiously at us. Without much thought, I grabbed a pair of flags and scrambled to the top of the wheelhouse and gave him a king, which means go ahead. His message was stay low, keep your head down. I really had some evil thoughts about getting that gratuitous advice.”
Looking around, O’Neill could see that “our chances of reaching the beach at that place were very poor, but the chances of being slaughtered by machine gun and mortar fire were very high.” He decided to pass his insights on to his skipper.
The skipper, an Ensign Phillips, was a “ninety-day wonder,” but O’Neill thought he was “just great. Unassuming, never unjustly critical, a courageous and resourceful leader. It was a privilege to have served with him.”
O’Neill did not think so much of Phillips’s executive officer, another ensign, “who was a kind man but in battle he became literally paralyzed, unable to give orders or even to move.” The third officer, an Ensign Fox, “was an absolute joy, bright, brave, and cool; we would do anything for him. His father was a Methodist bishop and his mother president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Maryland. He would dutifully pass around the temperance literature his mother would send, then lead the march to the nearest pub. He would point to himself as living proof that the ministers’ kids were the worst in town.”
Up on the wheelhouse, O’Neill was “really excited. I said to the skipper, ‘What the hell are you doing here? You’ll get us all killed! There’s more of a chance to get in to our right.’ ”
Ensign Phillips agreed and off to the right the LCT moved, sailing parallel to the beach for a kilometer or two, where other LCTs were moving in. Phillips closed the beach. He could see tanks sinking in runnels, so he asked for a volunteer who would test the water depth by wading into shore before the bulldozer in the front of his LCT unloaded.
“That was a nutty idea,” O’Neill commented, but someone did volunteer “to be a human depth finder.” Phillips ran onto the sandbar. At that moment, an LCT to the right, carrying seven half-tracks, dropped her ramp and the lead vehicle was hit just as it left the ramp. O’Neill saw “an immediate explosion and the entire LCT erupted in flames and then the ammunition began to explode so it was really quite a mess.”
Ensign Phillips gave the order to drop t
he ramp. The volunteer jumped into the water, but the bulldozer driver did not wait to see the result; he just drove off, almost overrunning the volunteer. The driver had his blade raised to its maximum position, which provided an excellent shield for him. Down into the runnel he went. The waterproofing worked and he chugged his way forward, dragging a line of jeeps attached by cable behind him.
O’Neill remembered “my last vision of my friend Bill Lynn was of him sitting in his jeep being pulled along into deep water and then disappearing beneath the surface and then appearing soaking wet, water sloshing out of the jeep, some fifty yards further.”
On the LCT, the gun crews were firing their 20mm guns into the bluff. So far as O’Neill could tell, “We were the only U.S. offensive activity in that area. Even the tanks were sheltered behind the sand dunes, unable to fire over them. Our orders had been to land, retract, and return for another load, but instead we stayed and continued to fire.”
The executive officer cowered in the hold, but Ensign Fox led O’Neill and others ashore to bring wounded men to the LCT. “We filled our bunks, our inside decks, and every available space on the main deck. The wounds were gross. There was one medic and our cook to tend to all of them, and we did our best using our inexpert hands as well as we could.”3
• •
It was about 0830. So far the Navy had not done any better than the Army in carrying out the plan for Omaha. The 12-inch and 14- inch shells from the prelanding bombardment had mostly gone over the top of the bluff. The skippers on the landing craft had mostly put their men and cargoes ashore in the wrong places. The cutting edge of the invasion force, the infantry from the 116th and 16th regiments, had taken horrendous casualties; the survivors were mostly huddled at the seawall. They were receiving precious little fire support.
The Men of World War II Page 83
