The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The Allies controlled the air over Normandy, which with the rarest of exceptions on D-Day kept the Luftwaffe from strafing the lucrative targets on the beach or bombing the beach or ships offshore, but the Air Force could contribute little in the way of direct support to the troops on the beach. The heavy bombers did not have the pinpoint accuracy required to hit the bluff but miss the beach; after the preassault bombardment, the big bombers returned to England, refueled and reloaded, and then hit targets such as railroads and crossroads well inland. That helped considerably in the following days by making German movement difficult, but it contributed nothing to the battle of June 6.

  Later in the war, the Allied fighter pilots and the Army developed an efficient, indeed deadly, ground-to-air radio communication system, but even had the system been in place on D-Day it wouldn’t have helped much, as 80 percent of the radios with the infantry at Omaha were lost in the surf or destroyed on the beach.

  LCTs had managed to land some tanks, but most of them had been disabled. The Navy had been unable to get many field artillery pieces ashore. About all the help the infantry was receiving was coming from those little 20mm guns on the LCTs. That wasn’t much.

  The warships at sea had big guns, but they had lifted their fire as the first waves went in and were under orders not to resume firing until they had a definite target radioed to them from fire-control parties ashore. But the fire-control parties had not made it ashore, and there was no shore-to-ship liaison. The gunships closest to the shore, the destroyers, did not dare fire into the bluff, even when they could see fortified positions, for fear of hitting advancing American infantry.

  “It was most galling and depressing,” Commander W. J. Marshall of the destroyer Satterlee wrote in his action report, “to lie idly a few hundred yards off the beaches and watch our troops, tanks, landing boats, and motor vehicles being heavily shelled and not be able to fire a shot to help them just because we had no information as to what to shoot at and were unable to detect the source of the enemy fire.”4

  Lt. Owen Keeler was the gunnery officer on the destroyer Frankford. He too was frustrated because he had no targets. Aside from all the other problems, “German camouflage was excellent, so we could not see who was where or pinpoint anything to shoot.” His skipper, Lt. Comdr. James Semmes, decided to go in closer for a better look. Navigating by fathometer and seaman’s eye, he got to within 400 yards, as close as he could possibly go without running aground, but “the camouflage on the beach was still good. We could not spot a target—and we did not know how far our troops had advanced.”5

  Destroyer Harding’s executive officer and navigator, Lt. William Gentry, shared the feeling of helplessness. He watched DUKWs sink: “All we could do was stay clear of the assault craft and hold ourselves ready for counterfire.”6 (Chief Engineer Lt. Ken Shiffer on Harding was able to make a small contribution. He went up on deck to see the assault. “All of a sudden I saw a heavily loaded DUKW. The coxswain yelled, ‘Which way is the beach?’ I realized that the DUKW was so low in the water he couldn’t make out the low-lying shoreline. I pointed to the east and he steamed away.”7)

  The skipper of Harding, Capt. George Palmer, wrote in his action report, “This ship ceased firing while troops landed on beach and we commenced patrolling area about 2000 yards offshore searching for targets of opportunity. The smoke on the beach was so heavy that no targets could be seen and unobserved fire was deemed unsafe.”8

  After two hours of such frustration, skippers began to act on their own responsibility. Evidently the first to do so was Lt. Comdr. Ralph “Rebel” Ramey on McCook. He sailed into the western sector of Omaha, close enough to see that the troops were not getting up the bluff. He began blasting away with his 5-inch guns at the Vierville exit, hitting gun positions, pillboxes, buildings, and dug-in cliff positions. Two guns set into the cliff, enfilading the beaches, were particular targets. After almost an hour of shooting, one of the German guns fell off the cliff onto the beach and the other blew up.9

  Pvt. Ernest Hillberg of the 1st Division was on a Higgins boat. The coxswain had received orders not to land yet, so “with those shells flying past,” Hillberg remembered, “he decided we had to find a place to hide. McCook was a great place to hide. So we hid behind her. I’m sure there were a hundred small craft hiding behind McCook, which was slowly but methodically cruising along the coast, spotting the gun emplacements and taking them under fire. It was beautiful to see. We were scared to death McCook was going to run aground.”10

  Other destroyers were joining McCook. Lt. W. L. Wade commanded an LCI group that was circling offshore, waiting for orders to go in. He described the scene in front of him at 0930: “Enemy fire on the beaches was terrific—105mm, 88mm, 40mm, mortars, machine guns, mines, everything. Destroyers were almost on the beach themselves, firing away at pillboxes and strong points.”11

  The scene looked different to different men, in at least one case to men standing next to each other on the same bridge. At 0856 Harding went to the command vessel for Omaha, Ancon, to pick up Adm. Charles Cooke and Maj. Gen. Thomas Handy, who wanted to go close in to observe. Harding then cruised the beach, firing away as she did so.

  Admiral Cooke declared that “the landing was a complete disaster” and commented that “the troops were pinned to the beach.” But to Lieutenant Gentry, Harding’s executive officer, “it looked to us Navy destroyer types as if everything was proceeding according to the book. Troops were moving off the beach inland, enemy fire appeared to have died down, and it seemed to me the U.S. Army was getting its act together.” But Cooke “kept muttering disaster.”12

  • •

  At 0950 Adm. C. F. Bryant, commanding the gunfire support group off Omaha, called all destroyers over TBS (Talk Between Ships) radio: “Get on them, men! Get on them! They are raising hell with the men on the beach, and we can’t have anymore of that! We must stop it!” Every destroyer off Omaha responded, the skippers taking the risk of running aground (several did scrape bottom but got off), firing point-blank at targets of opportunity on the bluff.13

  Comdr. Robert Beer on Carmick went in to within 900 meters of the beach, where he could keep up a visual communication of a sort with the troops ashore. When he saw a tank fire a single shot at a certain point on the bluff, Beer blasted the same spot. When he could see riflemen firing at a target, he laid into it with his 5-inch shells.14

  Seaman Edward Duffy was in the radio room of Shubrick. His skipper was engaging shore batteries in what Duffy called “Dodge City shootouts.” He had two packs of cigarettes and a pound box of lemon drops with him; he went through both, plus a dozen cups of “Godawful coffee” in three hours. (It was years before he ate another lemon drop; “When I eat one now it brings back a lot of memories.”)

  Down in the radio room, “We could hear the projectiles exploding in the water around us. We were below the main deck at just about the water level, so the sounds of the explosions reverberated within the steel hull.

  “I was scared. I had my life jacket very securely tied tightly about my (then) skinny frame. I expected at any moment to hear a shell come crashing through the bulkhead. I kept repeating to myself a prayer to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Then I became so tired of being scared I began paying attention to what the ship was doing.”

  Shubrick moved close in and pounded away point-blank. Duffy could “see” the battle over his earphones. “The spotters would report to all stations what was happening.” At one point, the range finder reported a German officer walking on the crest. “Our officers suspected that he was scouting and spotting for the guns in this area. We trained our main battery and director in his direction, took a range on his location, and sent him a four-gun salute. A direct hit and the tension was relieved because we had gotten one of the bastards ourselves.”15

  That a destroyer could fire a salvo at a single individual indicates what a superb job American industry had done in supplying the men of D-Day. Shubrick fired 440 rounds that day; McCook 975; Car
mick 1,127; Satterlee 638; the other destroyers between 500 and 1,000 rounds of 5-inch shells. They were supposed to save half their ammunition for possible German surface attack, or for antisubmarine work, but in many cases the destroyers returned to England with few or no rounds remaining in the locker.

  Frankford fired away from shoal water 800 meters off the beach. Gunnery Officer Keeler recalled: “A tank sitting at the water’s edge with a broken track fired at something on the hill. We immediately followed up with a 5-inch salvo. The tank gunner flipped open his hatch, looked around at us, waved, dropped back in the tank, and fired at another target. For the next few minutes he was our fire-control party. Our range-finder optics could examine the spots where his shells hit.”16

  A bit later McCook had the perhaps unique experience of forcing German troops to surrender. As “Rebel” Ramey was firing at a cliff position, German soldiers appeared waving a white flag and attempting to signal the ship by semaphore and flashing light. For nearly an hour Ramey’s semaphore man tried to establish communications, he using broken German, they using poor English.

  When Ramey tired of the game and signaled that he was resuming fire, a prompt answer came back—“Ceize fire!” Ramey had his man signal to the Germans that they should come down the bluff and surrender themselves. They understood and did, coming down single file with hands up to turn themselves over to GIs on the beach.17

  • •

  Admiral Morison got it right when he wrote, “This destroyer action against shore batteries . . . afforded the troops the only artillery support they had during most of D-Day.”18 The cruisers and battleships, unable to go in close, were banging away at major emplacements on the cliffs east and west of Omaha whose position was known before the invasion and with good effect, but the troops ashore could neither see nor sense the results. But the effect on the troops on Omaha of the destroyers’ heroic and risky action was electric.

  Before he got hit in his spinal column, while he was still on his LCT, Cpl. Robert Miller could see “a destroyer ahead of us with heavy smoke pouring from its stack. It seemed to be out of control and heading right for the beach. I thought, my God, they’re going to run aground and be disabled right in front of the German emplacement, when the ship made a hard left pulling parallel to the beach, blazing away with every gun it had point-blank at the position. Puffs of smoke and mounds of dirt flew everywhere on the hillside as the destroyer passed swiftly by.”19

  Seaman Giguere was on the beach when a destroyer “came in as close to shore as could be. She was firing at a pillbox just over my head. It was a funny feeling hearing the shells go over my head.”20 Seaman O’Neill, also on the beach, recalled, “The destroyers were firing their 5-inch shells point-blank at the pillboxes, you could see the shells as they went screaming overhead and smacked against the thick concrete walls. They bounced skyward off the sloping sides of those pillboxes, but they managed to get a few of them into the gun ports. The enemy fire soon stopped.”21

  Lt. Joe Smith, a Navy beachmaster, remembered seeing “the destroyers come right into the beach firing into the cliff. You could see the trenches, guns, and men blowing up where they would hit. They aimed right below the edge of the cliffs where the trenches were dug in. There is no question in my mind that the few Navy destroyers that we had there saved the invasion.” In his conclusion, Smith spoke for every man who witnessed the scene: “Believe me, I am a destroyer man from that day on.”22

  Forty-five years later, James Knight, an Army engineer on a demolition team who landed at 0630 at Fox Red, wrote a letter to the crew of the Frankford, published in the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Knight said that he had been pinned down until, “at about 1000 or 1030, a destroyer loomed out of the sea . . . headed straight toward me. Even though she wasn’t listing or smoking, my first thought was that she had either struck a mine or taken a torpedo and was damaged badly enough that she was being beached.”

  But the destroyer began to turn right. Before she was parallel to the beach she was blazing away with all her guns. Shells landed just a few feet over Knight’s head. He watched her proceed westward along the beach, firing constantly. He expected to see her pull out to sea at any moment “when suddenly I realized she was backing up and her guns had yet to pause. She backed up almost to where she had started, went dead in the water for the second time . . . and again headed toward the other end of the beach, with all guns still blazing.”

  Over the years since D-Day, Knight tried to find out the name of the destroyer, but neither Ryan nor Morison nor any other author mentioned the incident (although Morison did say that Frankford went in closest that morning). Then Knight saw a notice of a reunion for the Frankford in the VFW Magazine. He attended the reunion, in 1989. There he confirmed that the destroyer that had so impressed and helped him was the Frankford.

  In his letter to the crew, Knight wrote, “Regardless of the time of arrival, nearly every living person on Omaha was pinned down from the time he reached the dune line until after you made your ‘cruise.’ Not long after you swung out to sea, there was movement on the beach, which eventually enabled the infantry to advance up the slope onto the flat land and beyond.”23

  The chief of staff of the 1st Division, Col. S. B. Mason, wrote Rear Adm. J. L. Hall on July 8, 1944, after an inspection of the German defenses at Omaha. Those defenses should have been impregnable, Mason wrote, and indeed the Germans had hurled back everything the Army had thrown at them. “But there was one element of the attack they could not parry. . . . I am now firmly convinced that our supporting naval fire got us in; that without that gunfire we positively could not have crossed the beaches.”24

  When Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow went ashore at 1900 hours on D-Day, to establish his V Corps headquarters on the beach, his first message back to General Bradley on Augusta was: “Thank God for the United States Navy!”25

  The Navy was part of a team. Indispensable, obviously, especially the destroyers, but still just a part. Much hard fighting remained before the bluff and high ground could be secured even after Frankford and the others had expended virtually all their ammunition and withdrawn. What the Navy had done was to give the men on Omaha a fighting chance. It was up to the infantry to exploit it. The first task was to open those exits and relieve the traffic jam on the beach. To do that, the infantry had to get to the top and come down on the German defenders from the rear.

  • •

  The outstanding job the Navy did of destroying German pillboxes on the bluff was matched by the outstanding job the Navy did of caring for the wounded. Medical care began on the beach, with men dragging the wounded out of the water to keep them from drowning in the rising tide. Chief Yeoman Garwood Bacon of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion was on an LCI that hit a mine at 0810 on Dog Green. Many were wounded; the craft was burning. With the other members of his team, Bacon got a rubber raft into the water; he got aboard while they pitched onto it a radio set and medical packs plus their weapons and ammunition. As machine-gun and rifle fire whined past their ears, they pushed the raft through the obstacles to shallow water, then unloaded the contents on the sand.

  “Hey, Bacon,” Seaman Johnakin called out, “do you think that we can make it out to the ship again? Some of those wounded guys will never make it ashore.”

  “I’ll give it a try if you will,” Bacon replied.

  They tossed their packs, tommy guns, and helmets onto the beach, grabbed the raft, and began crawling backward out into deeper water, again dodging obstacles and trying to avoid bullets as they picked up wounded men from the water. “In a matter of a few minutes some fifteen wounded or nonswimmers were crammed into it or hanging on the outside of the raft, and with the help of free hands and feet flailing the water we all managed to reach shore once more where several able-bodied men helped to take the wounded to the protection of the seawall and administer first aid wherever possible.”26 An Army Signal Corps photographer took a snapshot of the scene; it became one of the best-known photos of Omaha Beach.
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  Bacon grabbed a carbine (someone had already picked up his tommy gun) and made his way to the shingle seawall. He saw a group of fifty or so men, “all prostrate on the sand or rocks. Thinking they were lying there held down by gunfire, I threw myself down between two soldiers and buried my face in the sand. Suddenly I realized there was no rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun whining overhead so I lifted my head cautiously and looked around. The sickening sight that met my eyes froze me on the spot. One of the men I had dropped between was headless, the other was blown half apart. Every last one of them was dead.” He could render no first aid to dead men, so he set off in search of his party.27

  German snipers would shoot at the Army medics (universally praised by the veterans of D-Day as the bravest of the brave) as they tried to tend wounded men on the beach who could not be moved. Wounded men who could be dragged to the seawall were treated by the medics as best they could, which wasn’t much more than applying tourniquets, giving wounds a quick cleaning, applying sulfa and/or the new wonder drug penicillin (the U.S. pharmaceutical industry had produced a record-breaking 100 million units of penicillin the previous month28), giving a shot of morphine, and waiting for an opportunity to take the man by litter down to a landing craft that was going back to the mother ship for another load.

  Seaman O’Neill and a beach engineer carried a stretcher to O’Neill’s LCT. When they set the litter down, O’Neill saw that one side of the wounded man’s face was gone. “His eyeball and teeth and jawbone were plainly visible. It looked like one of those medical drawings or a model. I asked him how he was doing. He said he felt OK.”

  O’Neill continued to bear the stretcher until his LCT was jammed with wounded. An Army medic and the cook on the LCT took over. The medic had some blood plasma, but his supply was soon exhausted. As the LCT moved out toward the transport area, where the wounded could be transferred to a hospital ship, O’Neill heard the medic say, “This man’s going to need some plasma or else he isn’t going to make it.”