The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  The cliff was sheer, about thirty meters high, just to the west of the Vierville draw. At its base men were out of sight of German machine gunners but still vulnerable to mortar fire and to grenades dropped over the edge by Germans on top. They were concussion grenades, universally called “potato mashers” by the GIs because of their shape. As they came down, Pvt. Michael Gargas called out, “Watch out fellows! Here comes another mashed potato!”6

  Sergeant Scribner’s boat was hit three times by artillery fire. The first shell tore the ramp completely off the boat, killing the men in front and covering the others with blood. The second hit the port side. Scribner started to climb over the rear starboard side when he noticed a 60mm mortar lying on the bottom of the craft. He stopped to pick it up when the third shell tore out the starboard side. Somehow he made it into the water.

  “I was carrying a radio, my rifle, my grenades, my extra ammunition, my bedroll, all my gear, and I started sinking in the Channel. I didn’t think I was ever going to stop going down.”

  Scribner made it to the shore—he cannot recall how—and tried to run across the beach. “I remember dropping three different times. Each time I did, machine guns burst in front of my face in the sand. I didn’t stop because I knew what was coming; I dropped because I was so tired.” When he made it to the base of the cliff, “I looked back, and I saw Walter Geldon lying out on the beach with his hand raised up asking for help. Walter never made it. He died on his third wedding anniversary.”7

  Lt. Sidney Salomon, leading 2nd Platoon of C Company, was first off his boat. He went to the right into chest-deep water as automatic weapons and rifle fire sprayed the debarking rangers. The second man off, Sgt. Oliver Reed, was hit. Salomon reached over and pulled him from under the ramp just as the craft surged forward on a wave. He told Reed to make it the best he could and started wading toward the shore. “By this time, the Germans had zeroed in on the ramp. Ranger after ranger was hit by small-arms fire as they jumped into the water, and in addition mortar shells landed around the craft, making geysers of water.”

  Salomon made the base of the cliff. He looked back. “Bodies lay still, where they had fallen, trickles of blood reddening the sand. Some of the wounded were crawling as best they could, some with a look of despair and bewilderment on their tortured and painracked faces. Others tried to get back on their feet, only to be hit again by enemy fire. Bodies rolled back and forth at the water’s edge, the English Channel almost laughing as it showed its might over man and played with the bodies as a cat would with a mouse.”8

  Of the sixty-eight rangers in Company C, nineteen were dead, eighteen wounded. Only thirty-one men made it to the base of the cliff. The company had yet to fire a shot.9 Its experience in the first few minutes on French soil had been nearly as disastrous as that of A Company, 116th.

  But the rangers had some advantages. Despite the grenades and mortar fire, they were more secure at the base of the cliff than the survivors of A Company were at the seawall on the other side of the Vierville draw. Their company commander, Capt. Ralph Goranson, along with two platoon leaders, Lts. William Moody and Sidney Salomon, were with them to provide leadership. And they were elite troops, brought to a fever pitch for this moment. For example, Sergeant Scribner recalled Sgt. “Duke” Golas: “He had about half his head blown away by a grenade and he was still standing at the bottom of the cliff firing his weapon, hollering at the Krauts up above to come out and fight.”10

  The officers, meanwhile, realized the company was alone, that the Vierville draw was not only not opened but was bristling with German defenders, and that their only alternative—other than cowering at the base of the cliff and getting killed—was to climb the cliff. Fortunately, they had been through cliff-climbing training and had some special equipment for the task.

  Lieutenants Moody and Salomon and Sgts. Julius Belcher and Richard Garrett moved to their right until they found a crevice in the cliff. Using their bayonets for successive handholds, pulling each other along, they made it to the top of the crest. There Moody attached some toggle ropes to stakes in a minefield and dropped them to the base of the cliff, enabling the remainder of the company to monkey-walk them to the top. By 0730 Company C of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, or what was left of it, was on the crest. According to the official Army history, it “was probably the first assault unit to reach the high ground.”11

  On the cliff, the rangers saw what they always called thereafter a fortified house. Actually, it was not fortified, although it might as well have been, as it was a typical Norman stone farmhouse. It overlooked the draw and was surrounded by a maze of communications trenches. Behind the house the Germans had numerous Tobruks and other types of pillboxes, plus an extensive trench system. From the house, the Germans were firing on the rangers.

  C Company’s mission was to move west along the high ground, but Captain Goranson decided to first of all attack the house and clean out the trenches behind it. Lieutenant Moody led a patrol against the house. He kicked in the door and killed the officer in charge, then began a search through the trenches. Moody was killed by a bullet through his forehead. Lieutenant Salomon took command of the patrol. It moved down the trenches using white phosphorus grenades to clear out pillboxes.

  Sgts. George Morrow and Julius Belcher spotted a machine gun that was enfilading the western end of Omaha Beach, one of those guns that had killed so many rangers an hour earlier. It was firing continuously down at the beach again, as the follow-up waves attempted to get across the sand. In a pitiless rage, Belcher ran toward the position, oblivious of his own safety. He kicked in the door of the pillbox and threw in a white phosphorus grenade. As the phosphorus began to burn on their skins, the Germans abandoned their gun and ran out the door, screaming in agony. Belcher shot them down as they emerged.12

  Not everyone was brave. Lieutenant Heaney recalled “an officer whose name I will not use. He had been one of the most physically active officers all during training. We all felt that he would be an outstanding combat soldier. But I found this officer in the bottom of a slit trench crying like a baby and totally unable to continue. Sergeant White assigned one of his men to bring him back to the beach for evacuation and this was the last I ever heard of him.”13

  Captain Goranson meanwhile had seen a section of men from the 116th Regiment landing just below the cliff (it was a kilometer off course). He sent a ranger down to guide them to the top, providing C Company with its first reinforcements. The Germans were constantly reinforcing, bringing men in from the draw and the village via their communications trenches. There were far more German than American reinforcements. At Utah, the paratroopers prevented the Germans from sending reinforcements forward to the beach; at Omaha there were no paratroopers, and the Germans had freedom of movement behind the beach.

  An all-day firefight ensued on the cliff to the west of the Vierville draw. Goranson was not strong enough to dislodge the Germans; his men would clear out a trench, move on, only to have fresh German troops reoccupy the position. Lieutenant Salomon was leading a “platoon” of three men. He described a typical action: “We proceeded further down the trench, around a curve. We came upon a German mortar crew in a fixed gun position. Some more grenades, more rifle and tommy-gun fire, as we continued through the trenches.”14 To Sergeant Scribner, it seemed that the day would never end.

  Lieutenant Salomon despaired. Looking down on the beach below, he saw chaos. “Up until noon D-Day,” he later commented, “I thought the invasion was a failure and I wondered if we could make a successful withdrawal and try the invasion some time again in the near future.”15

  For most of the rangers this was the first combat experience. It was a mark of how well they had been trained, and a textbook example of what training can accomplish, that they completely outfought the Germans in their fortified positions. They did so not by fighting regardless of loss but by using basic tactics carried out with enthusiasm balanced by proper caution. The next day a U.S. Army Quartermaster burial party
reported the result: there were sixty-nine German dead in and around the fortified house and trench system, two American.

  For C Company of the rangers and the section from the 116th, this was an isolated action. They were the only Americans on the west side of the Vierville draw. They were completely out of touch because all of the radios had been lost. They did get some help from the Navy, not always welcome. Unaware that the rangers were on the cliff, destroyers fired some 20mm and 5-inch guns on the position. Sergeant Scribner saw a 5-inch shell score a direct hit on a pillbox; he was amazed that it only “put in a dent about six inches deep. Those Germans really knew how to build their emplacements.”

  Sgt. William Lindsay was in a concrete pillbox when it received two direct hits from 5-inch shells. He lost a tooth and was knocked silly by the concussion. Three times during the day he had to be stopped by fellow rangers from walking off the cliff. That evening, he confronted Colonel Taylor of the 116th. Red-faced, cursing, he accused Taylor of stealing his rifle. All the while he had the rifle slung over his shoulder.16 The incident gave the rangers who saw it a laugh (after Lindsay recovered his senses, as he did in a few hours) and a certain sympathy for the Germans caught inside their casemates when 14-inch shells from the battleships exploded against them.

  “I was worried as all hell on top of the cliff,” Sgt. Charles Semchuck later said about the day, “just waiting for the Jerries to push us back into the Channel. They had the chance to do it. D-Day night, when we made contact with our A and B companies, my spirits and morale rose a hundred percent. . . . I felt like doing handsprings for I was so happy. I knew then that the Jerries had muffed their one chance for victory. I never again want to be in another D-Day.” Sergeant Lutz echoed that last sentiment: “Brother, I say this, no more D-Days for me if I can help it!”17

  C Company had not completed its mission. Indeed, it could be said it never even got started on its mission. Its action was minor in scale, a small-unit engagement of inconsequential size when measured by the number of men involved. Yet it was critical. By occupying the Germans on the west side of the Vierville draw and on the cliff, the rangers diverted some of the machine-gun fire that otherwise would have added to the carnage on the beach. By no means did the rangers do it alone, but without them the passage up the Vierville draw would have been, at best, even more costly; at worst, no Americans would have gotten up that draw on D-Day.

  • •

  Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers came in at 0740 on Dog Green; the 5th Ranger Battalion came in at 0750 on Dog White, to the east of the mouth of the Vierville draw. There they became, in effect, a part of the 116th Infantry, to the point that many of the ad hoc fighting units formed on the beach were composed of a mix of rangers and infantry from the 116th. Thus the experience of the rangers on the east side of the draw is best understood when told together with that of the 116th drive to the top of the bluff, as related in the following chapter.

  • •

  The Allied bombardment of Pointe-du-Hoc had begun weeks before D-Day. Heavy bombers from the U.S. Eighth Air Force and British Bomber Command had repeatedly plastered the area, with a climax coming before dawn on June 6. Then the battleship Texas took up the action, sending dozens of 14-inch shells into the position. Altogether, Pointe-du-Hoc got hit by more than ten kilotons of high explosives, the equivalent of the explosive power of the atomic bomb used at Hiroshima. Texas lifted her fire at 0630, the moment the rangers were scheduled to touch down.

  Colonel Rudder was in the lead boat. He was not supposed to be there. Lt. Gen. Clarence Huebner, CO of the 1st Division and in overall command at Omaha Beach, had forbidden Rudder to lead companies D, E, and F of the 2nd Rangers into Pointe-du-Hoc, saying, “We’re not going to risk getting you knocked out in the first round.”

  “I’m sorry to have to disobey you, sir,” Rudder had replied, “but if I don’t take it, it may not go.”18, II

  The rangers were in landing craft assault (LCA) boats manned by British seamen (the rangers had trained with British commandos and were therefore accustomed to working with British sailors). The LCA was built in England on the basic design of Andrew Higgins’s boat, but the British added some light armor to the sides and gunwales. That made the LCA slower and heavier—the British were sacrificing mobility to increase security—which meant that the LCA rode lower in the water than the LCVP.

  On D-Day morning, all the LCAs carrying the rangers took on water as spray washed over the sides. One of the ten boats swamped shortly after leaving the transport area, taking the CO of D Company and twenty men with it (they were picked up by an LCT a few hours later. “Give us some dry clothes, weapons and ammunition, and get us back in to the Pointe. We gotta get back!” Capt. “Duke” Slater said as he came out of the water. But his men were so numb from the cold water that the ship’s physician ordered them back to England.19) One of the two supply boats bringing in ammunition and other gear also swamped; the other supply boat had to jettison more than half its load to stay afloat.

  That was but the beginning of the foul-ups. At 0630, as Rudder’s lead LCA approached the beach, he saw with dismay that the coxswain was headed toward Pointe-de-la-Percée, about halfway between the Vierville draw and Pointe-du-Hoc. After some argument, Rudder persuaded the coxswain to turn right to the objective. The flotilla had to fight the tidal current (the cause of the drift to the left) and proceeded only slowly parallel to the coast.

  The error was costly. It caused the rangers to be thirty-five minutes late in touching down, which gave the German defenders time to recover from the bombardment, climb out of their dugouts, and man their positions. It also caused the flotilla to run a gauntlet of fire from German guns along four kilometers of coastline. One of the four DUKWs was sunk by a 20mm shell. Sgt. Frank South, a nineteen-year-old medic, recalled, “We were getting a lot of machine-gun fire from our left flank, alongside the cliff, and we could not, for the life of us, locate the fire.”20 Lt. James Eikner, Rudder’s communications officer, remembered “bailing water with our helmets, dodging bullets, and vomiting all at the same time.”21

  USS Satterlee and HMS Talybont, destroyers, saw what was happening and came in close to fire with all guns at the Germans. That helped to drive some of the Germans back from the edge of the cliff. D Company had been scheduled to land on the west side of the point, but because of the error in navigation Rudder signaled by hand that the two LCAs carrying the remaining D Company troops join the other seven and land side by side along the east side.

  Lt. George Kerchner, a platoon leader in D Company, recalled that when his LCA made its turn to head into the beach, “My thought was that this whole thing is a big mistake, that none of us were ever going to get up that cliff.” But then the destroyers started firing and drove some of the Germans back from the edge of the cliff. Forty-eight years later, then retired Colonel Kerchner commented, “Some day I would love to meet up with somebody from Satterlee so I can shake his hand and thank him.”22

  The beach at Pointe-du-Hoc was only ten meters in width as the flotilla approached, and shrinking rapidly as the tide was coming in (at high tide there would be virtually no beach). There was no sand, only shingle. The bombardment from air and sea had brought huge chunks of the clay soil from the point tumbling down, making the rocks slippery but also providing an eight-meter buildup at the base of the cliff that gave the rangers something of a head start in climbing the forty-meter cliff.

  The rangers had a number of ingenious devices to help them get to the top. One was twenty-five-meter extension ladders mounted in the DUKWs, provided by the London Fire Department. But one DUKW was already sunk, and the other three could not get a footing on the shingle, which was covered with wet clay and thus rather like greased ball bearings. Only one ladder was extended.

  Sgt. William Stivison climbed to the top to fire his machine gun. He was swaying back and forth like a metronome, German tracers whipping about him. Lt. Elmer “Dutch” Vermeer described the scene: “The ladder was swayi
ng at about a forty-five-degree angle—both ways. Stivison would fire short bursts as he passed over the cliff at the top of the arch, but the DUWK floundered so badly that they had to bring the fire ladder back down.”23

  The basic method of climbing was by rope. Each LCA carried three pairs of rocket guns, firing steel grapnels which pulled up either plain three-quarter-inch ropes, toggle ropes, or rope ladders. The rockets were fired just before touchdown. Grapnels with attached ropes were an ancient technique for scaling a wall or cliff, tried and proven. But in this case, the ropes had been soaked by the spray and in many cases were too heavy. Rangers watched with sinking hearts as the grapnels arched in toward the cliff, only to fall short from the weight of the ropes. Still, at least one grapnel and rope from each LCA made it; the grapnels grabbed the earth, and the dangling ropes provided a way to climb the cliff.

  To get to the ropes, the rangers had to disembark and cross the narrow strip of beach to the base of the cliff. To get there, the rangers had two problems to overcome. The first was a German machine gun on the rangers’ left flank, firing across the beach. It killed or wounded fifteen men as it swept bullets back and forth across the beach.

  Colonel Rudder was one of the first to make it to the beach. With him was Col. Travis Trevor, a British commando who had assisted in the training of the rangers. He began walking the beach, giving encouragement. Rudder described him as “a great big [six feet four inches], black-haired son of a gun—one of those staunch Britishers.” Lieutenant Vermeer yelled at him, “How in the world can you do that when you are being fired at?”

  “I take two short steps and three long ones,” Trevor replied, “and they always miss me.” Just then a bullet hit him in the helmet and drove him to the ground. He got up and shook his fist at the machine gunner, hollering, “You dirty son of a bitch.” After that, Vermeer noted, “He crawled around like the rest of us.”24