The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Pvt. Carl Weast was in the area. He heard someone holler “Gas!” Weast put on his mask, but he had cracked the edge of his facepiece and could tell by smell that it was only grass smoke, “so I took my damn gas mask off and threw it away. That’s the last time during the entire war that I ever carried a damn gas mask.”29

  As Colonel Schneider’s HQ group went up the bluff it ran into German prisoners coming down. Schneider told his interpreter, Sergeant Fast, to find out what he could from them. Fast had no training in this sort of thing, but he proved to be a natural at it.

  “I picked the youngest, most timid-looking, lowest-ranking Kraut I could find.” He moved him away from the others and informed the prisoner, “You are going to tell me what I want to know.” Then Fast told the prisoner to relax, “For you the war is over.” Then he made threats: “You have three choices. Tell me nothing at all and I’ll send you over to the Russians. Give me information and if you leave any doubt in my mind that you’re telling the truth I’ll turn you over to my Jewish buddy standing here next to me and he’ll take you behind that bush over there.” (Fast said in his oral history that the Jewish buddy was Herb Epstein, “and he had not shaved for a couple of days, he was big and burly, I remember he had a .45 on his hip and a ranger knife in his boot, and an automatic tommy gun.”)

  “Third, if you tell me what you know and convince me you are telling the truth I’ll send you to America and you will have a good life until the war is won and then you’ll get to go home.”

  Then the first question: “Did you see all the American and British bombers overhead earlier this morning?”

  “Ja,” the prisoner replied. Good, Fast thought, now he is in a yes mood. The prisoner went on to indicate the position of minefields and pointed out hidden fortifications along the bluff. He said there were no German troops in Vierville (which was true) but there were “many” stationed inland, and gave other useful information.30

  Schneider’s HQ group got to the top, as did other rangers to the left and right. What they could see was an open field and a maze of hedgerows. Germans with machine guns were firing from behind the bushes.

  Private Weast was furious. He wanted to know, “Where the hell was this Air Force bombardment that was supposed to blow all this stuff out of there. Hell, I didn’t see a bomb crater nowhere! Nowhere did I see a bomb crater.”31

  • •

  The Army’s official history states, “The penetrations of the beach defenses made between 0800-0900 represented a definite success achieved by determined action in the face of great difficulties.”32

  The penetrations had been made by about 600 men, mainly from C Company, 116th, and the rangers. They had penetrated and made it to the top—but they had no radios, no heavy weapons, no tanks, no supporting artillery, no way to communicate with the Navy. All the exits were still blocked, the beach was still jammed with vehicles that could not move, taking heavy artillery fire. The reserve regiments were not coming ashore.

  The 116th and the rangers were still on their own. They were mixed together. Moving toward the Germans in the hedgerows, encountering fire, moving to outflank the positions, the ad hoc assault groups tended to split up, resulting in progressive loss of control as movement proceeded inland. When Colonel Canham reached the top, shortly after 0900, and set up his CP, he found rangers and 116th elements scattered all through the field ahead, some headed for the coastal road to Vierville, some engaged in firefights with Germans in the bushes.

  The situation was by no means under control. A victory had not yet been won. But there was now a sizable American force on top of the bluff. The battle for Omaha Beach had not gone according to plan, but thanks to men like General Cota, Colonels Schneider and Canham, Captains Raaen and Dawson, and innumerable lieutenants and noncoms, disaster had been averted.

  * * *

  I. Metcalfe commanded the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry. “I first saw him in Vierville, late on D-Day,” Capt. John Raaen commented. “I was extremely impressed with his manner, his attitude, his knowledge. He was KIA shortly after D-Day.” (Maj. Gen. John Raaen to author, March 12, 1993.)

  II. Dawson stayed in the Army. He headed a Special Forces unit in Vietnam, where he made 125 night combat jumps. He retired as a colonel.

  III. Most of the men who got to the top that morning tended to move straight inland to their assembly point at Vierville. Had more of them done as Dawson did, the 1st and 29th divisions and supporting units would have gotten off the beach much sooner.

  23

  CATASTROPHE CONTAINED

  Easy Red Sector, Omaha Beach

  “OMAHA BEACH,” General Bradley wrote three decades after D-Day, “was a nightmare. Even now it brings pain to recall what happened there on June 6, 1944. I have returned many times to honor the valiant men who died on that beach. They should never be forgotten. Nor should those who lived to carry the day by the slimmest of margins. Every man who set foot on Omaha Beach that day was a hero.”1

  Bradley’s command post was a twenty-by-ten-foot steel cabin built for him on the deck of the cruiser USS Augusta. The walls were dominated by Michelin motoring maps of Normandy. There was a plotting table in the center of the room, with clerks at typewriters along one side. Bradley was seldom there; he spent most of the morning on the bridge, standing beside Adm. Alan G. Kirk, the Western Naval Task Force commander. Bradley had cotton in his ears to muffle the blast of Augusta’s guns, binoculars to his eyes to observe the shore.2

  For Bradley, it was “a time of grave personal anxiety and frustration.” He couldn’t see much except smoke and explosions. He was getting no reports from his immediate subordinate, Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow, commander of V Corps (1st and 29th divisions), no news from the beach, only scattered bits of information from landing-craft skippers returning to the transport area for another load, and they were muttering words like “disaster,” “terrible casualties,” and “chaos.”

  “I gained the impression,” Bradley later wrote, “that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe, that there was little hope we could force the beach. Privately, I considered evacuating the beachhead. . . . I agonized over the withdrawal decision, praying that our men could hang on.”3

  Those were the thoughts of a desperate man faced with two apparently hopeless options. At 0930, with the tide rushing in to fully cover all the obstacles, and with hundreds of landing craft circling offshore, while the congestion on the beach was still so bad that all landings were still suspended, sending in the follow-up waves as reinforcements according to the planning schedule would only add to the problem—but not sending them in would leave the forces already ashore isolated and vulnerable to a counterattack.

  Bradley’s private thoughts notwithstanding, as for retreat, “It would have been impossible to have brought these people back,” as General Eisenhower flatly and rightly declared.4 With almost no radios functioning, there was no way to recall the men from the 116th and 16th regiments and the rangers who were already—although unknown to Bradley or any other senior officer—making their way up the bluff. The men at the shingle could have been ordered to fall back to the beach for withdrawal, but if they had obeyed they would have been slaughtered—Omaha Beach was one of the few battlegrounds in history in which the greater danger lay to the rear. In any case, the landing craft ashore were kaput. Those offshore were jammed with men and vehicles.

  Withdrawal was not an option. Nor was the alternative that Bradley played with in his mind, sending follow-up waves to Utah or the British beaches, not just because that might well have meant sacrificing the men ashore at Omaha Beach but even more because it would have left a gap of some sixty kilometers between Utah and Gold beaches, which would have jeopardized the invasion as a whole.

  As head of the U.S. First Army, Bradley had more than a quarter of a million men under his immediate command. But standing on the bridge of Augusta, he was a helpless observer, desperate for information. On the beaches the plans could be modified or abandoned as ci
rcumstances demanded; on the Augusta, Bradley was stuck with the overall strategic plan.

  On the amphibious command ship USS Ancon, General Gerow had his command post. For the first three hours of the assault he was as blind as Bradley. He sent the assistant chief of staff of V Corps, Col. Benjamin Talley, in a DUKW to cruise offshore and report on the battle. Talley found that even from 500 meters he couldn’t see much. It was obvious that the beaches were jammed, that enemy artillery and machine-gun fire was effective, and that the exits had not been opened. He could not see up the bluff because of the smoke, so he was unaware of the progress of individuals and small units who had managed to reach high ground. Talley was also unaware of the 0830 order from the 7th Naval Beach Battalion commander to suspend landings, so he was disturbed by the failure of landing craft to go ashore. At 0930 he informed Gerow that the LCTs were milling around offshore like “a stampeded herd of cattle.”5

  At 0945 Gerow made his initial report to First Army. It was sketchy and alarming: “Obstacles mined, progress slow. 1st Battalion, 116th, reported 0748 being held up by machine-gun fire—two LCTs knocked out by artillery fire. DD tanks for Fox Green swamped.”6

  Five minutes later, Maj. Gen. Clarence Huebner, commanding the 1st Division, received a radio report from the beach: “There are too many vehicles on the beach; send combat troops. 30 LCTs waiting offshore; cannot come in because of shelling. Troops dug in on beaches, still under heavy fire.”7 Huebner responded by ordering the 18th Regiment to land at once on Easy Red—but only one battalion was loaded in LCVPs; the other two had to be transshipped from their LCIs to LCVPs, and in any case the prohibition on further landings was still in effect.

  Bradley sent his aide, Maj. Chester Hansen, and Admiral Kirk’s gunnery officer, Capt. Joseph Wellings, in a torpedo boat to the beach to report, but all he got back was a message from Hansen: “It is difficult to make sense from what is going on.”8

  From the generals’ point of view, disaster loomed, a disaster they could do nothing about. The generals were irrelevant to the battle.

  • •

  On Omaha, the situation was so bad that the evacuation of the wounded was toward the enemy. This may have been unique in military history. The few aid posts that had been set up were at the shingle seawall. Medics took great risks to drag wounded from the beach to the aid posts. There was little that could be done for them beyond bandaging, splinting, giving morphine and plasma (if the medics had any supplies). The medical units landed off schedule and on the wrong beach sectors, often without their equipment. The 116th lost its entire regimental supply of plasma in two LCIs sunk off the beach.

  Nevertheless, as a staff officer of the 116th recalled, “First-aid men of all units were the most active members of the group that huddled against the seawall. With the limited facilities available to them, they did not hesitate to treat the most severe casualties. Gaping head and belly wounds were bandaged with rapid efficiency.”9

  The situation looked worse to the medical teams than it did even to the generals offshore. Maj. Charles Tegtmeyer, regimental surgeon of the 16th, who landed at 0815, described what he saw: “Face downward, as far as eyes could see in either direction were the huddled bodies of men living, wounded and dead, as tightly packed together as a layer of cigars in a box. . . . Everywhere, the frantic cry, ‘Medics, hey, Medics,’ could be heard above the horrible din.”

  Tegtmeyer’s medics, now wading, now stumbling over prone men, bandaged and splinted wounded as they came upon them, then dragged them to the shelter of the shingle. “I examined scores as I went,” Tegtmeyer declared, “telling the men who to dress and who not to bother with.” In many cases it was simply hopeless. Tegtmeyer reported a soldier with one leg traumatically amputated and multiple compound fractures of the other. “He was conscious and cheerful,” Tegtmeyer noted, “but his only hope was rapid evacuation, and at this time evacuation did not exist. An hour later he was dead.”10

  Confusion in the planned landing sequence compounded the chaos. The first men of the 61st Medical Battalion to wade ashore on Easy Red were members of the headquarters detachment. They landed with typewriters, files, and office supplies on a beach strewn with dead and wounded. They abandoned their typewriters, scavenged for medical equipment among the debris, and went to work on the casualties around them. Forward emergency surgery never got started on Omaha that day; of the twelve surgical teams attached to the 60th and 61st Medical battalions, only eight reached shore and none of them had proper operating equipment. Like the clerks from the HQ detachment, the surgeons pitched in to give first aid.11

  • •

  At 0950, General Huebner gave the order for the 18th Regiment of the 1st Division to go ashore at Easy Red, the largest of the eight designated sectors. It lay just to the east of the middle of Omaha Beach. The right flank of Easy Red was the dividing line between the 29th and 1st divisions. Two first-wave companies of the 16th Regiment were supposed to have landed on Easy Red, with three additional companies coming in on the second wave.

  But the mislandings were such that what was to have been the most heavily attacked sector was actually the loneliest—only parts of one company came ashore there in the first hour, parts of two others in the next three hours. But at 1000, with the 1st Battalion of the 18th coming in and the 115th Regiment of 29th Division mislanding right on top of the 18th, it became the most crowded and bloodiest of all the beach sectors.

  At 1000, the tide was nearly at its highest mark. All the obstacles were covered. The skippers on the larger landing craft were afraid to try to go ashore, and they had orders from the Navy Beach Battalion to stay away. But the 18th’s 1st Battalion officers had orders from their CO to go in. There were some fierce arguments between the skippers and the soldiers.

  The stalemate was broken at about 1010 when LCT 30 drove at full speed through the obstacles, all weapons firing. LCT 30 continued the fire after touchdown. At about the same time, LCI 544 rammed through the obstacles, firing on machine-gun nests in a fortified house. These exploits demonstrated that the obstacles could be breached and gave courage to other skippers, who began to give in to the demands of the Army officers and move in.12

  The destroyers helped immeasurably in this attack. As noted, they sailed in close and pounded the enemy—when they could spot him. Harding’s action report noted, “At 1050 observed enemy pillbox which was firing on our troops down draw north of Colleville, thereby delaying operations on the beach. Opened fire on pillbox and demolished it, expending 30 rounds.”13

  Adm. Charles Cooke, along with Maj. Gen. Thomas Handy of General Marshall’s staff at the War Department, were on Harding. Cooke recorded that as Harding closed the beach, “We saw an LCT dash in opposite a draw firing her guns at some German position at Colleville. The German batteries were hidden in the shrubbery, had the advantage, and the LCT was badly shot up.”14

  So were many others. The Navy report for the transport group carrying the 18th ashore listed twenty-two LCVPs, two LCIs, and four LCTs as lost at the beach, either to mined obstacles or to enemy artillery fire.

  Sgt. Hyman Haas was lucky. LCTs to the right and left of his were burning. “The machine-gun fire was right into them. Mortars were blowing around them. Artillery pieces were blowing beside them. But we had landed in a spot that seemed to be immune.”

  Haas commanded a half-track (M-15). When he drove off the LCT, “the water reached up to my neck. My driver, Bill Hendrix, had his head just above water. We kept going. Some screwball gave a rebel yell. Sgt. Chester Gutowsky looked at him and growled, ‘You schmuck!! Why don’t you shut up?’ ”

  When Haas reached shore, “I was breathing very heavily with excitement, eyes darting in all directions, looking, waiting, seeing. It was quite bewildering.” He started thinking straight immediately. Haas ordered Hendrix to drive back into the water, then to turn the M-15 into firing position. He began to blaze away with his 37mm gun, aiming at a pillbox on the west side of the E-1 exit. The first three rounds were sho
rt. He adjusted his range setter, and “the next ten shots went directly into the porthole of the pillbox.”

  (Later that day, Haas drove up to the pillbox. “There, lying on the parapet, was a German officer, bleeding from the mouth, obviously in his last moments of life, being held by another wounded German. McNeil came running over. He says, ‘Haas, that’s your pillbox.’ It took my breath away. It’s one thing to fire impersonal, but I was responsible for that dying German officer and the wounded men in there. I felt awful and shocked at the sight.”15)

  With that kind of support, the 18th got ashore, but not without loss and not without confusion, a confusion compounded by the mislanding of the 115th Regiment of the 29th Division, which was supposed to land on Dog Red but instead came in starting at 1030 on Easy Red, right on top of the 18th. This caused a horrendous mix-up of men and units, and imposed delays, but it put a lot of firepower on Easy Red, where it was badly needed.

  As the 18th came ashore, it appeared to the officers that no progress at all had been made. The regimental action report declared, “The beach shingle was full of tractors, tanks, vehicles, bulldozers, and troops—the high ground was still held by Germans who had all troops on the beach pinned down—the beach was still under heavy fire from enemy small arms, mortars, and artillery.”16

  Capt. (later Maj. Gen.) Al Smith was executive officer, 1st Battalion, 16th Regiment. He had landed on Easy Red at 0745. “About 500 yards offshore I began to realize we were in trouble,” he recalled. “The nearer we got to the beachline, the more certain I was that the landing was a disaster. Dead and wounded from the first waves were everywhere. There was little or no firing from our troops. On the other hand, German machine guns, mortars, and 88s were laying down some of the heaviest fire I’d ever experienced.”

  About half of Smith’s battalion made it to the defilade afforded by the shingle embankment. Smith made contact with Brig. Gen. Willard Wyman, the assistant division commander. Wyman asked if the men were advancing by fire and movement, as taught at the Infantry School.