The Men of World War II

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  • •

  The German defenders had inflicted very heavy casualties on the assaulting force at Omaha Beach. V Corps suffered 2,400 dead, wounded, and missing in putting 34,000 troops of the 55,000-man assault force ashore. Losses of 7.2 percent in one day are horrendous, but that was five percentage points less than anticipated.24

  • •

  The 352nd Division suffered 1,200 killed, wounded, and missing, or about 20 percent of its total strength. The 29th and 1st divisions had accomplished their basic objective, establishing a foothold, even if they had not driven anywhere near as far inland as they had planned or hoped. The 352nd Division had not accomplished its objective, stopping the assault on the beach.

  • •

  The experiences of Pvt. Franz Gockel of the 352nd provide some vivid images of what the day was like for a German infantryman. At 0830 he had thought the battle won, but the Americans had continued to land. To his left and right, American squads and platoons had bypassed WN 62, then attacked it from the rear, “making it necessary for us to defend ourselves from attack from behind.” At noon, he got a half ration of bread and a mess tin of milk, but no supplies or reinforcements came in. A runner sent to get help was never seen again. The Americans, pressed on and “our resistance became weaker.”

  Gockel was shot through the left hand. The medic who put a bandage on smiled and said it looked like a good Heimatschuss (million-dollar wound). American troops got into the network of trenches and suddenly they were only twenty meters away.

  Gockel grabbed his rifle and ran toward Colleville. On the outskirts he linked up with his company CO and the few survivors from WN 62. The Americans were already in the village.

  The CO ordered Gockel and fifteen other wounded men into a truck for transport to a hospital in Bayeux. The route was blocked. Ruins and rubble covered the crossroads—here was the payoff from the B-17s and battleship bombardment. “Dead cattle lay in the pastures. The supply units had also suffered their share of casualties. Many of them were immobilized.”

  Gockel’s truck came under fire from a strafing RAF fighter plane. He and his comrades jumped out. Those with light wounds proceeded on foot toward Bayeux. En route they commandeered a French farmer’s horse and wagon. In Bayeux they found that the hospital had been evacuated. They were told to proceed to Vire. They found that city badly damaged and still burning from air bombardment. They spent the night in a farmhouse, drinking Calvados.

  Of the twenty men from WN 62, only three escaped un-wounded, and they were taken prisoner. Gockel concluded, “None of my comrades who had survived the invasion continued to believe in victory.”25

  • •

  The German failure at Omaha Beach had many causes. The attempt to defend everywhere had scattered the division in driblets here, droplets there. Furthermore, the CO of the 352nd, General Kraiss, completely misinterpreted Allied intentions. At 0200, when he received reports about paratroopers landing on his left flank between Isigny and Carentan, he thought that the Americans were trying to separate the 352nd from the 709th. At 0310 he ordered his division reserve, called Kampfgruppe Meyer after the CO of the 915th Regiment, to move from its positions south of Bayeux all the way to the Vire estuary. But it was a wild-goose chase; the paratroopers were a handful of 101st men who had been misdropped.

  At 0550 Kraiss realized his error. He told Meyer to halt the Kampfgruppe and await further orders. Within a half hour the Americans began landing at Omaha, but not until 0735 did Kraiss commit reserves to the area, and then he sent only one battalion from the Kampfgruppe. At 0835 he sent the other two battalions against the British 50th Division at Gold Beach. Splitting the 915th in this fashion meant it was nowhere able to strike a telling blow. The battalions were also hours late in arriving at the battle areas, because as they moved they were shot up by Allied fighters and hit by Allied bombers.

  Inadequate intelligence in many cases, and none at all in others, badly hampered Kraiss, but he was as guilty of passing on bad information as he was a victim of receiving it. At 1000 he reported penetrations in the forward positions of the 352nd at Omaha but indicated that they were not dangerous. At 1335 he advised Seventh Army HQ that the American assault had been hurled back into the sea, except at Colleville, which he said was being counterattacked by the 915th. Not until 1800 did he admit that the Americans had infiltrated through the 352nd’s strong points, but even then he claimed that only Colleville was in danger.

  At 1700, Field Marshal Rundstedt demanded that the Allied bridgehead be wiped out that evening. A few minutes later, General Jodl sent out an order from OKW—all available forces should be thrown into the battle. At 1825, Kraiss ordered his last uncommitted unit, the engineer battalion, to move to St.-Laurent and fight as infantry. By the time the engineers got there, it was dark, too late to do anything but dig in and wait for daylight.

  Shortly before midnight, June 6, Kraiss admitted to his corps commander, General Marcks, that the 352nd desperately needed help. “Tomorrow the division will be able to offer the enemy the same determined resistance it did today [but] because of heavy casualties . . . reinforcements must be brought up by the day after tomorrow. Losses of men and material in the resistance nests are total.”

  Marcks replied, “All reserves available to me have already been moved up. Every inch of the ground must be defended to the utmost capacity until new reinforcements can be brought up.”26

  In sum, the fighting power of the 352nd had been frittered away in stubborn defensive action by small groups who were able to delay but not to stop the American advance. Rommel’s insistence on close-up defense of the beach had made the initial assault phase harder for the Americans but at excessive cost for the Germans—and it had not worked. “In that respect,” the Army’s official history states, “V Corps had surmounted a severe crisis, and the success of its hard fight should be measured in other terms than the size of the beachhead.”27

  The 352nd was used up. No reinforcements were immediately available. Those coming to the sound of the guns from the interior of France, whether infantry or panzer, were going to have to run a gauntlet of air and naval gunfire to get there.

  The Atlantic Wall had been cracked at Omaha Beach, and there was nothing behind it in the way of fixed fortifications—except those awful hedgerows.

  • •

  How did V Corps do it? The sheer weight of the assault was one of the deciding factors, but by itself not enough to ensure victory. Pvt. Carl Weast of the rangers has an answer to the question. In his oral history, he was relating a story about his company commander, Capt. George Whittington.

  “He was a hell of a man,” Weast said. “He led people. I recall the time a week or so after D-Day when we shot a cow and cut off some beef and were cooking it over a fire on sticks. Captain Whittington came up and threw a German boot next to the fire and said, ‘I’ll bet some son of a bitch misses that.’ We looked at the boot. The German’s leg was still inside of it. I’ll bet by God he did miss it.”

  That same day, Weast heard the executive officer of the 5th Ranger Battalion, Maj. Richard Sullivan, criticizing Captain Whittington for unnecessarily exposing himself.

  “Whittington said to Sully, ‘You saw it happen back on that goddamn beach. Now you tell me how the hell you lead men from behind.’ ”

  Weast’s introduction to combat came on D-Day. He fought with the rangers through the next eleven months. He concluded that the Allied high command had been right to insist that “there be practically no experienced troops in the initial waves that hit that beach, because an experienced infantryman is a terrified infantryman, and they wanted guys like me who were more amazed than they were frozen with fear, because the longer you fight a war the more you figure your number’s coming up tomorrow, and it really gets to be God-awful.”

  Weast made a final point: “In war, the best rank is either private or colonel or better, but those ranks in between, hey, those people have got to be leaders.”28

  At Omaha Beach, t
hey were.

  * * *

  I. Fifty years later, many of those centuries-old hedgerows are gone. As Norman farmers began to acquire tractors after World War II, they needed bigger gaps to get in and out, and bigger fields to work in, so they began knocking down the hedgerows. One of the best places to see hedgerows as the GIs saw them is along the Merderet River west of Ste.-Marie-du-Mont and Ste.-Mère-Église.

  25

  “IT WAS JUST FANTASTIC”

  Afternoon on Omaha Beach

  BY EARLY AFTERNOON a majority of the German pillboxes on the beach and bluff had been put out of action by destroyers, tanks, and infantry, suppressing if not entirely eliminating machine-gun fire on the beach. Sniper fire, however, continued. The Germans made use of the maze of communication trenches and tunnels to reoccupy positions earlier abandoned and resumed firing.

  Worse, artillery from inland and flank positions kept up harassing fire on the beach flat, some of it haphazard, some of it called in by OPs on the bluff. Even the haphazard fire was effective, because the traffic jam remained—it was hardly possible for a shell or mortar fired on the beach flat to miss.

  Capt. Oscar Rich was a spotter for the 5th Field Artillery Battalion. He was on an LCT with his disassembled L-5 plane. He came to Easy Red at 1300. “I’d like to give you first my impression of the beach, say from a hundred yards out till the time we got on the beach,” he said.

  “Looking in both directions you could see trucks burning, tanks burning, piles of I don’t know what burning. Ammunition had been unloaded on the beach. I saw one pile of five-gallon gasoline cans, maybe 500 cans in all. A round hit them. The whole thing just exploded and burned.

  “I’ve never seen so much just pure chaos in my life. But what I expected, yet didn’t see, was anybody in hysterics. People on the beach were very calm. The Seabees were directing traffic and bringing people in and assigning them to areas and showing them which way to go. They were very matter-of-fact about the whole thing. They were directing traffic just like it was the 4th of July parade back home rather than where we were.”

  While the LCT circled offshore, looking for a place to go in, a mortar round hit it in the bow. The skipper, an ensign, nevertheless saw a likely spot and moved in. The beachmaster waved him off. He had forgotten to drop his sea anchor so “we had one heck of a time trying to get off the sandbar, but finally we made it,” Rich said.

  “I felt sorry for this ensign, who was really shook up after taking this round in the bow and forgetting to drop his sea anchor. And he asked me, ‘Lieutenant, do you know anything about running ships?’ and I said, ‘Hell, man, I’ve been running boats all my life.’ Actually, the biggest I’d ever run was a skiff fishing in the river, but he said, ‘You want to run this?’ and I said, ‘I sure as hell do.’

  “I got one of the sailors and told him, ‘Son, you’ve got one job and one job only.’ He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘When we get within 100 yards of the shore, you drop this sea anchor whether I tell you to or not.’ ”

  The LCT went in again. Somehow the sailors managed to drop the bow, even as the craft took another hit in the engine room. Two jeeps ran off. To Rich’s dismay, “They forgot to hook my airplane on and I didn’t have a jeep.” A Seabee came over with a bulldozer, hooked a rope onto the tow bar for the L-5, pulled it onto the beach, unhooked the plane, told Rich he had other work to do, wished him luck, and drove off. “So there I was with an airplane, no mechanic, no help, and no transportation.”

  Rich saw the beachmaster. “He couldn’t have been over twenty-five years old. He had a nice handlebar mustache and he was sitting in a captain’s chair there on the beach, and he had a radio and a half dozen telephones and a bunch of men serving him as runners and he was just keeping everything going. People came up to him and wanted to know this, that, or the other. He never lost his temper. He never got excited. He would just tell them and they’d go away. He was only a lieutenant, but these Army colonels and generals would come up and demand this and demand that and he’d say, ‘I’m sorry, I haven’t got it. You’ll just have to take what you’ve got and go on with it.’ They would shake their heads and go off and leave him.

  “When he’d spot an open space, why, he’d say, ‘Let’s get a craft in there. Let’s get a boat in there. Let’s get that one out of the way. Get a bulldozer over and shove that tank out of the way. Make room for somebody to come in here.’ He kept that beach moving. I have no idea who he was, but the Navy certainly should have been proud of him, because he did a tremendous job.”

  Rich told the beachmaster he needed a jeep to pull his L-5 off the beach. “He said, ‘There’s one over there. There’s nobody in it. Go take it.’ ”

  Rich did, and wove his way through the congestion to the E-1 draw, his plane in tow. Then he drove up the draw. Rich was possibly the first to do so—it had just opened.

  On top, Rich found the apple orchard outside St.-Laurent where he was supposed to be and began to assemble his plane. With no mechanic to help, he was not making much progress. From time to time he would get some help from a GI who could not resist the temptation to tinker with a machine. Sooner or later a noncom or officer would yell at the soldier to get the hell back to the battle and Rich would be on his own again. Not until dark did he get his plane ready to fly.1

  • •

  Rich was lucky. German artillery and mortar fire concentrated on the exits; without spotter planes, the Navy could not locate the sources of the fire. As the afternoon wore on, the shelling got heavier. Adm. Charles Cooke and Maj. Gen. Tom Handy of the War Department, observing the action from the deck of Harding, decided they needed a closer look. They off-loaded onto an LCI, closed the beach, transferred to an LCM, and went in through a gap in the obstacles.

  “The beach was strewed with wrecked landing craft, wrecked tanks, and various other vehicles,” Cooke recalled. “It was also strewed with dead and wounded.”

  Handy went to the right, Cooke to the left. Shells burst all around them, throwing sand in their faces, forcing them to hit the beach, in Cooke’s case inflicting some slight shrapnel wounds. After a couple of hours, they rejoined and decided to get out, because, as Cooke said, “the shelling was getting very much heavier, increasing the casualty toll and it appeared highly desirable to leave.”2

  • •

  Lt. Vince Schlotterbeck of the 5th ESB spent seven hours on an LCT cruising just out of range of the German guns, waiting for an opportunity to go in. Like most others, the skipper had cut loose the barrage balloon—there were no German planes strafing the fleet, and the balloons gave the Germans a target to spot and zero in on. Schlotterbeck spent the time perched atop the landing ramp, watching whatever caught his eye.

  “The underwater obstacles could be seen plainly, since the tide was not all the way in. The wreckage on the beach and in the water was greater than anything I had ever imagined. Tanks were strewn along the beach, some half submerged. We could see that there were only two or three tanks on which we could depend.”

  At 1830, the LCT tried to run in. “We headed for a likely spot but ran onto a sandbar and had to back off because the water was too deep. Just as we cleared, a shell threw up a spray in the exact spot where we had been grounded.” The skipper tried again. He found a gap in the obstacles “but a big ship loaded with ammunition was grounded and burning fiercely. The almost continuous explosions made it too dangerous to land there, so we sought again.” Finally the skipper saw a good spot at Fox Red and turned toward it, but an LCI raced him to the gap, cutting in front of the LCT and causing it to land on another sandbar. This time it was stuck, period.

  “Our engines throbbed at top speed, and our craft seemed ready to disintegrate from vibration. The stern anchor had been dropped and was being pulled in, but instead of pulling us off the anchor just dragged along in the sand. The engines screamed with power, never ceasing.”

  Meanwhile, the LCI that had beat the LCT to the gap had lowered its ramps and men were wading into shor
e. “Suddenly, a shell burst in their midst and we never saw any of them again. Then the Germans sent a shell into the front of the craft, one in the middle, and one in the rear.”

  Schlotterbeck’s LCT finally floated free on the rising tide. The officers on the craft held a conference to decide whether to wait until after midnight, when the tide would be full, or to continue to attempt to get ashore.

  “Everyone was in favor of going in as soon as possible because we did not like the idea of hitting the beach after dark, so we kept on trying. And at about 2000 we found the right spot.” Schlotterbeck waded ashore.

  “My mind had already been made up to the fact that a horrible sight would greet me, and it is a good thing that I had prepared myself because the number of casualties was appalling. The number of dead was very great, but what struck us hardest was the boys who had been wounded and were trying to hitch rides back to the transports. Wounded were walking along the beach trying to pick up a ride. Those who were more severely wounded came in pairs, supporting each other, when they rightfully should have been stretcher cases.”

  Schlotterbeck had to walk on dead bodies to proceed up the bluff. “At one point I was ready to walk on a body face up when the soldier slowly opened his eyes and I almost twisted myself out of shape to avoid him. Luckily, I missed him.”3

  Pvt. M. C. Marquis of the 115th Regiment had his own unnerving experience. On his LCVP going in that afternoon, he had of all things exchanged shoes with Corporal Terry: “We thought we got a better fit.” Going up the bluff, Terry was in front of Marquis. He stepped on a mine. It split open his foot and shoe. “As I walked by,” Marquis reported, “I said, ‘So long, Terry.’ I still wonder if he made it to the hospital.”

  As Marquis climbed, a dozen German prisoners guarded by a GI descended. “These were the first Germans we saw. They didn’t look so tough.”