The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Warming to the subject, Ellery went on: “I didn’t see any generals in my area of the beach, but I did see a captain and two lieutenants who demonstrated courage beyond belief as they struggled to bring order to the chaos around them.” Those officers managed to get some men organized and moving up the bluff. One of the lieutenants had a broken arm that hung limply at his side, but he led a group of seven to the top, even though he got hit again on the way. Another lieutenant carried one of his wounded men thirty meters before getting hit himself.

  “When you talk about combat leadership under fire on the beach at Normandy,” Ellery concluded, “I don’t see how the credit can go to anyone other than the company-grade officers and senior NCOs who led the way. It is good to be reminded that there are such men, that there always have been and always will be. We sometimes forget, I think, that you can manufacture weapons, and you can purchase ammunition, but you can’t buy valor and you can’t pull heroes off an assembly line.”18

  • •

  The truth of Ellery’s strongly felt opinion is obvious, but it is not the whole truth nor is it fair to Colonel Taylor (forty-seven-year-old men do not lead twenty-year-old men up steep bluffs) or to General Cota. Nor is it fair to the assembly line. It was the assembly line that had gotten the 16th Regiment and all the others across the Atlantic ocean, across the English Channel, and to the Normandy beach with weapons in their hands. Courage and bold leadership had taken over at that point and put small groups of infantry on top of the bluff, but without support they were not going to do much damage to the Germans or even stay there long. They had to have reinforcements, and not just infantry reinforcements.

  In a way, the men on the top were in a position similar to World War I infantry who led the way through no-man’s-land in frontal assaults. They had penetrated the enemy trench system, but as with their fathers in World War I, the follow-up waves were taking machine-gun fire from the flanks while enemy artillery pounded them from the rear. The men in front were isolated.

  This was where the incredible production feats of American industry came into play. The larger landing craft, the LCMs and LCTs and LSTs and Rhino barges, were, by 0830 or so, bringing in a staggering quantity of armed and armored vehicles. The 16th Regiment at Omaha already had lost more vehicles in the water and on the beach, all of them brought from across the Atlantic, than the entire German 352nd Division ever dreamed existed. And there were almost uncountable numbers of other vehicles waiting an opportunity to land.

  But at 0830 all those tanks, DUKWs, half-tracks, self-propelled artillery, trucks, and jeeps were more of a problem than a solution, and it was getting worse, because as the tide moved toward its high-water mark the beach area kept shrinking. At this point General Bradley contemplated sending follow-up waves over to the British beaches, because until someone could open the draws so the vehicles could exit the beach and get up to the road net on the high ground, the vehicles caught in the traffic jam on the beach were just targets, not weapons.

  That someone was spelled i-n-f-a-n-t-r-y.

  19

  TRAFFIC JAM

  Tanks, Artillery, and Engineers at Omaha

  IN NORTH AFRICA in 1943 General Eisenhower had reprimanded a general officer who had built an elaborate, bombproof underground HQ for himself, where he stayed during the Kasserine Pass battle. Eisenhower told him to go on a front-line inspection tour and explained to the reluctant warrior the simplest truth of war: “Generals are expendable just as is any other item in an army.”1

  War is waste. Men and equipment—and generals—are expendable so long as their destruction or death contributes to the ultimate goal of victory. At Omaha Beach, they were expended in fearful numbers. Hundreds of young men and boys, trained at enormous expense, were killed, many—perhaps most—of them before they could fire one shot. Equipment losses were staggering. Hundreds of tanks, trucks, self-propelled artillery, jeeps, and landing craft of all types went to the bottom or were destroyed on the beach by German artillery. Thousands of radios, rifles, machine guns, ammunition boxes, K and D rations, BARs, bazookas, flamethrowers, gas masks, hand grenades, and other matériel were destroyed, abandoned, or sunk.

  The equipment had made a long journey, from factories in California, Illinois, Michigan, and the Deep South to East Coast ports, then across the Atlantic to England, by truck or rail to Portsmouth, finally across the Channel, only to go to the Channel bottom off Omaha Beach. Some of those vehicles still rest there today. Aside from the German gunners, the major culprits were the runnels, deep trenches just inside the shallow sandbars, and the mined obstacles, which at high water took a ghastly toll.

  • •

  The first vehicles on Omaha Beach were Sherman tanks. They arrived at H-Hour minus thirty seconds, in Lt. Dean Rockwell’s flotilla. The LCTs hit a sandbar fifteen meters or so off the shoreline, where they dropped their ramps and the tanks drove off. Those coming off Rockwell’s LCT dipped into the runnel, gunned their waterproofed engines, and climbed toward the beach.

  As the tanks went clanking and grinding down the ramp, a German 88mm gun that was enfilading the beach took them under fire. As Rockwell retracted, he noticed two of the tanks get hit by 88 shells. One of them was burning. The following two, and others from the battalion, stayed offshore, about half under water, and commenced firing their machine guns and 75mm cannons.2

  Not all the tanks got that far. Ens. F. S. White, skipper of LCT 713, later reported to Rockwell: “The ramp was again lowered, and the first tank was launched. The water was much deeper than expected, and as the tank went off the ramp it went to the bottom and settled. The tank commander gave the order to abandon tank and the entire crew was brought back to the ship by means of a heaving line thrown from the ship.” Ensign White retracted, moved 100 meters east, and beached a second time. The other three tanks made it to the water’s edge even as LCT 713 took a direct hit.3

  Pvt. J. C. Friedman was a tank driver in the 747th Tank Battalion. His LCT came in on the third wave. Through his periscope he could see “tanks, half-tracks, jeeps, and trucks being blown up by land mines. The noise of gunfire and gun powder as well as the smell of death seemed to be all around us. Everyone in my tank was praying. I kept thinking, Is this the end of me? Constant shelling and shrapnel flying off the tank seemed to indicate an unleashing of the powers of hell. I wondered if all this was worth the lives taken and if we would see the next day.”4

  Col. John Upham commanded the 743rd Tank Battalion. It went in on the heels of the first wave. He stayed a few hundred meters offshore, directing his tanks by radio. When his LCT went in at 0800, he jumped over the side and waded ashore to join his tanks. Still on foot, he began to direct their fire. A rifle bullet tore through his right shoulder but he refused medical attention. He came upon Pvt. Charles Leveque and Cpl. William Beckett, who had abandoned their tank after a track had been knocked off. Upham, his right arm dangling uselessly, directed them to the seawall. Beckett commented, “You couldn’t get the colonel excited—not even then.”5

  Sgt. Paul Radzom was excited. He was in command of a half-track equipped with multibarreled .50-caliber machine guns. As his LCT approached the shore, machine-gun rounds started bouncing off the side. The ramp went down and “out we go. We were not supposed to be in more than eight feet of water. They dumped us off in fifteen feet. Our track didn’t go anywhere but down. I had the boys elevate that barrel straight up in the air, as high as it would go. There was about six inches of that barrel up above the water, when the swells weren’t hitting it. I lost everything including my helmet.

  “I swam back and got back on that ramp and the rest of the crew did, too, except old ‘Mo’ [Carl] Dingledine, who couldn’t swim. Last time I saw Mo he was clinging to that barrel. Never found out what happened to old Mo.” (Ens. Edward Kelly, commanding LCT 200, spotted Dingledine as he was retracting and picked him up.)

  Radzom’s LCT backed off and came in again. He jumped on Sergeant Evanger’s half-track as it drove off the
ramp. His crew followed him. The track made it to shore. “There was supposed to be a road cleared out for us. Then we were supposed to go in about five miles and secure a position. We couldn’t have gotten five yards.” The track got hit and Radzom jumped off. He picked up a helmet, then a rifle.

  “I saw a first louie laying there dead. There was the neck of a bottle sticking out of his musette bag. I snitched it. It was a bottle of Black & White scotch.” He rejoined Evanger’s crew and passed the bottle around. “That was the first time and the only time in my life that I drank scotch. I never felt a thing.” He got hit with shrapnel in the face, side, and back, and eventually was evacuated.6

  Cpl. George Ryan was a gunner on a 105mm howitzer. The vehicle was called an M-7. The cannon was mounted on a Sherman tank chassis. There were four M-7s on the LCT. The skipper saw that his designated landing site on Easy Red was too hot so he said he was going down a little way to find a softer spot.

  “Nobody was arguing with him,” Ryan remembered.

  The skipper turned toward shore and just that quick the craft was stuck on a sandbar. Ryan’s CO shouted, “Every man for himself,” and over the side the CO jumped.

  “Holy smokes,” Ryan remarked. “He was just gone. We lowered the ramp. Everybody in the first M-7 took a deep breath and they gave it the gun, down the ramp they went and into the water. The thing almost disappeared from sight, but the driver gave it the gun and broom, right out of the water it came. He did it so fast.”

  The second M-7 drove off “and it went glonck. It just disappeared from sight. The guys started popping up like corks. They swam in.”

  Shells were bursting around the LCT. “We gotta get off this thing,” someone in Ryan’s crew shouted, and they all jumped into the water. Ryan held back. “I wasn’t so much afraid of them bullets or the shells as I was of the cold Channel water. I cannot swim.”

  Ryan threw off all his equipment, inflated his Mae West, and began to tiptoe in off the ramp when “some German opened up on the side of the LCT with his machine gun, blblblblang. That convinced me. Into the water I dove. I pushed with all my might and then I started going. I’m swimming and I’m swimming. Somebody taps me on the shoulder and I look up. I was in a foot of water, swimming. You talk about the will to live. If they hadn’t stopped me I would have swam two miles inland.”

  Ryan made it to the seawall. He threw himself down beside a 16th Regiment infantryman. “You got a cigarette?” Ryan asked.

  A bit later, a piece of shrapnel made a scratch on Ryan’s hand. Nothing much, “almost like a cat would give you.” Soon a medical officer came along. He said, “Every man on this beach deserves the Purple Heart, just for being here. Give me your names, fellows. If you are wounded I can take care of you. If you are dead, I can’t. If there’s nothing wrong with you, I can see that you get a Purple Heart anyway.”

  “How about this, Major?” Ryan asked, showing his scratch. The doctor said he would get him the medal. But Ryan thought, “No, I can’t do this. It would cheapen it so much. A guy loses a leg and gets the Purple Heart; I get it for a scratch; that just ain’t fair. I turned it down.”7

  Another crew chief on an M-7 was Sgt. Jerry Eades. There were two M-7s on his LCT. They were hooked by cable to two half-tracks behind; directly behind one of the half-tracks, also connected by cable, was a truck, while a jeep was behind the other. The M-7s were supposed to drag a half-track and a truck or jeep to shore.

  As the landing craft approached the beach, the 105mm howitzers fired at the bluff. At first “it was just like a picnic,” because no one was firing back. “All of a sudden, shells hit the water around us and we knew we were back in the war [Eades had been in North Africa and Sicily]. We came alive. It was a feeling of, well, I don’t know how to explain fear, a feeling that went over you that you knew that the next breath could be your last. Of course, we were continuing to do our job.” They would fire, lower the elevation, fire again, one shell every thirty seconds.

  There were some GIs, infantry, on the LCT. There was nothing they could do but “wait for the slaughter. Us guys on the guns, at least we felt like we were doing something, shooting back. As long as you were shooting, you felt like you were in the war. But as for me, I would think, Let me hold my control, not let the guys see how scared I am, not lose control. That was my biggest fear, being caught afraid.”

  At 2,000 meters, the howitzers could not depress sufficiently to hit the bluff, so they stopped firing. German machine-gun bullets began to zing off the LCT. “I got down as low as possible, wishing I could push right on through the bottom of the boat, with the helpless feeling of ‘I can’t do anything now.’ ” The LCT was “going awfully slow. We were all having that urge like at a horse race, kind of shaking your shoulders to get the horse to run faster; we were trying to get this boat to go faster.”

  Eades looked at his watch. It was 0800. “All of a sudden I was real hungry. My thoughts drifted back to a bar and grill in El Paso, when I was in the old horse cavalry down there. The California Bar & Grill. They served a tremendous big taco for $.10 and an ice cold Falstaff beer for $.10. I could imagine myself sitting there at the bar with a beer and a taco for $.20 and here I was with maybe $200 in my pocket and I couldn’t even buy a beer and taco.”

  When the LCT grounded on a sandbar (after three unsuccessful tries) and dropped the ramp, the skipper was “running madly around the boat shouting, ‘Get them damn things off my boat! Get those damn things off my boat!’ My lieutenant had his arm up; when he dropped his arm forward, I kicked the driver in the back of the head and off we went. I heard a kind of ‘glub glub blub blub’ sound. The water was deeper than our air intake and we were immediately flooded.”

  Eades thought about “all the stuff we had just lost. The Navy boys had given us fifty pounds of sugar, thirty pounds of coffee, fifty cartons of cigarettes, and we had lost all this stuff—and our gun.”

  Eades made it to shore and up to the shingle, where he asked himself, “Just what in the hell am I doing here when I could be back in Ft. Bliss, Texas.” He was old Army, with an arm full of hash marks, an experienced goldbrick who knew how to avoid the tough assignments and garner the soft ones. To his consternation, he ended up spending D-Day as a rifleman on Omaha Beach, about the worst predicament an old soldier could find himself in. He organized “a kind of a provisional platoon” of infantry, engineers, and artillerymen, and up the bluff he led them.8

  Because so many vehicles went glub glub, many specialists found themselves ending up as ordinary infantry. Capt. R. J. Lindo was a liaison officer for the Navy. He landed at 0730, with two men to carry his radio. His job was to direct naval gunfire in support of the 18th Regiment. But “my worst fears and my best training were for naught as we lost our radios coming in from the LCT to the beach. So there I was, helpless to assist in any way. I became instead a part of the infantry attack.”9

  Sgt. William Otlowski, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, came in on a DUKW. He was in command of an M-7, which was far too heavy for the DUKWs to carry in anything but calm water. His DUKW was slammed up and down by a wave as it backed off its LST ramp. The rudder hit the ramp and got bent.

  “So we’re going around in little tight circles and we can’t straighten out, so the coxswain, a Navy boy, he decided to shut off the motor, which was a mistake, because that shut off the pumps and the DUKW started to fill with water and of course we sank.”

  Otlowski yelled at his crew to keep together, hold hands, stay in a circle. A passing LCVP, returning to its mother ship for another load, picked them up. They transferred to a Rhino ferry.

  The Rhino hit a sandbar. A lieutenant tied a rope to a jeep and told the driver to take off to test the water depth. The jeep promptly sank.

  “Hey, men,” the lieutenant called out, “grab the rope and pull up the jeep.” Just then an 88 burst on one side of the Rhino, then another on the far side.

  Otlowski yelled to the lieutenant, “Those are 88s, and the third one’s going to hit
right in the middle, get your men off this f—ing boat!’

  “He said, ‘Sergeant, stay where you are!’

  “I said, ‘To hell with you, Lieutenant, if you want to die, go ahead. Okay, men let’s go!’ ” Otlowski and his crew jumped ship and swam to shore.

  “I looked back, the third 88 had hit smack in the middle of that damn barge and every consecutive shot was right on target.”

  Otlowski picked up a rifle, ammunition belt, and helmet “and scooted up across the beach to the seawall.” He saw a young soldier walking behind it, with a big roll of communication wire on his back. A lieutenant spotted the soldier and called out, “Oh, boy, do we need that. Sit down right here. Give me that wire.”

  The soldier replied, “I can’t, Lieutenant. What will I do with this?” In his right hand he was carrying his left arm. Otlowski helped get the wire off his back, gave him some morphine, and yelled for a medic.10

  Charles Sullivan was a Seabee on a Rhino. He helped bring in three loads on D-Day. Most of the vehicles were destroyed before they could fire a shot, but he concluded, “In twenty-eight years of service, three wars, fourteen overseas tours of duty, thousands of faces, only Normandy and D-Day remain vivid, as if it happened only yesterday. What we did was important and worthwhile, and how many ever get to say that about a day in their lives.”11

  Sullivan’s comment brings to mind Eisenhower’s remark to Walter Cronkite that no one likes to get shot at, but on D-Day more people wanted to get in on it than wanted to get out.

  • •

  A tremendous tonnage of tanks, half-tracks, M-7s, jeeps, trucks, and other vehicles had attempted to come into Omaha between 0630 and 0830. Many had sunk, others were destroyed, and the few survivors were caught on an ever-shrinking beach with no place to go. The vehicles were more of a problem than they were an offensive weapon.

  Beside and between the tanks, half-tracks, M-7s, and the rest, the Higgins boats were coming in, carrying the 116th and 16th regiments. With them were demolition teams composed of Seabees and Army engineers (five of each in a team). There were sixteen teams, each assigned to a distinct sector of the beach with the job of blowing a gap some fifty meters wide. Not one landed on target.