A Seabee described his experience: “As we dropped our ramp, an 88mm came tearing in, killing almost half our men right there, the officer being the first one. We all thought him the best officer the Navy ever had. . . . From then on things got hazy to me. I remember the chief starting to take over, but then another shell hit and that did it. I thought my body torn apart.”
Bleeding heavily from shrapnel in his left leg and arm, the Seabee looked around and saw no one alive. Fire on the Higgins boat was about to set off the demolition charges. “So I went overboard and headed for the beach.” He reached the obstacles, looked back, and saw the craft blow up.
“That got me. Not caring whether I lived or not, I started to run through the fire up the beach.” He made the seawall, later picked up a rifle, and spent the day with the 116th as an infantryman.12
Other demolition teams had better luck. They got off their craft more or less intact and went to work, ignoring the fire around them. They were better off than the infantry; the GIs who landed at the wrong place and whose officers were wounded or killed before they made the seawall did not know what to do next. Not even heavy gunfire puts such a strain on a soldier’s morale as not knowing what to do and having no one around to tell him. The demolition teams, however, could see immediately what to do. Even if they were at the wrong place, there were obstacles in front of them. They started blowing them.
Comdr. Joseph Gibbons was the CO of the demolition teams at Omaha. He strode up and down the beach, giving help where it was required, supervising the operation. The first two of his men he met told him the whole of the rest of their team had been killed. They had no explosives with them. Gibbons told them to get behind the seawall until he found a job for them. Then he found a team that had landed successfully and was already fastening its charges to the obstacles. The men moved methodically from one obstacle to another, fixing the charges to them.13
Pvt. Devon Larson of the engineers made it ashore. He was alone but he had his explosives with him so he went to work anyway. “Lying on the beach, I saw only two steel obstacles in front of me. Both with Teller mines atop of them. I wrapped a composition C pack around the base, piled about a foot of sand on my side so that the explosion would be away from me, pulled a fuse lighter from my helmet, yelled ‘Fire in the hole!’ and pulled the fuse. I heard several more shouts of ‘Fire in the hole!’ to my left. I rolled to the right. The explosion rolled me a little farther, but my two steel posts were gone. No more obstacles were in front of me or on either side, so I headed for the seawall.”14
• •
Altogether, the demolition teams were able to blow five or six partial gaps instead of the sixteen that had been planned, and the gaps that did exist were not properly marked by flags. As the tide rose, this situation caused immense problems for the coxswains bringing in the follow-up waves of infantry and vehicles.
Seaman Exum Pike was on patrol craft 565. The job was to guide LCIs and other craft into the beach. But with landmarks obscured by smoke and haze and with no clear path through the obstacles, PC 565 could not accomplish its mission. It became, in effect, a gunboat, firing its machine guns at the bluff, from which Pike could see “a rain of fire that appeared to be falling from the clouds.” Pike remembered seeing a DUKW hit an obstacle and set off the mine. “I saw the bodies of two crewmen blown several hundred feet into the air and they were twisting around like tops up there, it was like watching a slow-motion Ferris wheel.”
Then PC 565 took a hit. Six men were wounded. “Blood was gushing down the gunwales of that boat like a river.” Recalling the scene forty-five years later, Pike commented, “I have often told my two sons I have no fear of hell because I have already been there.”15
• •
Ens. Don Irwin was the skipper of LCT 614. His crew consisted of another ensign, the executive officer, and twelve Navy enlisted men. His cargo consisted of sixty-five GIs, two bulldozers, and four jeeps with ammunition-carrying trailers. He was scheduled to go in at 0730.
“As we headed toward the beach,” Irwin recalled, “the most ear-splitting, deafening, horrendous sound I have ever heard or ever will took place.” The Texas was firing over the top of LCT 614. Irwin looked back “and it seemed as if the Texas’s giant 14-inch guns were pointed right at us.” Of course they were not; they were aiming at the bluff. “You’ll never know how tremendously huge a battleship is,” Irwin commented, “until you look up at one from fairly close by from an LCT.”
Irwin was headed toward Easy Red. So far no Americans had landed on that section of the beach. To Irwin, it seemed “tranquil.” He allowed himself to think that the briefing officer had been right when he said, “There won’t be anything left to bother you guys when you hit the beach. We’re throwing everything at the Germans but the kitchen sink, and we’ll throw that in, too.”
But as Irwin ran LCT 614 onto a sandbar and dropped the ramp, “all hell tore loose. We came under intense fire, mainly rifle and machine gun.” When the first two men from the craft went down in water over their heads, Irwin realized the water was still too deep, so he used his rear anchor and winch to retract. He spent the next hour trying to find a gap in the obstacles where he could put his cargo ashore. Finally he dropped the ramp again; the bulldozers made it to the shore “only to be blasted by German gunners with phosphorus shells which started them burning.”
The GIs were trying to get off, but when the first two got shot as they jumped off the ramp, the others refused to leave. Irwin had orders to disembark them. The orders stressed that to fail to do so could result in a court martial. He had been told that, if necessary, he should see to the execution of the order to disembark at gunpoint.
“But I could in no way force human beings to step off that ramp to almost certain wounding or death. The shellfire had grown even more intense. Pandemonium everywhere, with lots of smoke and explosions. Bodies in the water.
“The men in my crew, who were still at their battle stations and who had been standing erect on our way to the beach, were now flattened out against the craft as if they were a part of it. A couple of them were yelling, ‘Skipper, let’s get out of here!’
“After an hour of trying to get my load of troops and vehicles off, believe me I was ready.”16
• •
It was now 0830. Men and vehicles, almost none of them operating, were jammed up on the beach. Not a single vehicle and not more than a few platoons of men had made it up the bluff. At this point, the commander of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion made a decision: suspend all landing of vehicles and withdraw those craft on the beach.
• •
Ensign Irwin got the order to retract over his radio. He was told that the beach was too hot and that he should go out into the Channel, anchor, and await further orders. It was the most welcome order he ever received, but the one that he had the most difficulty in executing. As he began to retract, his LCT suddenly stopped. It was hung up on an obstacle. It could have been panic time, but Irwin kept his head. He eased forward, then back again and floated free. His crew began taking in the anchor cable. But just when the anchor should have been in sight, it stuck.
“Try as we might we couldn’t free that anchor. I gave the command ‘All engines ahead, full!’ This did cause the anchor to move, and soon coming to the surface was a Higgins boat that had been sunk with our anchor hooked into it.”
Irwin turned his LCT, gave it a couple of shakes, and freed the anchor. He got out to deep water and dropped the anchor.I
• •
The 0830 general order to retract craft on the beach and postpone the landing of others until gaps in the obstacles had been blown added to the confusion. With nowhere to go, over fifty incoming LCTs and LCIs began to turn in circles.
For most of the skippers and crews, this was the first invasion. They were amateurs at war, even the old merchant mariners commanding the LSTs. The crews were as young as they were inexperienced.
Seaman James Fudge was on one of the two LSTs that h
ad made it to the beach. When the order came to get off, “this is where our ship got in trouble, where our captain panicked. We had dropped our stern anchor. We had not unloaded a thing. The LST to our right got hit with an 88. And what our skipper needed to do was give the order ‘Haul in the stern anchor! All back full!’ But he said, ‘All back full!’ and forgot about the anchor. So he backed over his stern anchor cable and fouled the screws.”
The LST was helpless in the water, about 500 meters offshore. Eventually, it was off-loaded by a Rhino. Fudge said, “It was quite difficult to unload tanks from the LST to the Rhino. You had to have a crane, it was a terrible time in a somewhat choppy sea to have a barge to unload trucks and tanks without dropping them in the water. But we didn’t lose any.”
Fudge recalled that “an admiral came by on an LCVP and in front of the whole crew he scolded our skipper for being so thoughtless as to back over his own cable. He had some very insulting things to say to our skipper. Directly. He was a very angry man.”17
While the LST was being unloaded, Fudge saw a sight that almost every man on Omaha Beach that morning mentioned in his oral history. The incident was later made famous by Cornelius Ryan in The Longest Day. At about 0900, zooming in from the British beaches, came two FW-190s. The pilots were Wing Comdr. Josef Priller and Sgt. Heinz Wodarczyk. Ryan recorded that when they saw the invasion fleet, Priller’s words were “What a show! What a show!” They flew at 150 feet, dodging between the barrage balloons.
Fudge commented, “I can remember standing sort of in awe of them and everyone was trying to fire at them. People were shouting, ‘Look, look, a couple of Jerries!’ ” Every 40mm and 20mm in the fleet blasted away.
So far as Fudge could make out, many of the gunners were hitting the ship next to them, so low were Priller and Wodarczyk flying. No one hit the planes. As Priller and Wodarczyk streaked off into the clouds, one seaman commented, “Jerry or not, the best of luck to you. You’ve got guts.”18
• •
There was one battalion of black soldiers in the initial assault on Omaha, the 320th Barrage Balloon Battalion (Colored). It was a unique outfit attached to the First Army. The troopers brought in barrage balloons on LSTs and LCIs in the third wave and set them up on the beach, to prevent Luftwaffe straffing. (About 1,200 black soldiers landed on Utah on D-Day, all of them truck drivers or port personnel from segregated quartermaster companies.) Black Coast Guard personnel drove Higgins boats and black sailors manned their battle stations on the warships. Overall, however, it was remarkable that so few black servicemen were allowed to participate in the initial attack against the Nazi regime, and a terrible waste considering the contributions of black combat troops in Korea and Vietnam.II
• •
It was the Navy’s job to get the men to shore, the tankers and artillerymen’s jobs to provide suppressing fire, the infantrymen’s job to move out and up, the demolition teams’ job to blow gaps in the obstacles, and the engineers’ job to blow remaining obstacles, provide traffic control on the beach, blast the exits open, and clear and mark paths through the minefields. For the engineers, as for the others, the first couple of hours on Omaha were full of frustration.
Sgt. Robert Schober was with the 3466 Ordnance Maintenance Company. His unit’s job was to dewaterproof vehicles. His tools were crescent wrench, screwdriver, and pliers. The task was simple: tighten fan belts, open battery vents, remove packing from various parts of the engine. When Howell got to the beach, “I felt a ding on the helmet. When I realized it was a bullet, I was no longer scared. I made up my mind that when the next wave of infantry took off for the seawall, I was going too. I did, and dug in when I arrived.” He and his buddies stayed there through the morning, because they could not locate any vehicles that needed dewaterproofing.19
At least they made it to the wall. Cpl. Robert Miller, a combat engineer with the 6th ESB, did not. He was in an LCT that landed around 0700 on Easy Red. He glanced to his right “and saw another LCT, with the skipper standing at the tower, receive a blow from the dreaded German 88. After the smoke cleared both the skipper and tower had disappeared.”
Miller worried about the trucks packed full of dynamite on his LCT taking a hit from an 88, but that turned out to be the wrong worry: the craft was rocked by a blast from an underwater mine. The ramp was jammed, a half-track up front badly damaged, many of the men on board wounded.
“The skipper decided to pull back to dump off the halftrack, transfer the wounded, and repair the ramp. As this was being done a Navy officer in a control craft pulled alongside and raised hell with the skipper, saying we should not be sitting there and to get our a—into the beach where we belonged.”
The skipper took the LCT back in and managed to drop the ramp in eight feet of water about 100 meters offshore. He told the engineers, “Go!” Miller’s platoon commander objected “in no uncertain terms, reminding the skipper his orders were to run us onto the beach, but the skipper refused to budge.”
A jeep drove off. It went underwater but the waterproofing worked and it managed to drive to the shore. The trucks also made it, only to get shot up. The men came next. Miller went in over his head. He dropped his rifle and demolition charges, jumped up from the Channel floor, got his head above water, and started swimming to the beach.
“It was a very tough swim. The weight of the soaked clothes, boots, gas mask, and steel helmet made it near impossible but I did reach hip-deep water finally and attempted to stand up. I was near exhaustion.
“At last I reached shore and was about fifteen feet up the beach when a big white flash enveloped me. The next thing I knew I was flat on my back looking up at the sky. I tried to get up but could not and reasoned, my God, my legs had been blown off since I had no sensation of movement in them and could not see them for the gas mask on my chest blocked the view. I wrestled around and finally got the gas mask off to one side. I saw my feet sticking up and reached my upper legs with my hands, and felt relieved that they were still there, but could not understand my immobility or lack of sensation.”
Miller had been hit in the spinal cord. It was damaged beyond repair. Those first steps he took on Omaha Beach were the last steps he ever took.
A medic dragged him behind a half-track and gave him a shot of morphine. He passed out. When he came too he was at a first-aid station on the beach. He passed out again. When he regained consciousness, he was on an LST. He eventually made it to a hospital in England. Four months later, he was in a stateside hospital. A nurse was washing his hair. “To her and my own astonishment, sand was in the rinse water, sand from Omaha Beach.”20
Sgt. Debbs Peters of the engineers was on an LCI. When the craft was about 300 meters offshore, a shell hit it in the stern, then another midships. “Those of us on deck were caught on fire with flaming fuel oil and we all just rolled overboard.” Peters inflated his Mae West and managed to swim to an obstacle to take cover and catch his breath. Then he managed to stand and tried to run to the seawall, “but I was so loaded with water and sand that I could just stagger about.” He crouched down behind a burning Sherman tank; almost immediately a shell hit the tank. (That was an experience many men had at Omaha; the urge for shelter sent them to knocked-out tanks, half-tracks, and other vehicles, but it was a mistake, because the tanks were targets for German artillery.)
Peters managed to reach the seawall. There he found Capt. John McAllister and Maj. Robert Steward. “We agreed that we should get out of there if we expected to live and Major Steward told me to go ahead and find the mines.” Peters had no equipment for such a search other than his trench knife, but he went ahead anyway.
“I jumped up on the road and went across, fell down into a ditch, up again, through a brier patch, then up against the bluff.” He climbed carefully, probing for mines with his knife, leaving a white tape behind to mark the route. Near the top of the bluff he started taking machine-gun fire. Bullets ripped open his musette bag and one put a hole in his helmet. He tossed a grenade in the direc
tion of the pillbox and the firing ceased. He had done his job, and more.21
Pvt. John Zmudzinski of the 5th ESB came in at 0730 on an LCI. “Our job was supposed to be to bring in our heavy equipment and cut the roads through the beach and bring the cranes and bulldozers in.” Zmudzinski got ashore without getting hit. On the beach he saw some men freeze and just lie there. Beside them, he saw “a GI just lying there calmly taking his M-1 apart and cleaning the sand out of it, he didn’t seem to be excited at all.”
At the seawall, Zmudzinski threw himself down beside his CO, Capt. Louis Drnovich, an All-American football player at the University of Southern California in 1939. “He was trying to get things moving. He sent me down the beach to see if one of our bulldozers got in. I came back and told him nothing that heavy was getting in at that time. There was a half-track part way up to the exit road and Captain Drnovich sent me there to see what was holding him up. I went and hid behind it; it was all shot up and under heavy fire. When I got back to report, Captain Drnovich was gone.”
Drnovich had gone back to the beach and climbed into a knocked- out tank to see if he could get the cannon firing. As he was making the attempt, he was hit and killed.
At the seawall, Zmudzinski found that he was protected from machine-gun fire but taking mortar rounds. “It was a matter of Russian roulette. I didn’t know whether to stay where I was or go down the beach. It was just a matter of chance, whoever got hit.” He saw half-tracks on the beach getting hit “and then one whole LCT loaded with half-tracks catch fire and burn up.”22
Pvt. Allen McMath was a combat engineer who came in on the third wave. He found swimming difficult but managed to reach a pole sticking up in the water. “I held on to it for awhile to get my wind. I happened to look up. There on top of that pole was a Teller mine and that scared me so darned bad I took off and headed on in for shore.”
The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys Page 82
