The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  “There isn’t any more,” the cook said, tears in his eyes. They were still an hour and a half away from the hospital ship. When they finally got there, the ship was ready for them, with booms rigged to load litters. The LCT tied up alongside; hospital corpsmen came off the ship and aboard the LCT with medical supplies of all types. One by one, the wounded were lifted by litter to the ship.29

  Time was the great danger to the wounded. Pain could be endured or handled—a combination of shock and morphine helped (when a medic or a GI administered a shot of morphine he would tag the man so that another soldier coming along later would not give a second shot)—but loss of blood could not. But if the flow could be stopped and the man put into a doctor’s hands on a hospital ship, the chances of survival were good.

  The crews on the landing craft did their best to get the wounded to treatment. Sgt. Stanley Borkowski of the 5th ESB was running a DUKW back and forth from a Liberty ship to the beach, carrying cargo. On the return trips he brought wounded to the hospital ship, which was anchored about two miles out. “I do not wish to comment about the wounded soldiers,” Borkowski said in his oral history, his voice choking with the thought of what he had seen. “I was glad to get them to the hospital. My prayers are always with them.”30

  • •

  The LCI on which correspondent A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker was riding picked up some wounded men from Omaha Beach to take out to a hospital ship. Three of them had to be sent up in wire baskets, “vertically, like Indian papooses. A couple of Negroes on the upper deck dropped a line which our men made fast to the top of one basket after another. Then the man would be jerked up in the air by the Negroes as if he were going to heaven.

  “A Coast Guardsman reached up for the bottom of one basket so that he could steady it on its way up. At least a quart of blood ran down on him, covering his tin hat, his upturned face, and his blue overalls. . . . A couple of minutes after the last litter had been hoisted aboard, an officer leaned over the rail and shouted down, ‘Medical officer in charge says two of these men are dead. He says you should take them back to the beach and bury them.’ A sailor on deck said, ‘The son of a bitch ought to see that beach.’ ” The skipper of the LCI refused the absurd order.31

  Seaman Ferris Burke was a sixteen-year-old on LST 285, which served as a hospital ship. “The doctors were outstanding,” he recalled. “Just unbelievable. They worked for hours, amputating arms and legs, removing shrapnel, patching bullet wounds, and trying to calm down some men who were completely out of their minds.”

  Burke had an awful experience for a sixteen-year-old (or anyone else for that matter). He remembered Dr. Slattery asking him to go down to the shipfitter’s shop and get half a dozen pieces of angle iron, two feet long. Burke did. When he returned with the metal Dr. Slattery told him to tape the arms and legs he had amputated to the metal and throw them overboard. Later, when Burke told the shipfitter what he had used the angle iron for, the shipfitter was “a bit upset because he had given me very good metal. He said if he had known what the doctor wanted the metal for he would have given me some scrap from around the shop instead of the good stuff.”32

  There were many heartbreaking scenes. Pharmacist Mate Frank Feduik recalled administering morphine to a GI on the deck of an LST. He was lying on a stretcher. “He suddenly raised his body and let out an awful yell. He had realized that his right leg was missing. I pushed him back down and I remember him saying, ‘What am I gonna do? My leg, I’m a farmer.’ ”33

  • •

  War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.

  Captain Palmer on Harding was prowling just off the beach, blazing away with every gun on his ship. Palmer was described by Lieutenant Gentry as a man full of “autistic energy and nervous tension.” The medical officer on Harding was a Dr. McKenzie. At 1024 McKenzie had persuaded Palmer to cease firing long enough to launch the ship’s boat so that he could go ashore to render medical aid to wounded men on a Higgins boat that had been hit. Upon completion of that duty, although under intense rifle and machine-gun fire, McKenzie had the ship’s boat take him to a DUKW holding some wounded so that he could tend to them. Then he returned to Harding.

  On board, McKenzie faced an emergency. Ens. Robert Reetz had acute appendicitis. Only an immediate operation could save his life. McKenzie asked Palmer to cease fire so that he could operate. Palmer reluctantly agreed. After a half hour or so, Palmer sent Lieutenant Gentry down to the wardroom that had been converted to an operating room to see what was holding things up.

  McKenzie told Gentry he had given Reetz “enough anesthesia for two people but still couldn’t get him quieted down enough to operate.” Ens. William Carter was there, along with three others trying to hold Reetz down. (Carter remembered that “Dr. McKenzie had promised for months to let me assist in an operation; this was the first major one and he called for me to assist.”) The overhead light was out; Carter held a lantern with one hand and Reetz with the other. It took another forty-five minutes for the anesthesia to do its work, “with the captain calling down every five minutes for a progress report,” as Gentry put it. Finally, after one and a half hours, the operation was successfully completed. Captain Palmer let go a “Thank God” and ordered all guns to commence firing.34

  • •

  The medics were not the only men on the beach whose job was not to destroy but to preserve. The Army Signal Corps and the Coast Guard sent photographers ashore to record the battle. These were the men on the beach who carried only cameras and black-and-white film. They went in with the first waves.I

  Perhaps the bravest and certainly the best known that day was Robert Capa of Life magazine, who went into Omaha with Company E in the second wave. His craft mislanded at Easy Red. Capa was last off. He paused on the ramp to take a photograph. The coxswain “mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear.” Capa got behind an obstacle and shot a roll of film. He dashed forward to gain the protection of a burned-out tank in waist-deep water. He wanted to get to the seawall “but I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards.” He stayed behind the tank, repeating a sentence he had learned in the Spanish Civil War (where he had taken one of the best-known photographs of combat in the Twentieth Century, of a soldier just as he got hit in the chest): “Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria.” (“This is a very serious business.”)

  Capa finally made it to the seawall, where he threw himself to the ground. “I found myself nose to nose with a lieutenant from our last night’s poker game. He asked me if I knew what he saw. I told him no and that I didn’t think he could see much beyond my head. ‘I’ll tell you what I see. I see my ma on the front porch, waving my insurance policy.’ ”

  Mortars were landing all around. Capa kept shooting, inserting new rolls of film and shooting some more. He ran low on film. Turning to the beach, he saw an LCI.

  “I did not think and I didn’t decide it. I just stood up and ran toward the boat.” Holding his cameras high above his head, he waded out to the LCI. “I knew that I was running away. I tried to turn but couldn’t face the beach and told myself, ‘I am just going to dry my hands on that boat.’ ”

  Coast Guardsman Charles Jarreau was on the LCI, picking up wounded men to take back to a hospital ship. He spotted Capa: “Poor fellow, he was there in the water, holding his cameras up to try to keep them dry, trying to catch his breath.” Capa called out for help; the skipper told him to come aboard. “He was really grateful to get out. He came aboard. He took pictures on our ship, which appeared in Life magazine.”35

  Capa got back to Portsmouth later that day, then went by train to the de
veloping studios in London. He turned in his film for development. The darkroom assistant was so eager to see the photos that he turned on too much heat while drying the negatives. The emulsions melted and ran down. Of the 106 pictures Capa had taken, only eight were salvaged and they were blurry.

  Capa was understandably upset until he realized that the gray, murky photos of men hiding behind beach obstacles or coming ashore from Higgins boats caught the chaos and fear on Omaha Beach exactly. Thanks in part to the overeager developer, Capa had taken some of the most famous photographs of D-Day.36

  • •

  Hollywood director and producer John Ford was head of a photographic unit for the Office of Strategic Services. On D-Day, he had a team of Coast Guard cameramen working for him. They crossed the Channel on destroyer USS Plunket, carrying $1 million worth of camera gear. Twenty years later, Ford talked about his experiences to writer Pete Martin for the American Legion Magazine. Ford had brought with him to Omaha Beach his wonderful director’s eye; his oral history needs to be quoted at some length.

  “When we started,” Ford told Martin, “we were the last ship out in our huge convoy. . . . Suddenly our flotilla was switched about . . . which put out Plunket in the lead. I am told I expressed some surprise at leading the invasion with my cameras.”

  Plunket dropped anchor at 0600 off Omaha Beach. “Things began to happen fast.”

  Ford saw the first wave go in. “They didn’t have a chance.

  “Neither did the LCMs bringing in bulldozers and more tanks. They really caught hell. Later I heard that only three bulldozers out of 30 or 40 made it. I also remember seeing landing craft swing out of control and smash against obstacles where they touched off a mine and blew sky high. On a later day, much later, I discovered that it was this very week that the first U.S. shipyards were getting ready to lay off hundreds of men as war-time orders slackened.”

  The objective of Ford’s team was “simple, just take movies of everything on Omaha Beach. Simple, but not easy.” Ford offloaded onto a DUKW. Going in, “I remember watching one colored man in a DUKW loaded with supplies. He dropped them on the beach, unloaded, went back for more. I watched, fascinated. Shells landed around him. The Germans were really after him. He avoided every obstacle and just kept going back and forth, back and forth, completely calm. I thought, By God, if anybody deserves a medal that man does. I wanted to photograph him, but I was in a relatively safe place at the time so I figured, The hell with it. I was willing to admit he was braver than I was.”

  The infantry also made a vivid impression on Ford: “The discipline and training of those boys who came ashore in the later waves of landing craft, throwing up and groaning with nausea all the way into the beach, was amazing. It showed. They made no mad rush. They quietly took their places and kept moving steadily forward.”

  When Ford hit the beach, he ran forward and began directing his photographers to selected spots (mainly behind beach obstacles). They began setting up and shooting. “I wouldn’t let them stand up. I made them lie behind cover to do their photographing. [Nevertheless] I lost some men. To my mind, those seasick kids were heroes. . . . I take my hat off to my Coast Guard kids. They were impressive. They went in first, not to fight, but to photograph.

  “My memories of D-Day come in disconnected takes like unassembled shots to be spliced together afterward in a film.

  “I was reminded of that line in ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ about how the soldiers were always busy, always deeply absorbed in their individual combats.

  “My staff and I had the job of ‘seeing’ the whole invasion for the world, but all any one of us saw was his own little area. . . . In action, I didn’t tell my boys where to aim their cameras. They took whatever they could. . . . There was no panic or running around.”

  The film went back to London, where it was processed. Most of it was in Kodachrome, which was transferred to black-and-white for release in the newsreels in movie theaters. “My cutting unit . . . worked 24-hour watches, picking out the best part of the film that had been shot. I’m sure it was the biggest cutting job of all time. They worked four-hour shifts—on four, off four. . . . Very little was released to the public then [because] apparently the Government was afraid to show so many American casualties on the screen.”37, II

  * * *

  I. In 1991, one of my students remarked, “World War II? Isn’t that the one they fought in black and white?”

  II. Not until 1945 did the government release movie or still photos of dead American soldiers. In his 1964 interview with the American Legion Magazine, Ford said, “All of it [the D-Day film] still exists today in color in storage in Anacostia near Washington, D.C.” Where it was thirty years later the Eisenhower Center has been unable to discover.

  21

  “WILL YOU TELL ME HOW WE DID THIS?”

  The 2nd Ranger Battalion on D-Day Morning

  ON THE AFTERNOON of June 5, Lt. Col. James Earl Rudder, CO of the Ranger Force (2nd and 5th Ranger battalions), paid a visit to companies A, B, and C of the 2nd Battalion on their transport, the Prince Charles. He was going to lead companies D, E, and F on an assault at Pointe-du-Hoc, a sheer cliff some forty meters high about seven kilometers west of the right flank of Omaha Beach. A, B, and C were going in at the Charlie sector of Omaha, to the immediate right of Company A of the 116th Regiment.I

  Rudder, a 1932 graduate of Texas A&M, where he received a commission in the reserves, had been a college football coach and teacher before going on active duty in 1941. He knew how to give inspirational talks before going into action. On this occasion, he told companies A, B, and C, “Boys, you are going on the beach as the first rangers in this battalion to set foot on French soil. But don’t worry about being alone. When D, E, and F take care of Pointe-du-Hoc, we will come down and give you a hand with your objectives. Good luck and may God be with you.”1

  In the event, almost none of this worked out, not for A, B, and C or for D, E, and F. Most of the game plan had to be abandoned even before the action began. C Company was alone when it landed, and virtually alone through the day. D, E, and F companies came in at the wrong time from the wrong direction at Pointe-du-Hoc. Most of the special equipment for scaling the cliff never made it to the shore; much of what did failed to work. When the companies nevertheless made it to the top, they found that their objective, five 155mm cannon capable of dominating both Utah and Omaha beaches, were not in the casemates. Apparently what the rangers had accomplished in one of the most famous and heroic actions of D-Day had gone for naught and the skills and sacrifices of one of the most elite and highly trained forces in the Allied army had been wasted. But in fact what the rangers accomplished at Omaha and at Pointe-du-Hoc was critical to the ultimate success at both American beaches.

  Ten years after the event, Colonel Rudder visited the site with his fourteen-year-old son and Collier’s reporter W. C. Heinz. Looking up at the cliff at Pointe-du-Hoc, he asked, “Will you tell me how we did this? Anybody would be a fool to try this. It was crazy then, and it’s crazy now.”2

  • •

  The plan was for Company C to land on the far right flank of Omaha Beach and follow Company A of the 116th Regiment up the Vierville draw, pass through the village, turn right, and clear out the area between the beach and the coastal road (about a kilometer inland) running from Vierville to Pointe-du-Hoc. In that area the Germans had some twenty pillboxes, bunkers, Tobrucks, and open gun emplacements, plus a radar station. The schedule called for Company C to accomplish its mission in two hours, that is, by 0830. Companies A and B would land at 0730 at Pointe-du-Hoc, if given a signal that Rudder needed them there for reinforcement: if no signal was received (presumably meaning that Rudder’s force had failed), they would land at the mouth of the Vierville draw, from which spot they would move to the high ground, turn right, and proceed west on the coastal road to attack Pointe-du-Hoc from the land side.

  For ranger companies A, B, and C, in short, everything depended on Company A of the 116
th Regiment securing the Vierville draw and the village itself in the initial moments of the assault. But Company A of the 116th was wiped out at the beach. Company C of the rangers came in a few minutes later, at 0645, in an isolated position, at the far western edge of Omaha, just beyond the Vierville draw; the closest American troops were more than two kilometers to the east at Dog Red.

  Going in on the heels of the naval bombardment, before the Germans opened fire, the rangers were in a cocky mood. “It’s going to be a cinch,” one of them said. “I don’t think they know we’re coming.” Sgt. Donald Scribner recalled the men in his boat singing “Happy Anniversary” to Sgt. Walter Geldon—June 6, 1944, was Geldon’s third wedding anniversary.3 They cheered when the LCT(R)s launched their rockets, only to groan when they saw the rockets fall short and harmlessly in the water. Their dismay increased as they realized, in the words of Lt. Gerald Heaney, “there was no one on the beach in front of us and we were going to touch down in a sector that had not been invaded by other American soldiers.”

  When Heaney’s LCA hit a sandbar, the British coxswain called out a cheery “This is as far as I go, Yanks” and lowered the ramp. German machine-gun fire ripped across the boat. The first man out was immediately hit. Heaney saw he had no chance if he went down the ramp, so he jumped over the side.

  “All around me men were being killed and wounded. I ran as hard as I could toward shore, and I remember being so exhausted when I reached the shore that it was all I could do to make it to the cliff.”4

  The CO of C Company, Capt. Ralph Goranson, recalled, “Going across the beach was just like a dream with all the movement of the body and mind just automatic motion.” He made it to the shelter at the base of the cliff. To Sgt. Marvin Lutz, crossing the beach was “like a horrible nightmare.” Nevertheless, like his CO, he moved automatically—the payoff from the training maneuvers.5