The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys

by Stephen E. Ambrose

  Looking back down the beach, Seitzler noticed that “Jerry would deliberately shoot the medics. I think that the hottest place in hell is reserved for the man that would do that.” Turning back to face the bluff, Seitzler crossed the seawall and began to make his way to high ground.12

  After dragging some wounded GIs off the beach, Pvt. Harry Parley found an opening in the barbed wire. “A few men had already gone through. I could see them picking their way up the slope. As I started up, I saw the white tape marking a safe path through the mines, and I also saw the price paid to mark that path. A couple of GIs had been blown to death and another was being attended to by a medic. As I passed, I could see that both his legs were gone and tourniquets were being applied. In the weeks that followed, I was to see much worse, but that particular memory remains with me still.”

  As Parley neared the top, a destroyer commenced firing at a pillbox on the crest. “I remember foolishly standing about forty feet below and watching in amazement the power and accuracy of the Navy fire landing just above me. It was like sitting in the very first row of a movie looking up at the screen.”

  Parley traded his BAR for an M-l with another GI. “He wanted more firepower and I wanted less weight to carry. Finally reaching the top, I found an area entirely devoid of vegetation, marked by shell craters and covered by a maze of trenches, dugouts, and firing positions used by the Germans earlier in the morning.”

  Parley also saw his first enemy soldiers, two prisoners, hands on head, being passed back down the slope. They were Asians. (In general, the Ost soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms tended to surrender as soon as GIs got near them. They were mainly in the trenches. Ethnic Germans inside concrete fortifications tended to fight on.)13

  Captain Sink, CO of HQ Company, 116th, landed at 0800 just east of Les Moulins draw. The beach “had its share of the dead, the dying, the wounded, and disorganized.” HQ Company was supposed to be at the Vierville draw; Sink’s orders were to proceed up that draw to the village to set up a regimental CP and assembly area. But Sink took one look and decided that lateral movement on the beach through the masses of men and equipment and heavy fire was out. He made an instant decision to breach the wire obstacles in his front, wade the swamp, climb the bluff, and proceed to Vierville along the dirt road. The regimental adjutant declined to accompany Sink; he took out his entrenching tool and started to dig in on the beach. Sink went ahead.

  After wading through the swamp, Sink and Lieutenant Kelly found a path up the bluff. They passed an unoccupied gun emplacement located on a natural shelf about halfway up. Looking back, they could see the men of the company carefully working their way through the breach in the barbed wire and following up the path in single file.

  Sink and Kelly came out in an open field at the top of the bluff, where they immediately came under small-arms fire. Advancing by creeping and crawling for several hundred feet, they reached a spot where it was safe to stand. Looking down the bluff, they were dismayed to discover that only six men were still climbing; the others had dropped back to the beach. Sink sent a runner to return to the beach, round up the men, and get them started again.

  Sink and Kelly drew machine-gun fire from St.-Laurent. They fell back and encountered a group from 3rd Battalion, 116th, including the battalion CO, Lt. Col. Lawrence Meeks. It was 1000. Meeks ordered 3rd Battalion to move against St.-Laurent. Sink’s mission was to establish the CP at Vierville, so he decided to return to the beach to get his missing men moving.14

  Sgt. Warner Hamlett and some of his buddies from F Company, 116th, got over the seawall only to be held up at the base of the bluff by machine-gun fire from pillboxes. They tried to put them out of action by attaching TNT to long poles, but barbed wire surrounding the pillboxes kept the Americans from getting close enough to the positions to insert the explosive.

  “We decided to run between the pillboxes and enter the trenches that connected the boxes. We entered those trenches, slipped behind the pillboxes, and threw grenades into them. After the explosion, we ran into the boxes to kill any survivors. Rows of pillboxes stood between us and the top of the bluff. Slowly, one by one, we advanced. The bravery and gallantry of the soldiers was beyond belief.”

  Hamlett was wounded in the leg and back. When he got to the top of the bluff, “Sergeant England told me to go back to the beach and get a medic to tag me so that I could be transported back to a hospital ship. As I painfully walked back to the beach, thousands of parts of bodies lined it. They were floating, heads, arms, legs. I realized what being in the first wave was all about.”

  Hamlett concluded his oral history, “I was in the hospital in England for two months. I was then sent back to the front lines. In all, I saw seven months of combat and was wounded twice more. I would do it all over again to stop someone like Hitler. I am Warner H. Hamlett.”15

  • •

  Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers, along with the 5th Ranger Battalion, had alternate missions. If they got word by 0700 from Colonel Rudder (“Praise the Lord” was the signal) indicating that the 2nd Rangers had possession of Pointe-du-Hoc, they were to go in there and provide reinforcements. If they did not get the message, they were to go in at Dog Green and Dog White, proceed up the Vierville draw, turn right, and go overland to the aid of their comrades at Pointe-du-Hoc.

  Lt. Col. Max Schneider of the rangers was in command. He delayed making his landing decision as long as possible. By 0715 he could delay no longer. His craft were midway between Pointe-du-Hoc and Vierville.

  “Schneider had to choose,” Capt. John Raaen, CO of HQ Company, 5th Rangers, wrote in a memoir. “Emotion ran high to go in and assist the 2nd at the Pointe, but our orders under the plan were to shift to Vierville [if the message was not received] and shift we did.”

  It was a critical and wise decision. The rangers provided badly needed support for the 116th at Vierville, and Rudder’s men would soon accomplish the mission at the Pointe on their own.

  • •

  Shortly after the craft made their turn toward the beach, Schneider got the message sent from Rudder’s CP, “Praise the Lord.” It came too late; Schneider was already committed.16

  Companies A and B of the 2nd Rangers hit the beach first. Pvt. Jack Keating was in A Company. He recalled that as his LCA approached the beach, Texas was firing “right over our little old boat, and every time she fired it almost lifted our boat out of the water.” The LCA came in at the boundary between Dog Green and Dog White, just east of the Vierville draw. No one had landed at that spot yet and it was still free of fire. The CO of A Company, Capt. Dick Merrill, called out, “Fellows, it’s an unopposed landing.”

  The coxswain dropped the ramp and the Germans began firing. “The first few minutes in the water,” Keating said, “I will never forget as long as I live. There were machine guns, rifle fire, mortar fire, 88s, and God knows what else. And it felt as though every German was aiming at me.”

  It took Keating a half hour to make his way to the beach. “It’s not like in Hollywood,” he commented. “The actors jump into the water and in three seconds they’re charging up the beach. Well, it isn’t like that.”

  When he finally struggled ashore, Keating got behind a tank with two buddies. “We got behind the engine to get some heat back into our bones and had our first cigarette on French soil.”

  After catching his breath, “I got my wits, as most everybody did, and realized now there’s only one way to go, baby, and that’s you gotta go in.” As he moved across the beach, his musette bag was ripped open by a burst of machine-gun fire. “It ruined my cans of plums and peaches, my bars of candy, my K rations, cigarettes, everything was ruined.”

  On the beach, Keating encountered a captain from the 116th who had been shot in the head and twice through the chest “and he was still alive. He asked me if I would take him to the aid station down the beach. I said, ‘There’s only one way I can do it: I’ll crawl. You get on my back and I’ll crawl.’ It was about 100 yards down the beach. I finally
got him there.”17

  Colonel Schneider observed the landing efforts of the two companies. He saw that “it was a disaster.” Captain Raaen commented, “Schneider was battlewise. He wasn’t about to waste his battalion in a fruitless assault, so he made his second decision: he ordered the British crews to move east, parallel to the beach, until he found the relatively quiet Omaha Dog Red beach. There our two columns did by the right flank and our assault was on.”18

  Sgt. Victor Fast was Schneider’s interpreter. In his view, “Colonel Schneider’s presence of mind and shrewd calculations—a Ranger mind working, not afraid to make a decision—saved a multitude of lives, maybe hundreds.”19

  The two companies from the 2nd Rangers had taken casualties almost as bad as the companies from the 116th, but the 5th Rangers got to the seawall with only six casualties out of some 450 men. Lt. Francis DawsonII of D Company described his experience: “The skipper made an abrupt turn to the left and a tremendous wave hit the craft and we were lifted over several obstacles. Then the ramp opened and I was out. Five days on ship had taken its toll on my legs. After standing for several hours with the sea pounding, my legs just would not move fast enough.” But he made the seawall—which at that spot was constructed of wooden timbers—and sent a runner to inform Lt. George Miller, D Company CO, where his platoon was located.20

  When Captain Raaen landed, “I saw a dismaying sight. Obstacles everywhere. Wounded and dead, lying in the sand. The crack of machine-gun fire passing us by. The puffs in the sand where bullets hit. Those awful 20mm antiaircraft cannon shells bursting overhead. And of course the artillery shells bursting around us.”

  Despite the fire, Raaen was able to trot ashore. Later, to his amazement, he found he had lost only one man from his company. He looked around “and at that point I realized that no one had left that part of the beach.” The rangers had landed on a sector containing assault teams of the 116th whose men were shell-shocked, leaderless, unorganized. Fear had gripped them, and some of the rangers too. Raaen pointed to the seawall and called out, “Ranger headquarters, there!” Simultaneously, he tried to get his life belt off but could not. His radioman was beside him, “cringing with fear. I called him over and told him to cut it off.”

  “Oh, sure, Captain,” the man replied. He stood up beside Raaen and cut it off. “From there on he was never afraid again, nor was I. I had seen in my first minute of combat what showing complete lack of fear could do for your men.” There was another factor in the recovery. In general, the men cringing at the seawall were as confused as they were exhausted and shell-shocked. In the wrong sectors with none of their leaders present, they just did not know what to do. On being given a specific assignment and carrying it out, most men got a grip on themselves and went on to do their duty.

  Although the 5th Rangers had a much easier time coming in at around 0745 than the 116th had experienced at 0630, things were bad enough. As LCIs followed the rangers’ LCAs to Dog White, German artillery began to pound the beach. Raaen saw an LCI ramp get hit by an 88 just as the flamethrower man stepped onto it. “In an instant the boat was a mass of flames. It was horrible to see. I looked away. There were other things to do.”21

  Father Joe Lacy was on the beach, tending to the wounded. Lacy was described by one ranger as a “small, old, fat Irishman.” The rangers had insisted that he could never keep up with them in combat, but he had insisted on coming along. On the transport on the night of June 5-6, he told the rangers, “When you land on the beach and you get in there, I don’t want to see anybody kneeling down and praying. If I do I’m gonna come up and boot you in the tail. You leave the praying to me and you do the fighting.”

  On the beach, men saw Father Lacy “go down to the water’s edge and pull the dead, dying, and wounded from the water and put them in relatively protected positions. He didn’t stop at that, but prayed for them and with them, gave comfort to the wounded and dying. A real man of God.”22

  • •

  When Lt. Jay Mehaffey reached the seawall he could hear only German fire, “and I had the impression that the invasion had failed and that all other Americans had been killed or captured. At that moment on Omaha Beach the invasion of France had ceased to exist and it was in effect a military disaster. The grand design of battalions achieving D-Day objectives had collapsed completely.”23

  But in fact the rangers were getting organized and to work. Captain Raaen saw an old sergeant set up a .30-cal water-cooled machine gun on a tripod. An engineer lieutenant in a green sweater was helping him, carrying water and ammunition. They set up, “the sergeant got behind it and began to traverse and search the bluff to our right front, and I could see troops from the 116th trying to fight their way up the bluffs. The sergeant was firing in support of their advance.”

  The engineer lieutenant was “absolutely oblivious to the German fire around him. He yelled down at the troops that were huddled up against the seawall, cowering, frightened, doing nothing and accomplishing nothing, ‘You guys think you’re soldiers?!’ To no avail.”

  General Cota came down the beach. In the Hollywood version, he calls out “Rangers lead the way!” and off they charged. In the real thing, the battlefield noise was such that he couldn’t be heard ten feet away. What he did was move from group to group. The first he encountered included Raaen, who recognized him (Cota’s son was a West Point classmate of Raaen’s). Raaen reported the location of Colonel Schneider’s CP.

  Cota started encouraging individuals and small groups to move out on their own, saying, “Don’t die on the beaches, die up on the bluff if you have to die, but get off the beaches or you’re sure to die.” To Raaen, he said, “You men are rangers and I know you won’t let me down.”24

  Cota found Schneider at his CP. Cota remained standing; Schneider stood upright to converse. According to one witness, Cota said, “We’re counting on you rangers to lead the way.” Sergeant Fast, Schneider’s interpreter, remembered Cota saying, “I’m expecting the rangers to lead the way.”25

  Whatever Cota’s exact words, the motto of the Rangers became “Rangers lead the way.” It is a valid motto, well earned, but insofar as it implies that it was necessary for the rangers to be inspired to lead, it needs some correcting.

  The rangers did not feel that they needed a kick in the butt from Cota. “There was little or no apprehension about going through the wire and up the hill,” Cpl. Gale Beccue of B Company, 5th Rangers, remembered. “We had done that in training so many times that it was just a matter of course.” He and a private went about their business; they shoved a bangalore torpedo under the barbed wire and blew gaps, then started up. They encountered little opposition: “The German forward positions had been pulling back to prepare rear positions.” Meanwhile, German artillery was concentrating on the follow-up landing craft, making it “a lot worse on the beach than when we had landed.”26

  As for the implication in the Ranger motto that it took rangers to lead the 116th off the beach, the fact is that the first organized company to the top at Vierville was Company C, 116th. By the time the rangers landed, many other individuals from the 116th had gone up. They preceded the rangers. The members of the 116th still at the seawall came from those companies that had been decimated in the first wave. Although they seemed helpless, they were just waiting for someone to tell them what to do, and give them some equipment—they had no bangalore torpedoes, no BARs, no machine guns, no radios, no officers—and some support. When the platoon leaders from the rangers started moving, they joined in. It is a small point, and the Rangers certainly had no intention of casting aspersions on the 116th when they adopted their motto, but it rankles with some of the survivors of the 116th.

  • •

  As Captain Raaen crossed through the gap in the barbed wire, leading his men, he recalled, “There was little Tony Vullo, the smallest man in the battalion, lying across a ruined pillbox with his trousers down, having his gluteus maximus treated for a bullet wound.” He had been shot by a single bullet at
such an angle that he had four separate bullet holes in his butt. “Of course, the men enjoyed ribbing him as we went by.”27

  For some, going up the bluff was relatively safe. Lieutenant Dawson and his platoon from D Company of the 5th Rangers were among those. He reached the top, then turned parallel to the beach and began moving along the crest in a bent-over position, shooting or throwing grenades down on the Germans in the trenches below him.III

  Captain Raaen’s headquarters company was held up by machine-gun fire. Lieutenant Dawson could see the German firing position. It was seventy-five meters away, on the military crest of the bluff, and held two men. Dawson motioned for his BAR man to come forward, but the German machine gunners spotted his movement, turned on him, and killed him.

  Dawson retrieved the BAR and attacked the German position, firing from the hip as he did so. The two terrified Germans jumped out of the pillbox and began to flee up the bluff. Dawson cut them down.

  That freed Raaen. He moved on up and encountered heavy smoke from a brushfire. “Captain, can we put on our gas masks?” one of the men called out.

  Raaen doubted that it was necessary but reluctantly gave permission. As the smoke thickened, he decided to put on his own. He took his helmet off, put it between his knees, with his left hand ripped open the cover of the gas-mask bag, and pulled out the mask. He had forgotten about the apple and orange he had stuffed in the bag; they went bouncing down the bluff.

  He put on his mask, took a deep breath, “and nearly died. I had forgotten to pull the plug on the front that allowed the air to come through. I had to rip off my mask, take a couple more gasps of smoke, put the mask back on, rip off the tab, and I could breathe easily. I reorganized myself, took two steps, and I was out of the smoke. I was so furious that I kept my mask on for about ten or twenty more feet just to punish myself for having weakened and put on the mask.”28