Now he was not so sure. Messages from the beachhead remained fragmentary, including: “Obstacles mined, progress slow.” An aide dispatched by PT boat returned drenched and discouraged an hour later to report that troops were pinned down; a naval officer came back with a more vivid assessment: “My God, this is carnage!” Told that Admiral Moon was jittery over ship losses, Bradley advised Collins, his VII Corps commander, “We’ve got to get the buildup ashore even if it means paving the whole damned Channel bottom with ships.” Another 25,000 troops and 4,000 vehicles were scheduled to land at Omaha on the second tide. Should those waves be diverted to Utah or to the British beaches? Would that consign those now ashore to annihilation?
The man described in his high school yearbook as “calculative” pushed through the canvas war-room door and climbed to Augusta’s bridge, squinting at the opaque shore and mulling his odds.
* * *
Not for some hours would Bradley learn that by late morning his prospects on Omaha had brightened considerably, beginning at beach Dog White. There Brigadier General Norman Cota, known as Dutch and the son of a French-Canadian railroad telegrapher who emigrated to New England, had reached the five-foot timber seawall half a mile east of the beach exit leading to Vierville. Soldiers who could outcrawl the tide lay clustered like barnacles on the banked littoral, hugging wooden groins that jutted from the seawall.
We must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads, Cota had told officers from the 116th Infantry as they sailed for Normandy. Now he improvised. Chewing an unlit cigar, jut-jawed with pale eyes and a hooked nose, Cota scrabbled west along the groins. Pistol in hand, he sang tuneless, ad-libbed lyrics under his breath. Encountering a cluster of troops, he demanded, “What outfit is this? Goddamn it, if you’re Rangers get up and lead the way.… I know you won’t let me down.… We’ve got to get these men off this goddamned beach.” A bangalore torpedo threaded through a double apron of barbed wire blew a gap across the beach road beyond the seawall. Machine-gun fire cut down the first GI into the breach—“Medico, I’m hit,” he cried, then sobbed for his mother until he died—but others, including Cota, scampered across the blacktop and through the burning marsh grass beyond.
Up the bluff they climbed, single file, marking mines with white engineer tape, cigarettes, and scraps from a ration box. Smoke hid them from German marksmen but made them weep until they strapped on gas masks. Mortar rounds killed a trio of soldiers next to Cota and wounded his radioman; knocked flat but unscratched, the general regained his feet and followed the snaking column toward the hillcrest, past captured Germans spread-eagled on the ground. Then over the lip of the ridge they ran, past stunted pines and through uncut wheat as Cota yelled, “Now let’s see what you’re made of!” GIs hauling a captured MG-42 machine gun with ammunition belts draped around their necks poured fire into enemy trenches and at the broken ranks pelting inland.
By ten A.M. tiny Vierville had fallen but for snipers. Outside a cobbler’s shop dead horses lay in their traces, still harnessed to a Wehrmacht supply wagon. Terrified civilians peeked from their window casements onto a road clogged with rubble. Another rifle company scuffing into the village found Cota twirling his pistol on his finger. “Where the hell have you been, boys?” he asked.
Elsewhere along Omaha, in what one witness called “a final stubborn reserve of human courage,” more desperate men found additional seams up the escarpment. “I walked slowly,” a 29th Division soldier recalled, “dragging my unwilling soul with me.” Halfway up the slope, a soldier missing a lower leg sat smoking a cigarette and fiddling with the tourniquet tied at his knee. “Watch it,” he warned. “There are some personnel mines here.” Captain Joe Dawson’s G Company used GI corpses as stepping stones through a minefield. “Fire everywhere it seems,” a major scribbled on an envelope used as a diary. “Prayed several times.” When a German feigned surrender and threw a grenade from his raised hand, disemboweling a Ranger lieutenant, the dead officer’s enraged men not only killed the killer but each man reportedly “shot the corpse six or eight times” as they filed past.
A dozen destroyers—some so close to the beach that their keels scraped bottom—plied the inshore stations to fire onto targets marked by Army tracer and tank rounds. One soldier watching shells arc across the bluff reported that “a man standing there felt as if he could reach up and pick them out of the air.” When a German artillery observer was spotted in the eleventh-century Colleville church tower, U.S.S. Emmons took a dozen rounds to find the range, then with the thirteenth knocked the tower into the nave and adjacent graveyard below. A similar call for fire against the church of St.-Laurent shattered the steeple with the first shell. After one shuddering broadside from Texas, an RAF pilot spotting for the battleship cried from his Spitfire cockpit, “Oh, simply champion!”
By noon the enemy line had been broken by half a dozen penetrations “coagulating haphazardly,” as the official Army history later noted. Two fresh regiments, the 115th Infantry and the 18th Infantry, swarmed over Easy Red before the ebb tide despite the loss of many landing craft to mines and misadventure. Later the 26th Infantry also was ordered to shore, putting the entire infantry complement of the 1st Division back in France for the first time since 1918. By midafternoon, some five thousand infantrymen had scaled the bluff, finally free of plunging fire although still tormented by fires flanking and grazing, direct and indirect. Scraps of news reached the fleet, including a message dispatched from a colonel in a DUKW: “Men believed ours on skyline.… Things look better.” But only after one P.M. did Omar Bradley, pacing on Augusta’s flag bridge, learn in a message from V Corps that the day was saved, if not won: “Troops formerly pinned down on beaches Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red advancing up heights behind beaches.”
Cota continued his charmed day by hiking from Vierville down the narrow ravine toward Dog Green, forcing five prisoners yanked from foxholes to guide him through a minefield. “Come on down here, you sons of bitches,” he yelled at snipers plinking away from the hillside. In a great geyser of masonry, engineers on the beach flats used a thousand pounds of dynamite to demolish a long antitank wall nine feet high and six feet thick. Armored bulldozers scraped debris from the Vierville draw, thus opening another portal for tanks, trucks, and the mechanized juggernaut that would be needed to liberate first Normandy, then France, then the continent beyond.
* * *
That left the British and Canadians, beating for three beaches to the east. Several tactical modifications aided the trio of assault divisions in Second Army: landing craft were launched seven miles from shore rather than the eleven typical in the American sector; the Royal Navy’s bombardment lasted four times longer than that of the U.S. Navy; and half a dozen gadgets eschewed by the Yanks as either too newfangled or unsuited to the American beaches—such as an armored flamethrower and a mine flail bolted to the nose of a tank—proved useful at several points during the battle.
In other respects, “the bitches,” as Tommies called Gold, Juno, and Sword, were of a piece with Utah and Omaha, if less benign than the former and less harrowing than the latter. Some amphibious Shermans, another British brainstorm, foundered in the chop, and many LCT engine rooms flooded from leaks and the low freeboard. Landing craft ferrying Centaur tanks proved no more seaworthy than the DUKWs overloaded with American howitzers; scores capsized. OVERLORD’s eastern flank was considered especially vulnerable, so two battleships and a monitor pounded the landscape with 15-inch guns from twenty thousand yards, buttressed by five cruisers and fifteen destroyers. Thousands of rockets launched from modified landing craft soared inland “like large packs of grouse going for the next parish with a strong wind under their tails,” as one brigadier reported. This twenty-eight-mile stretch of coast was defended by ninety shore guns and eight German battalions whose ranks included many conscripted Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainians of doubtful fealty to the Reich. British naval and air bombardments later were found to have demolished one in ten enemy mortars, one in five mach
ine guns, and one in three larger guns, in addition to those abandoned by their affrighted crews. Still, British assault infantrymen were said to be disappointed, having “expected to find the Germans dead and not just disorganized.”
During the run to shore, inevitable recitations from Henry V were bellowed above the roar of diesel engines and booming guns. More than a few men felt themselves accursed for swilling proffered tots of rum, “thick as syrup and as dark,” in a Royal Engineer’s description; thousands of expended “spew bags” bobbed on the boat wakes. Heartfelt snatches of “Jerusalem” could be heard in wallowing landing craft, and “The Beer Barrel Polka” blared from a motor launch loudspeaker.
On, on, you noble English! Closest to Omaha lay Gold, barricaded with 2,500 obstacles along its 3.5-mile length. Engineers managed to clear only two boat lanes on the rising tide, and stout fortifications at Le Hamel would hold out until reduced by petard bombs and grenades later in the day. “Perhaps we’re intruding,” one soldier mused. “This seems to be a private beach.” Royal Marines storming the fishing village of Port-en-Bessin, on the Omaha boundary, suffered over two hundred casualties during the forty-eight hours needed to finally rout enemy diehards there. But by early afternoon on June 6, all four brigades of the 50th Division made shore, scuttling inland and threatening to turn the German flank.
On the eastern lip of the Allied beachhead, the British 3rd Division hit Sword on a narrow front in hopes of quickly knifing through to Caen, nine miles inland. “Ramp down! All out!” the boat crews cried, echoed by sergeants barking, “Bash on! Bash on!” Enemy mortar and machine-gun fire bashed back, and Royal Engineers cleared no beach obstacles on the first tide. Tommies “with shoulders hunched like boxers ready for in-fighting” found themselves in the surf, as a Daily Mail reporter wrote, “treading on an invisible carpet of squirming men.” A Commando sergeant reported that the crimson-tinted seawater “made it look as though men were drowning in their own blood,” and a lieutenant in the King’s Liverpool Regiment told his diary: “Beach a shambles. Bodies everywhere.… Phil killed.” The northwest wind shoved the high-tide line to within thirty feet of the dunes, leaving the narrow beach utterly clogged and so disrupting landing schedules that a reserve brigade remained at sea until midafternoon. Even so a kilted piper with a dirk strapped to his leg, Sergeant Bill Millin, waded through the shallows playing “Highland Laddie” despite cries of “Get down, you mad bastard, you’re attracting attention to us!” Skirling “Blue Bonnets over the Border,” Millin then marched off with Commandos “in parade-ground style” to search for British glidermen holding the Orne bridges.
The wind-whipped tide and a bullying current also played hob with the Canadian 3rd Division on Juno, wedged between the two British beaches. Almost one-third of three hundred landing craft were lost or damaged, and only six of forty tanks made shore. Street fighting raged along the Courseulles harbor, and fortified houses behind the twelve-foot seawall at Bernières kept Canadian artillery and vehicles jammed on the beaches. Pigeons carrying Reuters dispatches from Juno flew south rather than across the Channel, provoking outraged cries of “Traitors! Damned traitors!”
Despite such setbacks and a thousand Canadian casualties—about half the number expected—the Royal Winnipeg Rifles and Regina Rifles by midmorning had pushed two miles inland. Across the Anglo-Canadian bridgehead, once troops punched through the coastal defenses few German units remained to block village crossroads. At two P.M., Piper Millin and the Commandos led by their brigadier, Lord Lovat—wearing a green beret and white sweater, and swinging his shillelagh—tramped across the Bénouville bridge held by Major John Howard and his glider force; now the seaborne and airborne forces were linked on both invasion flanks. Fifteen miles to the west, Allied fighter-bombers at noon pounced on a counterattacking regiment of 2,500 Germans with twenty-two assault guns near Villiers-le-Sec. British troops hieing from Gold finished the rout at three P.M., killing the German commander and shattering the enemy column.
Reporters were told to expect a briefing by British officers at four P.M. in Caen. No such briefing transpired: the 3rd Division spearhead, harassed by mines and heavy gunfire, stalled three miles north of the city. Troops from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who were issued bicycles and told to “cycle like mad behind the Sherman tanks into Caen” found bikes “not at all the ideal accessory” for crawling under mortar fire. The city and the road linking it to Bayeux remained in German hands, an inconvenience both vexing and consequential.
Yet the day seemed undimmed. Canadian troops had pressed six miles or more into France, and British soldiers reported reaching Bayeux’s outskirts. Despite sniper fire nagging from a copse nearby, engineers by day’s end began building a refueling airstrip at Crépon with a twelve-hundred-foot packed-earth runway. Prisoners trudged to cages on the beach, holding up trousers from which the buttons had been snipped to discourage flight. French women who emerged from cellars to kiss their liberators found themselves happily smudged with camouflage kettle soot and linseed oil. Inquiries by officers in their public-school French—“Ou sont les Boches?”—often provoked wild pointing and an incomprehensible torrent of Norman dialect. But there was no misunderstanding the scratchy strains of “La Marseillaise” played over and over by a young girl outside her cottage on an antique gramophone with a tin horn. Allons enfants de la Patrie, / Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
A Conqueror’s Paradise
AS if in pursuit of the sinking sun, a black Horch convertible raced west across France from the German frontier, threading the Marne valley from Reims, then swinging to the right bank of the Seine north of Paris. Since early May, Allied fighter-bombers had demolished all twenty-six bridges spanning the river from the French capital to the sea, converting the bucolic drive to Normandy into a circuitous annoyance. The sleek Horch, with its winged chrome ornament on the radiator grille and twin spare tires mounted behind the front fenders, provoked stares as the car sped through drowsy villages and farm communes. But it was the German officer in a leather coat in the front seat with a map spread across his knees who drew the eye: the familiar flat face with a narrow, sloping forehead and incipient jowls belonged to Hitler’s youngest but most celebrated field marshal. Even French peasants recognized him, and as the convertible raced past they called aloud to one another: “C’est Rommel!”
Yes, Rommel. He had driven home to Herrlingen in southwest Germany the previous day with a pair of gray suede shoes from Paris as a surprise fiftieth-birthday present for his wife, Lucie-Maria. He had meant to confer afterward with the Führer in his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden and to complain about shortages of men and matériel for the Atlantic Wall, but had instead been summoned back to France by grave reports of Allied landings in Normandy on Tuesday morning. “Tempo!” he urged the driver. “Tempo!” Turning to an aide in the rear seat, he added, “If I was commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in fourteen days.”
At 9:30 P.M., with little left of the long summer day, sentries in camouflage capes waved the Horch into the red-roofed river village of La Roche–Guyon, forty miles west of Paris. Past the church of St.-Samson and sixteen square-cut linden trees, the car turned right through a spiked wrought-iron gate to stop with a screech in a stone courtyard. The Château de La Roche–Guyon had presided above this great loop of the Seine since the twelfth century and had served since early March as Rommel’s Army Group B headquarters. Clutching his silver-capped baton, the field marshal climbed a flight of steps to the main door, determined to salvage what he could from the day’s catastrophe.
“How peaceful the world seems,” he had told his diary in late April, “yet what hatred there is against us.” If France proved “a conqueror’s paradise,” as one German general claimed, La Roche–Guyon was Rommel’s secluded corner of that heaven. Brilliant fields of poppies and irises hugged the Seine near the nineteenth-century suspension bridge, now sitting cockeyed on the river bottom. Cézanne and Renoir had painted here together
in the summer of 1885, following Camille Pissarro and preceding Georges Braque, who in 1909 made angular studies of the castle in buff and blue. Two hundred and fifty steep steps led to a battlement atop the circular medieval keep, where Rommel, after a hare shoot or a stroll with his dachshunds, sometimes watched barges loaded with fuel and ammunition glide past in the evening.
On the chalk cliffs overhanging the river’s north bank and the castle’s peppermill roofs stood a bristling array of antiaircraft batteries; deep tunnels had been blasted to house German troops without damaging the ducal orangery or the crypt crowded with dead seigneurs. The current duke, a spindly Nazi sympathizer, remained in residence without evident discomfort, and the duchess had donated four bottles of a luscious 1900 claret to commemorate the Führer’s birthday on April 20. The chateau’s timber-ceilinged Hall of the Ancestors, hung with family oils, had been consigned to Rommel’s staff as a table-tennis room. From the field marshal’s bedroom, with its canopied four-poster, fifteen-foot windows gave onto a fragrant rose terrace and another river vista.
Clacking typewriters and snatches of Wagner from a phonograph could be heard as Rommel ascended the grand staircase and hurried through the billiards room to the salon that now served as his office. Pegged parquet floors creaked beneath his boots. Four magnificent tapestries depicting the Jewish queen Esther had recently been shunted into storage, but fleecy painted clouds still drifted across the twenty-five-foot ceiling, and the inlaid desk on which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had been signed in 1685 remained for Rommel’s personal use. He stood instead, hands clasped behind his back, listening as staff officers sought to make sense of the sixth of June. “He’s very calm and collected,” an artillery officer wrote. “Grim-faced, as is to be expected.”
The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 Page 11
