The Longest Day

by Cornelius Ryan

  Into the chaos, confusion and death on the beach poured the men of the third wave—and stopped. Minutes later the fourth wave came in—and they stopped. Men lay shoulder to shoulder on the sands, stones and shale. They crouched down behind obstacles; they sheltered among the bodies of the dead. Pinned down by the enemy fire which they had expected to be neutralized, confused by their landings in the wrong sectors, bewildered by the absence of the sheltering craters they had expected from the Air Force bombing, and shocked by the devastation and death all around them, the men froze on the beaches. They seemed in the grip of a strange paralysis. Overwhelmed by it all, some men believed the day was lost. Technical Sergeant William McClintock of the 741st Tank Battalion came upon a man sitting at the edge of the water, seemingly unaware of the machine-gun fire which rippled all over the area. He sat there “throwing stones into the water and softly crying as if his heart would break.”

  The shock would not last long. Even now a few men here and there, realizing that to stay on the beach meant certain death, were on their feet and moving.

  Ten miles away on Utah Beach the men of the 4th Division were swarming ashore and driving inland fast. The third wave of assault boats was coming in and still there was virtually no opposition. A few shells fell on the beach, some scattered machine-gun and rifle fire rattled along it, but there was none of the fierce infighting that the tense, keyed-up men of the 4th had expected. To many of the men the landing was almost routine. Private First Class Donald N. Jones in the second wave felt as though it was “just another practice invasion.” Other men thought the assault was an anticlimax; the long months of training at Slapton Sands in England had been tougher. Private First Class Ray Mann felt a little “let down” because “the landing just wasn’t a big deal after all.” Even the obstacles were not as bad as everyone had feared. Only a few concrete cones and triangles and hedgehogs of steel cluttered the beach. Few of these were mined and all of them were lying exposed, easy for the engineers to get at. Demolition teams were already at work. They had blown one fifty-yard gap through the defenses and had breached the sea wall, and within the hour they would have the entire beach cleared.

  Strung out along the mile of beach, their canvas skirts hanging limply down, were the amphibious tanks—one of the big reasons why the assault had been so successful. Lumbering out of the water with the first waves, they had given a roaring support to the troops as they dashed across the beach. The tanks and the preassault bombardment seemed to have shattered and demoralized the German troops holding positions back of this beach. Still, the assault had not been without its share of misery and death. Almost as soon as he got ashore, Private First Class Rudolph Mozgo saw his first dead man. A tank had received a direct hit and Mozgo found “one of the crew lying half in and half out of the hatch.” Second Lieutenant Herbert Taylor of the 1st Engineer Special Brigade was numbed by the sight of a man “decapitated by an artillery burst just twenty feet away.” And Private First Class Edward Wolfe passed a dead American “who was sitting on the beach, his back resting against a post, as though asleep.” So natural and peaceful did he seem that Wolfe “had an urge to reach over and shake him awake.”

  Stomping up and down the sands, occasionally massaging his arthritic shoulder, was Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt. The fifty-seven-year-old officer—the only general to land with first-wave troops—had insisted on this assignment. His first request had been turned down, but Roosevelt had promptly countered with another. In a handwritten note to the 4th’s commanding officer, Major General Raymond O. Barton, Roosevelt pleaded his case on the grounds that “it will steady the boys to know I am with them.” Barton reluctantly agreed, but the decision preyed on his mind. “When I said goodbye to Ted in England,” he recalls, “I never expected to see him alive again.” The determined Roosevelt was very much alive. Sergeant Harry Brown of the 8th Infantry saw him “with a cane in one hand, a map in the other, walking around as if he was looking over some real estate.” Every now and then a mortar burst on the beach, sending showers of sand into the air. It seemed to annoy Roosevelt; impatiently he would brush himself off.

  As the third-wave boats beached and men began to wade ashore, there was the sudden whine of German 88 fire and shells burst among the incoming troops. A dozen men went down. Seconds later, a lone figure emerged from the smoke of the artillery burst. His face was black, his helmet and equipment were gone. He came walking up the beach in complete shock, eyes staring. Yelling for a medic, Roosevelt ran over to the man. He put his arm around the soldier. “Son,” he said gently, “I think we’ll get you back on a boat.”

  As yet only Roosevelt and a few of his officers knew that the Utah landings had been made in the wrong place. It had been a fortunate error; heavy batteries that could have decimated the troops were still intact, sited in along the planned assault area. There had been a number of reasons for the mislanding. Confused by smoke from the naval bombardment which had obscured landmarks, caught by a strong current moving down the coast, a solitary control boat had guided the first wave into a landing more than a mile south of die original beach. Instead of invading the beach opposite Exits 3 and 4—two of the vital five causeways toward which the 101st Airborne was driving—the entire beachhead had slipped almost two thousand yards and was now astride Exit 2. Ironically, at this moment Lieutenant Colonel Robert G. Cole and a miscellaneous band of seventy-five 101st and 82nd troopers had just reached the western end of Exit 3. They were the first paratroopers to get to a causeway. Cole and his men concealed themselves in the swamps and settled down to wait; he expected the men of the 4th Division along at any moment.

  On the beach, near the approach to Exit 2, Roosevelt was about to make an important decision. Every few minutes from now on wave after wave of men and vehicles were due to land—thirty thousand men and thirty-five hundred vehicles. Roosevelt had to decide whether to bring succeeding waves into this new, relatively quiet area with only one causeway, or to divert all other assault troops and take their equipment to the original Utah Beach with its two causeways. If the single exit could not be opened and held, a nightmarish jumble of men and vehicles would be trapped on the beach. The general huddled with his battalion commanders. The decision was made. Instead of fighting for the planned objectives which lay back of the original beach, the 4th would drive inland on the single causeway and take out German positions when and where they found them. Everything now depended on moving as fast as possible before the enemy recovered from the initial shock of the landings. Resistance was light and the men of the 4th were moving off the beach fast. Roosevelt turned to Colonel Eugene Caffey of the 1st Engineer Special Brigade. “I’m going ahead with the troops,” he told Caffey. “You get word to the Navy to bring them in. We’re going to start the war from here.”

  Off Utah the U.S.S. Corry’s guns were red-hot. They were firing so fast that sailors stood on the turrets playing hoses on the barrels. Almost from the moment Lieutenant Commander George Hoffmann had maneuvered his destroyer into firing position and dropped anchor, the Corry’s guns had been slamming shells inland at the rate of eight 5-inchers a minute. One German battery would never bother anyone again; the Corry had ripped it open with 110 well-placed rounds. The Germans had been firing back—and hard. The Corry was the one destroyer the enemy spotters could see. Smoke-laying planes had been assigned to protect the “inshore close support” bombarding group, but the Corry’s plane had been shot down. One battery in particular, on the bluffs overlooking the coast above Utah—the gun flashes located it near the village of St.-Marcouf—seemed to be concentrating all its fury on the exposed destroyer. Hoffmann decided to move back before it was too late. “We swung around,” recalls Radioman Third Class Bennie Glisson, “and showed them our fantail like an old maid to a Marine.”

  But the Corry was in shallow water, close to a number of knife-edged reefs. Her skipper could not make the dash for safety until he was clear. For a few minutes he was forced to play a tense cat-and-mouse game with the
German gunners. Trying to anticipate their salvos, Hoffman put the Corry through a series of jolting maneuvers. He shot forward, went astern, swung to port, then to star-board, stopped dead, went forward again. All the while his guns engaged the battery. Nearby, the destroyer U.S.S. Fitch saw his predicament and began firing on the St.-Marcouf guns, too. But there was no letup from the sharp-shooting Germans. Almost bracketed by their shells, Hoffman inched the Corry out. Finally, satisfied that he was away from the reefs, he ordered, “Hard right rudder! Full speed ahead!” and the Corry leaped forward. Hoffman looked behind him. Salvos were smacking into their wake, throwing up great plumes of spray. He breathed easier; he had made it. It was at that instant that his luck ran out. Tearing through the water at more than twenty-eight knots the Corry ran headlong onto a submerged mine.

  There was a great rending explosion that seemed to throw the destroyer sideways out of the water. The shock was so great that Hoffman was stunned. It seemed to him “that the ship had been lifted by an earthquake.” In his radio shack Bennie Glisson, who had been looking out a porthole, suddenly felt that he had been “dropped into a concrete mixer.” Jerked off his feet, he was hurled upward against the ceiling, and then he crashed down and smashed his knee.

  The mine had cut the Corry almost in half. Running across the main deck was a rip more than a foot in width. The bow and the stern pointed crazily upward; about all that held the destroyer together was the deck superstructure. The fireroom and engine room were flooded. There were few survivors in the number two boiler room—the men there were almost instantly scalded to death when the boiler blew up. The rudder was jammed. There was no power, yet somehow in the steam and fire of her death agonies the Corry continued to charge crazily through the water. Hoffman became suddenly aware that some of his guns were still firing—his gunners, without power, continued to load and fire manually.

  The twisted pile of steel that had once been the Corry thrashed through the sea for more than a thousand yards before finally coming to a halt. Then the German batteries zeroed in. “Abandon ship!” Hoffman ordered. Within the next few minutes at least nine shells plowed into the wreck. One blew up the 40-millimeter ammunition. Another set off the smoke generator on the fantail, almost asphyxiating the crew as they struggled into boats and rafts.

  The sea was two feet above the main deck when Hoffman, taking one last look around, dived overboard and swam toward a raft. Behind him the Corry settled on the bottom, her masts and part of her superstructure remaining above the waves—the U.S. Navy’s only major D-Day loss. Of Hoffman’s 294-man crew thirteen were dead or missing and thirty-three injured, more casualties than had been suffered in the Utah Beach landings up to this time.

  Hoffman thought he was the last to leave the Corry. But he wasn’t. Nobody knows now who the last man was, but as the boats and rafts pulled away, men on the other ships saw a sailor climb the Corry’s stern. He removed the ensign, which had been shot down, and then, swimming and climbing over the wreckage, he reached the main mast. From the U.S.S. Butler, Coxswain Dick Scrimshaw watched in amazement and admiration as the sailor, shells still falling about him, calmly tied on the flag and ran it up the mast. Then he swam away. Above the wreck of the Corry, Scrimshaw saw the flag hang limp for a moment. Then it stretched out and fluttered in the breeze.

  Rockets trailing ropes shot up toward the one-hundred-foot-high cliff at Pointe du Hoc. Between Utah and Omaha beaches the third American seaborne attack was going in. Small-arms fire poured down on Lieutenant Colonel James E. Rudder’s three Ranger companies as they began the assault to silence the massive coastal batteries which intelligence said menaced the American beaches on either side. The nine LCAs carrying the 225 men of the 2nd Ranger Battalion clustered along the little strip of beach beneath the cliff overhang. It afforded some protection from the machine-gun fire and from the grenades the Germans were now rolling down on them—but not much. Offshore the British destroyer Talybont and the U.S. destroyer Satterlee lobbed in shell after shell onto the cliff top.

  Rudder’s Rangers were supposed to touch down at the base of the cliff at H Hour. But the lead boat had strayed and led the little flotilla straight toward Pointe de la Percée, three miles east. Rudder had spotted the mistake, but by the time he got the assault craft back on course, precious time had been lost. The delay would cost him his five-hundred-man support force—the rest of the 2nd Rangers and Lieutenant Colonel Max Schneider’s 5th Ranger Battalion. The plan had been for Rudder to fire flares as soon as his men had scaled the cliff, as a signal for the other Rangers waiting in their boats some miles offshore to follow in. If no signal was received by 7:00 A.M., Colonel Schneider was to assume that the Pointe du Hoc assault had failed and head for Omaha Beach four miles away. There, following in behind the 29th Division, his Rangers would swing west and drive for the Pointe to take the guns from the rear. It was now 7:10 A.M. NO signal had been given, so Schneider’s force was already heading for Omaha. Rudder and his 225 Rangers were on their own.

  It was a wild, frenzied scene. Again and again the rockets roared, shooting the ropes and rope ladders with grapnels attached. Shells and 40-millimeter machine guns raked the cliff top, shaking down great chunks of earth on the Rangers. Men spurted across the narrow, cratered beach trailing scaling ladders, ropes and hand rockets. Here and there at the cliff top Germans bobbed up, throwing down “potato masher” hand grenades or firing Schmeissers. Somehow the Rangers dodged from cover to cover, unloaded their boats and fired up the cliff—all at the same time. And off the Pointe, two DUKWS—amphibious vehicles—with tall, extended ladders, borrowed for the occasion from the London Fire Brigade, tried to maneuver closer in. From the tops of the ladders Rangers blasted the headlands with Browning automatic rifles and Tommy guns.

  The assault was furious. Some men didn’t wait for the ropes to catch. Weapons slung over their shoulders, they cut hand-holds with their knives and started up the nine-story-high cliff like flies. Some of the grapnels now began to catch and men swarmed up the ropes. Then there were wild yells as the Germans cut the ropes and Rangers hurtled back down the cliff. Private First Class Harry Robert’s rope was cut twice. On his third try he finally got to a cratered niche just under the edge of the cliff. Sergeant Bill “L-Rod” Petty tried going up hand over hand on a plain rope but, although he was an expert free climber, the rope was so wet and muddy he couldn’t make it. Then Petty tried a ladder, got thirty feet up and slid back when it was cut. He started back up again. Sergeant Herman Stein climbing another ladder, was almost pushed off the cliff face when he accidentally inflated his Mae West. He “struggled for an eternity” with the life preserver but there were men ahead and behind him on the ladder. Somehow Stein kept on going.

  Now men were scrambling up a score of ropes that twisted and snaked down from the top of the cliff. Suddenly Sergeant Petty, on his way up for the third time, was peppered by chunks of earth flying out all around him. The Germans were leaning out over the edge of the cliff, machine-gunning the Rangers as they climbed. The Germans fought desperately, despite the fire that was still raining on them from the Rangers on the fire ladders and from the destroyers offshore. Petty saw the climber next to him stiffen and swing out from the cliff. Stein saw him, too. So did twenty-year-old Private First Class Carl Bombardier. As they watched, horrified, the man slid down the rope and fell, bouncing from ledges and rock outcroppings, and it seemed to Petty “a lifetime before his body hit the beach.” Petty froze on the rope. He could not make his hand move up to the next rung. He remembers saying to himself, “This is just too hard to climb.” But the German machine guns got him going again. As they began to spray the cliff dangerously near him, Petty “unfroze real fast.” Desperately he hauled himself up the last few yards.

  Everywhere men were throwing themselves over the top and into shell holes. To Sergeant Regis McCloskey, who had successfully brought his half-sinking ammunition boat in to the beach, the high plateau of Pointe du Hoc presented a weird, incredible sight. The
ground was so pitted by the shells and bombs of the pre-H-Hour naval and air bombardment that it looked like “the craters of the moon.” There was an eerie silence now as men pulled themselves up and into the protective craters. The fire had stopped for the moment, there was not a German to be seen, and everywhere men looked the yawning craters stretched back toward the mainland—a violent, terrible no-man’s-land.

  Colonel Rudder had already established his first command post, a niche at the edge of the cliff. From it his signal officer, Lieutenant James Eikner, sent out the message “Praise the Lord.” It meant “All men up cliff.” But it was not quite true. At the base of the cliff the Rangers’ medical officer, a pediatrician in private practice, was tending the dead and the dying on the beach—perhaps twenty-five men. Minute by minute the valiant Ranger force was being chipped away. By the end of the day there would only be ninety of the original 225 still able to bear arms. Worse, it had been a heroic and futile effort—to silence guns which were not there. The information which Jean Marion, the French underground sector chief, had tried to send to London was true. The battered bunkers atop Pointe du Hoc were empty—the guns had never been mounted.*