The Longest Day

by Cornelius Ryan

  Out of the Utah Beach area the 4th Division poured inland. Their D-Day losses were light: 197 casualties, sixty of whom were lost at sea. Terrible fighting lay ahead for the 4th in the next weeks, but this was their day. By evening 22,000 men and 1,800 vehicles would be ashore. With the paratroopers, the 4th Division had secured the first major American beachhead in France.

  Savagely, inch by inch, men fought their way off Bloody Omaha. From the sea the beach presented an incredible picture of waste and destruction. The situation was so critical that at noon General Omar Bradley aboard the Augusta began to contemplate the possible evacuation of his troops and the diversion of follow-up forces to Utah and the British beaches. But even as Bradley wrestled with the problem, the men in the chaos of Omaha were moving.

  Along Dog Green and Dog White, a crusty fifty-one-year-old general named Norman Cota strode up and down in the hail of fire, waving a .45 and yelling at men to get off the beach. Along the shingle, behind the sea wall and in the coarse beach grass at the base of the bluffs, men crouched shoulder to shoulder, peering at the general, unwilling to believe that a man could stand upright and live.

  A group of Rangers lay huddled near the Vierville exit. “Lead the way, Rangers!” Cota shouted. Men began to rise to their feet. Farther down the beach was an abandoned bulldozer loaded with TNT. It was just what was needed to blow the antitank wall at the Vierville exit. “Who drives this thing?” he thundered. No one answered. Men seemed still paralyzed by the merciless gunfire that flayed the beach. Cota began to lose his temper. “Hasn’t anyone got guts enough to drive the damn thing?” he roared.

  A red-haired soldier got slowly up from the sand and with great deliberation walked over to Cota. “I’ll do it,” he said.

  Cota slapped him on the back. “That’s the stuff,” the general said. “Now let’s get off the beach.” He walked away without looking back. Behind him, men began to stir.

  This was the pattern. Brigadier General Cota, the 29th Division’s assistant commander, had been setting an example almost from the moment he arrived on the beach. He had taken the right half of the 29th’s sector; Colonel Charles D. Canham, commanding the 116th, had taken the left. Canham, a bloody handkerchief tied around a wrist wound, moved through the dead, the dying and the shocked, waving groups of men forward. “They’re murdering us here!” he said. “Let’s move inland and get murdered!” Private First Class Charles Ferguson looked up in amazement as the colonel went by. “Who the hell is that son of a bitch?” he asked and then he and the other men with him got up and headed toward the bluffs.

  In the 1st Division’s half of Omaha Beach, the veterans of Sicily and Salerno came out of the shock faster. Sergeant Raymond Strojny rallied his men and led them up the bluffs through a mine field. On top he knocked out a pillbox with a bazooka. Strojny had become “just a little mad.” A hundred yards away Sergeant Philip Streczyk had had his fill of being pinned down, too. Some soldiers remember that Streczyk almost booted men off the beach and up the mined headlands, where he breached the enemy barbed wire. A short while later, Captain Edward Wozenski met Streczyk on a trail running down the bluffs. Horrifed, Wozenski saw Streczyk step on a Teller mine. Streczyk said coolly, “It didn’t go off when I stepped on it going up, either, Captain.”

  Ranging up and down the 1st Division sector, oblivious to the artillery and machine-gun fire that raked the sands, was the 16th’s commanding officer, Colonel George A. Taylor. “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach,” he yelled, “the dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Everywhere intrepid leaders, privates and generals alike, were showing the way, getting the men off the beach. Once started, the troops did not stop again. Technical Sergeant William Wiedefeld, Jr., stepped over the dead bodies of a score of his friends and, with face set, went up the hill through the mine fields. Second Lieutenant Donald Anderson, nursing a wound—he had been shot in the back of the neck and the bullet had come out through his mouth—found that he had “the courage to get up, and at that point I changed from a rookie in combat to a veteran.” Sergeant Bill Courtney of the 2nd Rangers climbed to the top of the ridge and yelled down to his squad, “Come on up! The s.o.b.s are cleaned out!” Immediately there was a burst of machine-gun fire to his left. Courtney wheeled, hurled a couple of grenades and then yelled again, “Come on! Come on! The s.o.b.s are cleaned out now!”

  Even as the troops began to advance, the first few landing craft began driving right up on the beaches, ramming their way through the obstacles. Coxswains on other boats saw it could be done and followed. Some destroyers, backing up the advance, came so close to the shore that they ran the risk of foundering and, at point-blank range, fired at enemy strongpoints all along the bluffs. Under the covering barrage, engineers began to complete the demolition job they had begun almost seven hours earlier. Everywhere along Omaha Beach the deadlock was breaking up.

  As the men found it possible to move forward, their fear and frustration gave way to an overpowering anger. Near the top of the Vierville bluff, Ranger Private First Class Carl Weast and his company commander, Captain George Whittington, spotted a machine-gun nest manned by three Germans. As Weast and the captain circled it cautiously, one of the Germans suddenly turned, saw the two Americans and yelled, “Bitte! Bitte! Bitte!” Whittington fired, killing all three. Turning to Weast he said, “I wonder what bitte means.”

  Out of the horror that had been Omaha Beach, troops pressed inland. At one-thirty General Bradley would receive the message: “Troops formerly pinned down on beaches Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red advancing up heights behind beaches.” By the end of the day men of the 1st and 29th divisions would be one mile inland. The cost of Omaha: an estimated 2,500 dead, wounded and missing.

  7

  IT WAS 1:00 P.M. when Major Werner Pluskat got back to his headquarters at Etreham. The apparition that came through the door bore little resemblance to the commander his officers knew. Pluskat was shivering like a man with a palsy, and all he could say was, “Brandy. Brandy.” When it came his hands shook so uncontrollably that he was almost unable to lift the glass.

  One of his officers said, “Sir, the Americans have landed.” Pluskat glared and waved him away. His staff crowded around him, one problem uppermost in their minds. The batteries, they informed Pluskat, would soon be low on ammunition. The matter had been reported to regiment, he was told, and Lieutenant Colonel Ocker had said that supplies were on the way. But nothing had arrived as yet. Pluskat rang Ocker.

  “My dear Plus,” came Ocker’s airy voice over the wire, “are you still alive?”

  Pluskat ignored the question. “What’s happening about the ammunition?” he asked bluntly.

  “It’s on the way,” said Ocker.

  The colonel’s calmness maddened Pluskat. “When?” he shouted. “When will it arrive? You people don’t seem to realize what it’s like up here.”

  Ten minutes later Pluskat was summoned to the phone. “I’ve got bad news,” Ocker told him. “I’ve just learned that the ammunition convoy has been wiped out. It will be nightfall before anything gets up to you.”

  Pluskat wasn’t surprised; he knew from bitter personal experience that nothing could move along the roads. He also knew that at the rate his guns were firing, the batteries would be out of ammunition by nightfall. The question was, which would reach his guns first—the ammunition or the Americans? Pluskat gave orders for his troops to prepare for close combat and then he wandered aimlessly through the château. He felt suddenly useless and alone. He wished he knew where his dog Harras was.

  8

  BY NOW THE British soldiers who had fought D Day’s first battle had been holding on to their prize, the bridges over the Orne and the Caen Canal, for more than thirteen hours. Although Major Howard’s glider-borne troops had been reinforced at dawn by other 6th Airborne paratroopers, their numbers had been steadily dwindling under fierce mortar and small-arms fire. Howard’s men had stopped several sma
ll, probing counterattacks. Now the tired, anxious troopers in the captured German positions on either side of the bridge eagerly awaited the link-up from the sea.

  In his foxhole near the approaches to the Caen Canal bridge, Private Bill Gray looked at his watch again. Lord Lovat’s commandos were almost an hour and a half overdue. He wondered what had happened back up on the beaches. Gray didn’t think the fighting could be much worse there than it was at the bridges. He was almost afraid to lift his head; it seemed to him the snipers were becoming more accurate by the minute.

  It was during a lull in the firing that Gray’s friend, Private John Wilkes, lying beside him, suddenly said, “You know, I think I hear bagpipes.” Gray looked at him scornfully. “You’re daft,” he said. A few seconds later, Wilkes turned to his friend again. “I do hear bagpipes,” he insisted. Now Gray could hear them, too.

  Down the road came Lord Lovat’s commandos, cocky in their green berets. Bill Millin marched at the head of the column, his pipes blaring out “Blue Bonnets over the Border.” On both sides the firing suddenly ceased, as soldiers gazed at the spectacle. But the shock didn’t last long. As the commandos headed across the bridges the Germans began firing again. Bill Millin remembers that he was “just trusting to luck that I did not get hit, as I could not hear very much for the drone of the pipes.” Halfway across, Millin turned around to look at Lord Lovat. “He was striding along as if he was out for a walk round his estate,” Millin recalls, “and he gave me the signal to carry on.”

  Disregarding the heavy German fire, the paratroopers rushed out to greet the commandos. Lovat apologized “for being a few minutes late.” To the weary 6th Airborne troopers, it was a stirring moment. Although it would be hours before the main body of British troops reached the farthermost points of the defense line held by the paratroopers, the first reinforcements had arrived. As the red and green berets intermingled, there was a sudden, perceptible lightening of the spirits. Nineteen-year-old Bill Gray felt “years younger.”

  9

  NOW, ON THIS fateful day for Hitler’s Third Reich, as Rommel raced franctically for Normandy, as his commanders on the invasion front tried desperately to halt the storming Allied assault, everything depended on the panzers: the 21st Panzer Division just behind the British beaches, and the 12th S.S. and the Panzer Lehr still held back by Hitler.

  Field Marshal Rommel watched the white ribbon of road stretching out ahead and urged his driver on. “Tempo! Tempo! Tempo!” he said. The car roared as Daniel put his foot down. They had left Freudenstadt just two hours before and Rommel had uttered hardly a word. His aid, Captain Lang, sitting in back, had never seen the field marshal so depressed. Lang wanted to talk about the landings, but Rommel showed no inclination for conversation. Suddenly Rommel turned around and looked at Lang. “I was right all along,” he said, “all along.” Then he stared at the road again.

  The 21st Panzer Division couldn’t get through Caen. Colonel Hermann Von Oppeln-Bronikowski, commanding the division’s regiment of tanks, drove up and down the column in a Volkswagen. The city was a shambles. It had been bombed some time earlier and the bombers had done a good job. Streets were piled up with debris, and it seemed a Bronikowski that “everyone in the city was on the move trying to get out.” The roads were choked with men and women on bicycles. There was no hope for the panzers. Bronikowski decided to pull back and go around the city. It would take hours, he knew, but there was no other way. And where was the regiment of troops that was supposed to support his attack when he did get through?

  Nineteen-year-old Private Walter Hermes of the 21st Panzer Division’s 192nd Regiment had never been so happy. It was glorious. He was leading the attack against the British! Hermes sat astride his motorcycle, weaving ahead of the advance company. They were heading toward the coast and soon they would pick up the tanks and then the 21st would drive the British into the sea. Everybody said so. Nearby on other motorcycles were his friends, Tetzlaw, Mattusch and Schard. All of them had expected to be attacked by the British before now, but nothing had happened. It seemed strange that they hadn’t caught up with the tanks yet. But Hermes guessed that they must be somewhere ahead, probably attacking already on the coast. Hermes drove happily on, leading the advance company of the regiment up into the eight-mile gap that the British commandos still hadn’t closed between Juno and Gold. This was a gap the panzers could have exploited to split the British beaches wide open and menace the entire Allied assault—a gap that Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski knew nothing whatever about.

  In Paris at OB West, Major General Blumentritt, Rundstedt’s chief of staff, called Speidel at Rommel’s headquarters. The one-sentence conversation was duly recorded in Army Group B’s War Diary. “OKW,” said Blumentritt, “has released the 12th S.S. and Panzer Lehr divisions.” The time was 3:40 P.M. Both generals knew that it was too late. Hitler and his senior officers had held up the two panzer divisions for more than ten hours. There was no hope of either division reaching the invasion area on this vital day. The 12th S.S. would not get to the beachhead until the morning of June 7. The Panzer Lehr, almost decimated by continuous air attacks, would not arrive until the ninth. The only chance of catching the Allied assaults off balance now lay with the 21st Panzer Division.

  Close on 6:00 P.M., Rommel’s Horch pulled up in Rheims. In the city commander’s headquarters Lang placed a call to La Roche-Guyon. Rommel spent fifteen minutes on the phone, getting a briefing from his chief of staff. When Rommel came out of the office, Lang saw that the news must have been bad. There was silence in the car as they drove off. Sometime later Rommel drove his gloved fist into the palm of his other hand and said, bitterly, “My friendly enemy, Montgomery.” Still later, he said, “My God! If the Twenty-first Panzer can make it, we might just be able to drive them back in three days.”

  North of Caen, Bronikowski gave the order to attack. He sent thirty-five tanks, under the command of Captain Wilhelm von Gottberg, ahead to take the heights at Périers, four miles from the coast. Bronikowski himself would try for the ridge at Biéville two miles away with another twenty-five tanks.

  General Edgar Feuchtinger, commander of the 21st Panzer, and General Marcks, the 84th Corps commander, had come to see the attack go in. Marcks came over to Bronikowski. He said, “Oppeln, the future of Germany may very well rest on your shoulders. If you don’t push the British back into the sea, we’ve lost the war.”

  Bronikowski saluted and replied, “General, I intend to do my best.”

  As they moved up, the tanks fanning out across the fields, Bronikowski was halted by Major General Wilhelm Richter, commander of the 716th Division. Bronikowski saw that Richter “was almost demented with grief.” Tears came to his eyes as he told Bronikowki, “My troops are lost. My whole division is finished.”

  Bronikowski asked, “What can I do, sir? We’ll help as best we can.” He got out his map and showed it to Richter. “Where are their positions, sir? Will you point them out?”

  Richter just shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  Rommel turned half around on the front seat of the Horch and said to Lang, “I hope there isn’t a second landing right now from the Mediterranean.” He paused for a moment. “Do you know, Lang,” he said thoughtfully, “if I was commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in fourteen days.” He turned back and stared ahead. Lang watched him, miserable, unable to help. The Horch roared on through the evening.

  Bronikowski’s tanks rumbled up the rise at Biéville. So far they had encountered no enemy resistance. Then, as the first of his Mark IV tanks neared the top, there was the sudden roar of guns opening up somewhere in the distance. He couldn’t tell whether he had run headlong into British tanks or whether the firing was from antitank guns. But it was accurate and fierce. It seemed to be coming from half a dozen places all at once. Suddenly his lead tank blew up without having fired a shot. Two more tanks moved up, their gun firing. But they seemed to make no impression o
n the British gunners. Bronikowski began to see why: He was being outgunned. The British guns seemed to have a tremendous range. One after the other Bronikowski’s tanks were knocked out. In less than fifteen minutes he lost six tanks. He had never seen such shooting. There was nothing Bronikowski could do. He halted the attack and gave the order to pull back.

  Private Walter Hermes couldn’t understand where the tanks were. The advance company of the 192nd Regiment had reached the coast at Luc-sur-Mer, but there was no sign of the panzers. There was no sign of the British either, and Hermes was a little disappointed. But the sight of the invasion fleet almost made up for it. On the coast, off to Hermes’s left and right, he saw hundreds of ships and craft moving back and forth, and a mile or so offshore were warships of every description. “Beautiful,” he said to his friend Schard. “Just like a parade.” Hermes and his friends stretched out on the grass and took out their cigarettes. Nothing seemed to be happening and no one had given them any orders.

  The British were already in position on the Périers heights. They stopped Captain Wilhelm von Gottberg’s thirty-five tanks even before the panzers got into firing range. In a matter of minutes Gottberg lost ten tanks. The delay in orders, the time wasted trying to get around Caen had given the British the opportunity to consolidate fully their positions on the strategic heights. Gottberg roundly cursed everyone he could think of. He pulled back to the edge of a wood near the village of Lebissey. There he ordered his men to dig in their tanks, hulls down, with only the turrets showing. He was sure the British would drive on Caen within a few hours.

  But to Gottberg’s surprise time passed without an attack. Then, a little after 9:00 P.M., Gottberg saw a fantastic sight. There was the slowly mounting roar of planes and, off in the distance against the still-bright evening sun, he saw swarms of gliders coming in over the coast. There were scores of them, flying steadily in formation behind their tow planes. Then as he watched, the gliders were cast off and, wheeling and banking, they came soughing down, to land out of sight somewhere between him and the coast. Gottberg swore angrily.