by Mark Moyar
On the day that Rome fell, a new cast of Rangers boarded ships for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy. The 2nd and 5th Ranger battalions, formed at Tennessee’s Camp Forrest in September 1943, were among the 156,000 troops assigned to the amphibious D-Day landings. While the Cisterna cataclysm had discredited the use of Rangers in raids during sustained land campaigns, the Overlord planners believed that the special training and superior physical prowess of the Rangers made them the preferred option for some particularly difficult operations at the start of the invasion. The 2nd Ranger Battalion received the most daunting mission on the entire fifty-mile invasion front, the capture of Pointe du Hoc.
A promontory overlooking both Omaha Beach and Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc was shielded from amphibious invaders by cliffs one hundred feet tall. In the months leading up to the invasion, Allied reconnaissance had spotted six 155mm howitzers in thick concrete casemates atop the cliffs. These guns could inflict severe damage if fired continuously at American landing craft, potentially causing such a mess of sunken vessels as to prevent the invasion forces from advancing past the beaches into terrain where they would be less vulnerable to German firepower and more capable of harming Germans.
Allied aircraft and battleships had pounded Pointe du Hoc for weeks, plastering it with more than ten kilotons of ordnance—comparable in explosive power to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Waves of heavy bombers from the US Eighth Air Force and the British Royal Air Force Bomber Command hit the promontory in the predawn hours of June 6, and then the battleship USS Texas assailed it with dozens of fourteen-inch shells. The firing did not abate until the landing craft carrying the 2nd Ranger Battalion were just a few hundred yards from Pointe du Hoc.
For a few moments, all was quiet, giving rise to hopes that the coastal defenses had been obliterated by the colossal maelstroms of bombs and shells. The American boats were nearly to the narrow shale beach in front of Pointe Du Hoc when the shore exploded with fire from German machine guns. The 7.92mm bullets took the lives of some Rangers before they could get out of the boats. Others struck down Rangers as they clambered into the surf or ran across the shallows.
Using forty-eight rocket launchers, the Rangers shot ropes and rope ladders toward the clifftops, aiming for surfaces where the grapnels at the ends of the ropes were most likely to catch. Several of the ropes and rope ladders were too waterlogged to reach sufficient height, bouncing off the cliff face and falling onto the beach. Others were unable to hook into the bomb-blasted earth on top of the promontory, so that one tug from the Rangers below brought them tumbling down. About twenty of all the hooks caught. German defenders pulled out some of these hooks or cut the ropes, flinging them down at the beach in defiance. But a few hooks held fast, and up these ropes platoons of Rangers were soon climbing.
Some of the Rangers who reached the shale beach intact made the ascent with extension ladders, consisting of sixteen-foot sections that linked together. One man, Staff Sergeant William Stivison, mounted a motorized extension ladder that had been obtained from Merryweathers Ltd. of London, a manufacturer of firefighting equipment. As the ladder increased in length, Stivison fired the twin Lewis machine guns that had been fastened to the top rungs. When the ladder reached a height of ninety feet, however, it swayed so violently in the wind that it had to be retracted.
Germans threw grenades down at the Rangers who were trying to scale the cliffs. They fired rifles and machine pistols straight down and at angles. Nevertheless, enough Rangers made it up the cliffs within the first hour to push the Germans away from the clifftops. Breaking into the huge gun casemates, the Rangers discovered to their dismay that the howitzers had been removed and telephone poles inserted in their places. The pre-invasion bombardment had, at some point, convinced the Germans to tow the guns to another location.
Two Ranger sergeants, spotting tire marks leading away from the casemates, followed the tracks to a camouflaged position. To their amazement, the Rangers saw before them the six howitzers, stacks of unused ammunition at their sides, with no Germans anywhere to be seen. The two sergeants attached thermite grenades to the howitzers’ traversing and elevation mechanisms, which aimed the barrels. Generating heat of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit for half a minute, the grenades melted the devices into worthless hunks of metal, rendering the mighty weapons useless.
The ineffectiveness of the Germans in protecting the promontory and the guns led the Rangers to suspect that the Germans’ reputation for martial prowess was a fiction. They were quickly disabused of that notion, however, by the competence of the ensuing German counterattacks at Pointe du Hoc. During the next twenty-four hours, German officers led a series of concerted charges on the 2nd Ranger Battalion, whistling and shouting commands to the Germany infantry. Taking advantage of their familiarity with the terrain and its entrenchments, the assault troops overran many of the clifftop foxholes that the Rangers had occupied. German soldiers took foxholes to the rear of other Rangers, blurring the battle lines and leaving some of the Americans isolated, like single checkers near the opponent’s end of the board. “The Germans had an awful lot of underground storage with interconnecting tunnels for shells and food,” explained Lieutenant Charles “Ace” Parker. “The Germans would pop up anyplace. They were very, very annoying. You’d see the dirt move aside and a German would pop up out of the bottom of a shell hole. It would be necessary to shoot him on the spot.”
Captain Walter “Doc” Block of Chicago, the battalion’s medical officer, set up shop in an underground chamber containing sixteen bunks that still had the smell of the Germans who had slept in them the night before, a distinctive odor that GIs attributed to the German diet of sausage and cheese. Block’s work would be immortalized by the reporting of Lieutenant G. K. Hodenfield, a Stars and Stripes correspondent who had been notified three days before D-Day that he would accompany the battalion tasked with assaulting the most formidable German redoubt. Block “worked all night with a flickering candle and sometimes a flashlight,” Hodenfield wrote in his dispatch. “At times there were so many patients that men had to lie in the command post until, maybe, one of the other patients would die or could be patched up well enough to go back out.”
In the early morning of June 7, the Germans took their biggest swing at the 2nd Ranger Battalion. Infiltrating the American lines in the dark, they surrounded an entire Ranger platoon and took its men captive. Well-coordinated German assaults breached several sectors of the Ranger perimeter, putting the whole battalion in danger of dismemberment. Officers at the Ranger command post were discussing the possibility of retreat when a Ranger from E Company burst in. “The Germans have broken through,” he panted. “We couldn’t hold ’em. My God, there’s guys gettin’ killed everywhere!” A short time later, another Ranger reported that D Company had been wiped out. German fire was homing in on the command post.
The officers conferred briefly. A Ranger lieutenant emerged from the conclave to pass the word that the entire battalion would pull back immediately if the Germans launched another attack.
“Do you mean not even try to fight them off?” complained Private William Petty. “Some Ranger outfit we are!” A young man who had disdained authority from his early childhood, Petty had not endeared himself to the officers during the battalion’s brief history. Had they been conducting an exercise, the lieutenant might merely have been irritated, or even amused. With their lives on the line, however, he had no patience for such carping.
“You’ve had a couple of years of college, so you should know what ‘immediately’ means,” snarled the lieutenant. “I mean just that—no heroics; withdraw the moment that they hit.”
“How does one prepare for withdrawal?” Petty persisted. “That wasn’t included in Ranger training.”
“You’re the self-appointed leader out there,” the lieutenant yelled back, his face flushing crimson. “Figure it out yourself, damn it!”
As feared, it was not long before the Germans initiated a new attack, h
eralded by a torrent of whistles, yells, and machine pistol fire. The speed and ferocity of the onslaught so unnerved some of the Rangers that they surrendered. Most of the others pulled back, save for a dozen Rangers who did not get the withdrawal order in time. Unaware that a dozen Rangers were stranded, the Ranger battalion commander called upon the US Navy to lay waste to the field that the Germans had just repossessed. The battleship Texas obliged with its mammoth fourteen-inch guns, the shells creating holes twenty feet wide and five feet deep. Lieutenant George Kerchner, one of the dozen men who had survived the German infantry assaults and was now attempting to survive the American barrage, pulled the Catholic prayer book from his pocket. Huddled in a ditch, he thumbed the pages and prayed to God to spare him from the earthshaking, man-destroying explosions. “I read that prayer book through from cover to cover, I suppose, half a dozen times, and I prayed very sincerely for protection,” Kerchner recollected. “I’ve been so ashamed to ask for anything since then. I figure I used up all I had coming to me.”
As in the case of many of the Allied amphibious operations in Italy, naval gunfire kept the Germans from completing the annihilation of their American adversaries. After two days of intense battle, the Germans retreated from Pointe du Hoc into the Norman hedgerows. Much additional bloodshed awaited the Americans in those hedgerows, but the 2nd Ranger Battalion would not be among the units that would bleed there, for the invasion’s first two days had chewed up the battalion so badly that it was pulled out of combat for an extended rehabilitation. Seventy percent of its Rangers had been killed, wounded, or captured.
In another notable similarity to the Italian Campaign, Ranger units in France would end up participating routinely in regular infantry operations once the Allied invasion forces pushed out of the D-Day beachhead. The 5th Ranger Battalion, which sustained 114 casualties during the Normandy landing, took part in the battle for the citadel at Brest in the late fall, a close-quarters struggle in which the combatants resorted to the use of scaling ladders, grappling hooks, and other instruments of medieval warfare. The 5th Rangers took 137 casualties at Brest, and 131 more during infantry battles in December. By February 1945, the sum of the casualties it had incurred in France was close to its remaining strength of 398 Rangers.
On February 23, the 5th Ranger Battalion finally received an opportunity to conduct the type of raid for which it had been designed—though even this operation would ultimately devolve into conventional warfare. To support the advance of the US 10th Armored Division into the German heartland, the battalion was ordered to cross the Saar River and occupy a position along the Irsch-Zerf road, four miles in the enemy’s rear. A major route of German supply and reinforcement, the Irsch-Zerf road would be critical for German forces attempting to disrupt the American armored penetration. The Rangers were told they would need to hold the area for forty-eight hours, until a regular infantry unit relieved them.
At 8 p.m., the Rangers arrived at a pontoon footbridge that American engineers had hurriedly built across the roaring Saar. Water splashed up onto the ten-inch planks of the footbridge, but fortunately the frosty air was not cold enough to form ice on the stepping surface. When Rangers reached the river’s edge, they were told, “Don’t fall in, as nobody will attempt to rescue you.”
Six companies of Rangers crossed the bridge and treaded into German-held territory. During the march toward Zerf, they scarfed up a total of eighty-five German prisoners. Upon reaching the Irsch-Zerf road, the Rangers discovered a collection of empty pillboxes in an adjacent field. They took up residence in the concrete fortifications, then seeded the road with antitank mines. Training their machine guns and bazookas on the road, the Rangers lay in waiting for German military traffic. They did not have to wait long for a heavy vehicle to trip the first mine.
Once the German high command realized that a thorn had been placed in its rear, it dispatched nearby combat units to pluck it out. German artillery pounded the field occupied by the Rangers, followed by infantry assaults. By this date, however, five and a half years into the war, German infantry units were a far cry from the formations that had once overrun most of Europe. To replace the skilled and combat-hardened men who had fallen in the prime of life in Russia, North Africa, Italy, and France, Hitler was now conscripting boys and old men and throwing them into battle with minimal training, alongside Poles and Austrians who evidenced little zeal for the Nazi fatherland. The Rangers easily repulsed the first attacks with small arms and artillery.
The 5th Ranger Battalion appeared to have the situation well in hand, until word came that the American replacement forces would not be coming in forty-eight hours as originally promised. The Rangers had brought supplies to last only a few days, and as the Germans sent larger and better units to assault the field, the Rangers exhausted most of their ammunition and had to request a resupply by air. The first supplies dropped by air to the Rangers missed their mark, falling into German hands. On the second day of air-dropping, however, the Rangers received enough ammunition and food to last the nine days it would take their replacements to arrive.
The German attacks continued apace. On a few occasions, the Rangers deemed the German infantry’s chances of success so high that they called American artillery on their own position, in the knowledge that it would kill more Germans than Americans since the Germans were moving in the open while the Americans were crouching in pillboxes and foxholes. Sergeant Joe Drodwell recalled that after one American artillery shower, “I never saw so many dead Germans in my life. The area was just literally covered with bodies. Some of our guys got killed, too, but nothing like the Germans.” During its time on the Irsch-Zerf road, the 5th Ranger Battalion sustained 90 casualties while killing an estimated 299 enemy and taking 328 prisoners.
One other Ranger battalion, the 6th, staked its claim to fame in early 1945. Lieutenant General Walter Krueger, commander of the US Sixth Army in Brisbane, Australia, had formed the 6th Ranger Battalion after hearing of the successes of Darby’s Rangers in the European Theater. During the fall of 1944, the battalion had participated in the initial American invasion of the Philippine archipelago, spearheading the invasion of several Japanese-held islands. When General Krueger received word in late January 1945 that the Japanese were holding Americans prisoner in central Luzon, near the city of Cabanatuan, he ordered a company from the 6th Ranger Battalion to bound past the rest of the advancing American forces to raid the prison. The facility was thirty miles from the nearest American position, a frightfully long distance for a small raiding force that would be moving on foot, but for Krueger the risks of waiting were even greater. On December 14, 1944, the Japanese had slaughtered 150 Allied prisoners in the Philippine province of Palawan, and they might choose to do the same at Cabanatuan when the US Sixth Army came near.
Commanding the 6th Ranger Battalion was Lieutenant Colonel Henry Mucci, an ebullient Italian American whom the troops had nicknamed “Little MacArthur” because of the pipe that constantly hung from his mouth, and perhaps also because of his imperious bearing. Mucci entrusted the mission to his C Company, on account of its commander, Captain Robert Prince, whom Mucci rated the best of his company commanders. The son of a Washington State apple distributor and a graduate of Stanford University, Prince was the quiet type—analytical, unexcitable, and cool under pressure. He was only twenty-five years old, and had never seen combat.
Like many of the Ranger operations in Europe against retreating Germans, the raid on Cabanatuan could not wait for prolonged planning and rehearsal. Lieutenant Colonel Mucci and Captain Prince had only a few hours for initial planning, which they devoted to the long march to the prison. Bereft of information on the prison and its guards, they would not draw up the assault plan until they neared the camp and consulted with a small group of American reconnaissance soldiers who would be sneaking to the camp ahead of the Rangers.
On the afternoon of January 28, 1945, 121 Rangers began the march toward Cabanatuan. Dressed in fatigues without insignia or rank, the
Rangers wore soft caps rather than helmets on orders from Mucci, who thought the helmets weighed too much, made too much noise, and reflected too much light. Wherever possible, the column marched through high elephant grass or bamboo groves to elude the eyes of the Japanese and their spies. Philippine guerrilla allies joined forces with the Rangers along the way, and they eventually outnumbered the Rangers by two to one.
Mucci and Prince linked up with the reconnaissance personnel on January 29. From the scouts they learned that an estimated 7,000 Japanese soldiers were currently located in the city of Cabanatuan, four miles from the camp, and 1,000 were bivouacked in bamboo thickets just one mile away. Mucci prevailed upon Philippine guerrillas to take up blocking positions on the two roads that the neighboring Japanese units would use to reach the camp in the event of an alarm. As soon as the guerrillas heard the Rangers open fire on the prison, they would blow the nearest bridge and engage any Japanese soldiers attempting to relieve the prison’s garrison.
The prison camp sat in the middle of an open plain of rice paddies, which offered the Rangers no concealment whatsoever. The assault force would have to crawl through the open paddies for a mile and hope that the Japanese soldiers manning the watchtowers were not vigilant enough to see them. The crawl began on the evening of January 30 at 5:45 p.m.
Digging their fingernails into the muck, the Rangers clawed their way forward for an hour and forty-five minutes. In the dimming twilight, none of the Japanese guards caught sight of the crab-like advance of the Ranger company. By the time the Americans reached the prison perimeter, night had descended.
Creeping up to the prison fences, the Rangers took aim at the Japanese pillboxes, guard posts, and towers, locating sentries by the orange glow of their cigarettes. At the signal of a lone gunshot, Ranger weapons erupted in a concert of bullets, maintaining a steady fortissimo for fifteen seconds. None of the defensive positions had been thickly fortified, and none of their occupants survived the Ranger fusillade. Busting open the lock on the main gate, the Rangers stormed inside, losing just one man in subduing the remainder of what had been a Japanese force of more than 200.
