The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  “Stand by to beach!” sang out the coxswains. The boats, now riding in the breakers, pitched violently. Ahead, exposed beyond the breakers, were the obstacles. The moment the bows grounded, down would go the ramps, into the water would go the troops. The G.I.’s braced themselves for the shock of landing.

  But on many of the LCVP’s, it didn’t go at all that way. A hailstorm of machine gun bullets, directed with fiendish precision, started suddenly to drum against the steel plating of their bow ramps. The Nazis on the cliffs above had opened on them with a well-aimed torrent of fire that meant swift death to all those inside the boat should the steel ramp shielding them go down now.

  In those LCVP’s, the men looked at each other a moment in dumb amazement. Were these the handfuls of second rate troops they had been told of, manning the defenses? They were firing like full regiments of sharpshooting veterans. But veterans or rookies, why weren’t they all dead? How, in God’s name, had they survived that shower of bombs, that rocket barrage, ever to man those machine guns?

  Nobody stopped to give any answer. If the machine guns already had them in their sights, it wouldn’t be long till the slower moving casemated 75’s and 88’s trained on them, with only one exploding shell necessary to tear their craft, steel ramp and all and they with it, to shreds. They dare not stay another second.

  On many an LCVP, with a stream of bullets beating on its bow, as its forefoot bumped the bottom more often than not on an offshore sandbar and progress ahead stopped, the ramp never went down. Over the sides to dodge the bullets rattling on the ramp went the G.I.’s, to find themselves usually in water up to their necks, and sometimes most unfortunately, in water deeper even than that.

  On other boats, not at the moment caught by machine gun bursts, the ramps were lowered and the men debarked from forward as intended. But few found conditions much better—rarely was the water less than waist deep as they first plunged into it. But even so, they swiftly learned the beach was so fringed with offshore hidden sandbars on which most of the LCVP’s grounded and dropped their ramps, that a man breasting his way forward with his rifle held high over his head and the water hardly to his hips, might suddenly find himself wholly submerged and swimming for his life before his feet again made any contact with the sand. And when that happened, into the sea went any special equipment he was taking ashore to help in the fight on the beach—bangalore torpedoes, bazookas, mortars, radio equipment.

  Right ahead now were the obstacles, all fully exposed on the sands but with pools of water here and there about them. You could see them all, fearsome looking objects right in front of you—first the “Belgian Gates,” then the stakes and the hedgehogs, draped with mines, hung with long lines of barbed wire. Gingerly the G.I’s avoided the mined obstacles, cautiously snaked through the wire. It slowed them up fearfully. And all the while the fire from the machine guns on the cliffs seemed to be increasing as they got closer in. The whole crest of the ridges, as well as the strongpoints around the four draws, was spitting fire at them.

  No one had time to think. Avoidance of entanglement in the barbed wire right before him which would make a man a sitting duck for the machine gunners on the crest above was the main problem in survival. But a few took time to look ahead. Where were all the bomb craters on the beach beyond the high water line, that marked the explosions of the fragmentation bombs meant to take out the minefields and the concertina wire at the least, since obviously they had failed to knock out many of the dug-in machine-gun nests on the bluffs? But not a single bomb crater was visible anywhere—not on the beach sands, not on the bluff slopes, not on the crests—no craters anywhere. The air bombardment must have been a total loss—that was clear.

  Actually the bombs—all 13,000 of them—due to too late a release, had missed the beach itself literally by miles. Most of them had landed in the open fields three miles inland. The Nazi gunners on the cliffs hadn’t even known it was they who were supposed to be bombed! And as for the myriad pockmarks that should have been left by the hardly less powerful shower of explosive rockets, they weren’t in evidence either. Every rocket apparently had overshot its mark by far—there was no damage whatever to concertina wire, to trenches, to gun positions from either the carpet of bombs from the B-24’s or the rocket drenching from the LCT(R)’s, either of which alone had power enough wholly to have obliterated the defenders. But both had obviously scored clean misses. The enemy not only was undamaged, but was in position in force enough to light up the whole crest with fire.

  The lack of beach cratering, immediately visible to every G.I. who snatched a glimpse ahead as he struggled slowly forward through the obstacles, came like a blow between the eyes. The DD tanks which were to have come in ahead of him to engage such guns above as might have survived all that bombing, hadn’t themselves survived the seas to fire a shot to cover his landing. But ironically enough, those Nazi guns had somehow all survived the bombing and there they were, all firing like mad at him. Sicker at heart now than a few minutes ago he had been sick at the stomach, each G.I. saw that he was in for it. There was still a terrible distance to the first possible shelter on the beach—the seawall, the shingle, and the dunes fringing the road. What chance did he have, naked to the fire of all those guns on the cliff, of ever making that seawall, unless those howitzers coming in on the Dukws soon got in close enough to take the place of the foundered DD’s? Or better yet, unless the Navy spotters flew over soon to zero in the heavy naval guns on those strongpoints shooting down at him and blast them from the bluffs?

  Slowly the exhausted G.I.’s struggled forward through the obstacles, hoping each instant to hear the whistling overhead of counter-battery fire from the 105’s on the Dukws that would silence those murderous machine guns. Or even more, for a sight of those Navy spotting planes coming over the cliffs so the warships offshore could resume fire.

  But not everyone struggling forward was still on his feet. The wounded, prone on the wet sands, were crawling in, trying to keep ahead of the tide advancing now at over a yard a minute, only finally to drown when, so weakened they could no longer make that yard, the rising tide caught up with them. Others, more mercifully killed outright, floated face down amongst the obstacles till fouled in the outer wire. There they bobbed gruesomely about in the paths of still other G.I.’s wading by them until the flooding tide rose high enough to tear them free and wash them further inshore to catch again on the next line of barbs.

  Meanwhile, further offshore, a second tragedy was taking place in the heavy seas to destroy almost the last hope of support for the defenseless G.I.’s struggling toward the beach.

  About halfway back in the lines of landing craft moving toward the beach came the desperately awaited lines of Dukws. In thirteen Dukws on the right rode the thirteen 105 mm. howitzers of the 111th Field Artillery Battalion, all unlimbered, loaded, and ready to fire. To the left of that battery were thirteen more Dukws carrying the guns of the 7th Field Artillery Battalion. And to the left of these were six more Dukws with the six howitzers of the 16th Infantry Cannon Company.

  These thirty-two mobile guns were to help furnish fire support while on the way in, firing from the Dukws underway. But most particularly they were to stay, still afloat, just beyond the obstacle line to furnish close-in artillery support to the infantry already ashore, either in addition to the DD’s, or in place of them should they fail to get through the obstacles.

  But as I had observed weeks before off Selsey Bill the freeboard even of an unloaded Dukw had looked to me as nothing to put up against a voyage in rough seas. With a 105 mm. aboard, together with its ready ammunition and its gun crew of fourteen artillerymen, the remaining freeboard of a Dukw and the seas running off Omaha Beach that morning just didn’t go together.

  The heavily laden Dukws couldn’t take it. Toward the right of the line, which was the windward side and the most exposed to the breaking seas, the Dukws started to fill and swamp. Soon twelve out of the thirteen guns belonging to the 111th Field Artiller
y Battalion had gone down, Dukws and all; with them also had been lost many of their gun crews. Six of the howitzers of the 7th Field Artillery Battalion followed them to the bottom. So also did five of the six howitzers belonging to the 16th Infantry Cannon Company. Long before they came anywhere near the surf line, with twenty-three out of thirty-two of these Dukws already sunk, the crews of the nine remaining were concerned only with staying afloat themselves, not at all with counter-battery fire on the cliffs above Omaha. Bailing desperately, they managed to keep those last few Dukws afloat somehow, but they never fired a shell in support of anybody. Nor till somebody cleared a path for them through the obstacles and up on the hard sand, which as they approached the surf line looked highly dubious for a long while yet, did they dare fire lest the added shock of recoil sink their practically awash Dukws. As a fire support group, the Dukw flotilla with their powerful 105 mm. howitzers had failed the G.I.’s struggling up the sands as badly as had the DD’s with their lighter 75 mms.

  And now, practically unnoticed in all the turmoil of thun-dering guns on sea and land, of foundering Dukws amongst the foam-crested waves, and of the cries of men drowning everywhere in the spreading wakes churning up the seas astern of endless lines of LCVP’s, came the final blow to any hope of artillery support for the struggling G.I.’s trying to wade ashore.

  As scheduled, timed to arrive just after H-hour, when neither bombs from the B-24’s, rockets from the LCT(R)’s, nor shells from the naval barrage should knock them from the sky, came the flight of Piper Cubs flown by the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm. They bore the spotters for the close-in overhead naval fire control that was to lay directed heavy gun fire from the warships on the enemy casemates and strongpoints atop the cliffs, putting an umbrella of intense and accurate naval shells over the G.I.’s as they waded inshore through the obstacles.

  Queer looking planes they were; tiny of course, which was one reason they had been chosen for the job; rather slow in speed, which was just what a naval spotter needed to stay in the vicinity of his target long enough to spot the fall of the shots with some accuracy. And they were totally unlike any fighting plane, allied or Nazi, that anyone there had ever seen.

  Flying low, the spotting planes came in from the Channel, headed for Omaha Beach. The sea beneath them was covered now with hundreds and hundreds of landing craft bound inshore. Purposely, the planes kept well below the cloud cover, so the spotters could see their intended targets the instant they exposed themselves by firing on anything.

  That huge flotilla of small landing craft headed for the beachhead—the LCVP’s, the LCM’s, the LCA’s—had no armament to talk of, but every one of them did have mounted aft a machine gun, sometimes two, mounted for AA work—at the moment the whole surface of the sea was dotted with boats carrying those machine guns. And in general, from coxswain through to bow man, the boats were manned by young seamen seeing action for the first time—all jumpy, and probably excusably so.

  There was that order, passed to all hands on the Near Shore a few days before we shoved off; every coxswain knew it:

  “If you see any aircraft overhead during daylight on the Far Shore, do not fire. They will be ours.”

  But these queer little planes, coming in so low over them were like no planes they had ever seen before. Could they be one of Goebbels’ boasted secret weapons, coming in now to destroy them? Orders or no orders, some trigger-happy gunner on a landing craft (none of them carried any officers) concluded on his own that they must be enemy and opened fire on one. The gunners in the nearby craft, assuming he must somehow have had information that those odd planes were enemy, opened fire also on others, and the firing swiftly spread.

  In a moment, the little planes, easy targets all to that unexpected burst of fire from friendly craft below them, came crashing down into the sea to join the other wreckage roundabout. We had shot down all our own spotters! Now when the G.I.’s most desperately needed naval gunfire as their last remaining hope of support, our warships had all been blinded. And the landing craft, that momentary burst of firing over, kept on for the beach, unaware even of what they had just done.

  The last protection for the G.I.’s wading ashore in the face of all that fire from the superbly manned Atlantic Wall had been destroyed. The best planned, the best rehearsed, and the best supported invasion assault in history was falling on its face, mostly because of bad weather, partly because of that undetected placement by the Nazis of their 352nd Division. The generals were out of it now. If any of those G.I.’s on the beach were to survive even the next hour, it was up to them alone. Every shield provided for their protection had been destroyed.

  CHAPTER 21

  Only three minutes behind the leading line of landing craft and assault troops moving on Omaha Beach came the combat engineer and naval demolition groups, foaming along in twenty-four snub-nosed LCM’s. They were to blast the sixteen highly essential gaps through the obstacle fields, two gaps in each one of the eight sectors into which the beach was divided. For this there were sixteen demolition teams of forty men each (including thirteen men of the Navy per team), sixteen bulldozers, and eight supporting teams for clean-up; twenty-four teams all told.

  All along, these men had suspected during their training on the English sands that theirs might be a suicide mission. By the time they hit the beach on D-day, from what they could see going on inshore of them, they knew it was.

  The soldiers and sailors in the demolition groups caught it even worse than the G.I.’s landing only three minutes ahead of them. Probably because their LCM’s were somewhat bulkier than the LCVP’s, the heavier caliber Nazi artillery in the concrete casemates on the cliffs above decided to leave the LCVP’s and their troops to the machine guns while they themselves took on the more formidable looking LCM’s just astern of them. To landing craft already loaded with high explosives, the results were disastrous both to the mission and to the men in the demolition parties.

  As it was coming in to the breakers, a shell hit the LCM of Team 14. The explosives on deck, waiting to be landed, detonated, killing all the naval personnel.

  The LCM carrying Team 11 had just touched down and eight naval men in that team were dragging clear of the ramp their pre-loaded rubber boat filled with their quota of explosives, when another shell bursting just above set off their cargo. Only one man survived.

  The men of Demolition Team 15 had somewhat better luck. They had got as far as the surf line with their rubber boat when a mortar shell scored a clean hit on it and touched off its demolition charges. Most of the team survived that—only three were killed, though four more were wounded.

  Another LCM, coming in a little late, caught a shell hit directly on its ramp. As it drifted free, out of control, a second shell exploded fairly on its bow, killing fifteen engineers. Only five army men from this craft eventually got ashore.

  The sixteen bulldozers, brought in on LCT’s with a tank battalion trying to get ashore nearby, started to land and work their way in, clearing obstacles as they went. Instantly, they also became prime targets for artillery fire, particularly from the 88’s on the cliff at Pointe de la Percée. Out of sixteen only six ever reached the shore line. And out of those six, three more were promptly smashed by direct hits by artillery. That left the engineers only three bulldozers for the entire beach. The Nazis now were having a field day, shooting up engineers in preference to G.I.’s. The engineer teams, practically immobilized by the requirements of their mission, offered superior targets.

  Meanwhile, in spite of bursting shells and detonating explosives spreading death and destruction all about and amongst them, the remaining engineers and naval demolition groups went doggedly to work on the obstacles. Many of their LCM’s were as much as fifteen minutes late in hitting the surf line. They had been allowed only thirty minutes from H-hour to blow all sixteen of those gaps before two things coming in from seaward would inexorably call a halt to their operation—the rising tide which would by then have flooded the outer obstacles to a de
pth of at least two feet, and the next wave of assault infantry which would prohibit any more blasting lest they blow up our own men coming through, along with the obstacles.

  Disregarding exploding shells and the drumfire of machine gun bullets, those men of both Army and Navy turned to on the wet sands, wiring up obstacles with explosive charges to destroy them and their mines, slashing the barbed wire, running the primacord fuse lines back and forth, offshore to inshore, connecting all the charges for a given gap fifty yards wide and from outer “Belgian Gate” to inshore hedgehog into one vast spider web of primacord and blasting charges so it could be blown all together to leave a cleared path.

  The results were not all that had been anticipated. Out of sixteen gaps desired, only six were actually blown, and those not evenly. Like the troops before them, the engineers also had been set down to the eastward and were never uniformly distributed. Also some teams had been annihilated and others had hard luck of another nature. Team 7 had its charges set and ready to blow when an LCVP, unluckily choosing their area to try to bull its way in, smashed into the obstacles, exploded half a dozen mines and itself, and broke their fuse lines. They could not blow their charges. In a second case, the naval officer about to pull the twin igniters to set off the blast on his gap, was at that instant struck by flying shrapnel that cut clear both his fingers and the primacord fuses. There was no blast.

  The worst disaster hit Team 12. With their gap completely fused and ready to blow, the men of that demolition group were just getting clear themselves when a mortar shell hit the primacord fuse. Off went the blast, together with all the Nazi mines wired to the obstacles. When the smoke cleared, nineteen men of that team, killed or wounded, lay all about in the rising water, plus some nearby unfortunate G.I.’s who had been trying to crawl inshore through obstacles adjacent to that wired gap.