The Far Shore

by Edward Ellsberg

  At this point, the NSFCP which had come ashore with the 18th Infantry took a hand. Its radio equipment was in good order. Offshore lay a destroyer, close in now that the tide was nearly at full flood, with its bow practically scraping bottom in its anxiety to get even closer if it could. The NSFCP contacted the destroyer, by radio maneuvered it to a position farther east from which, close in to the beach where it was possible to see laterally along it, the destroyer had a line of sight inside the blast screen of that German 88, able at last to gaze practically straight down the muzzle of that camouflaged gun.

  That settled it. For the destroyer gunners, with their target pinpointed for them by that NSFCP just below it, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. At short range, with their flat trajectory shells passing only a few yards above the heads of the G.I.’s on the beach, it took only three salvos, starting a little high to keep on the safe side, to bring the fourth salvo down squarely on the armored gun shield protecting the opening in the concrete casemate enclosing that deadly 88.

  Two high velocity naval armor piercing 5-inch shells went through the armor, of that gun shield, leaving two very neat round holes, and burst inside. Immediately, all the Nazis inside that massive pillbox still able to move, rushed out in surrender. All that was required of the 2nd Battalion of the 18th then was to accept their surrender and occupy the position.

  That ended all resistance on both sides of the St. Laurent Draw. Immediately, the bulldozers pushed forward to fill in the anti-tank ditches blocking access to the draw, the engineers of the 16th Regiment turned to on clearing mines and cutting away wire, while on the western slope the Engineer Special Brigade turned to with some freshly disentangled bulldozers to carve an entirely new road up the draw clear of any of the mines bedded in the old road. By 1300, vehicles were moving up this new road, the first of any whatever able to move inland.

  The St. Laurent Draw became immediately the major funnel for all traffic off the beach and inland, and the log jam on the beachhead was broken at last.

  Farther west, conditions were rapidly being improved also, now that some communication was being established by NSFCP’s with the offshore warships.

  In front of the Vierville Draw, up which went the only paved road off the beach and before which the worst slaughter anywhere along the beachhead had taken place, lay behind the seawall the shattered fragments of Companies A and B of the 116th, completely immobilized.

  Here no progress at all had been made, except that Captain Goranson and his little group of Rangers, before passing inland, had cleaned out the machine guns and mortars on the high right shoulder. But the heavier artillery in the thickly concreted casemates and the machine-gun nests on the left shoulder made the draw itself as impassable as ever. And besides that, all thought of movement anyway had been thoroughly beaten out of the dazed minds of those anywhere near it and still alive. They were mentally as well as physically pinned down.

  Into this scene of death and desolation came straggling from the east some engineer demolition units, destined originally to land before the Vierville Draw with the first wave, but set down by the tide for an ultimate landing far to the eastward. Dragging their demolition materials, they had finally made their way along the cluttered beach back to the area on which they had been briefed, mainly for the destruction there of the massive concrete road blocks the Nazis had set up across the pavement of that vital road mounting the draw.

  But it was obvious to the engineers on a casual glance up the draw that so long as those casemated guns and automatic weapons above commanded the road, the only demolition work likely to be done around the roadblocks would be executed by the Nazis on the bodies of anyone foolish enough to show himself near them.

  However, along with the engineers there arrived an NSFCP sent ashore to help the 116th Infantry on whose sector all this came. Not far offshore lay the destroyer McCook. Some nine miles out lay the battleship Texas which, since lifting fire at H-hour on Pointe du Hoe, had been given nothing to do.

  For the NSFCP, it was an ideal set-up. A little on their right was a massive target, clearly visible to them from the beach, but invisible from seaward. Offshore were two warships, waiting only for someone to designate a target for them. The NSFCP immediately lined up both vessels for action. Since the concrete casemates housing the guns on the western shoulder of the Vierville Draw were by far the most massive of any on the Omaha Beach, it was decided that the McCook’s 5-inch guns would yield to the 14-inch guns on the Texas in the initial bombardment.

  At about 1200, the Texas opened fire from long range, giving her main battery shells a high angle plunging effect on impact. The fall of the shells, four per salvo, was swiftly spotted and moved on the target by the NSFCP.

  After the fall of the fourth salvo, the McCook, which from her offshore position could see somewhat better up the draw than could the observers closer in on the beach, radioed in to the beach to direct the Texas to cease firing. On the McCook even through the tremendous clouds of dust raised by the exploding shells, they could see the Germans coming out of their shattered emplacements, hands held high in token of surrender.

  There being no one nearer, the beaten Nazis proceeded down the draw to surrender to the demolition engineers.

  That left only the strongpoints on the eastern flank of the draw, mainly trenches, mortar pits, and machine-gun nests. On these, the McCook and her 5-inch battery turned to, helped by a few more salvos for good measure from the heavy guns on the distant Texas. All this observed naval fire, to put it euphemistically, swiftly “neutralized” completely these defenses. Except for a few snipers who still constituted a minor nuisance incapable of being dealt with by warship guns, the Vierville Draw was open. The engineers promptly turned to with their own explosives on demolishing the road blocks.

  1300.

  With the defenses of the Vierville Draw now only shattered blocks of concrete and smashed trenches, there remained on the western flank of the Omaha Beach only the casemated guns on Pointe de la Percée. But these were not to be laughed off; they were quite as able as ever to destroy any landing vessels approaching the Vierville Draw and to block any traffic attempting to move up that exit. The destruction they had already spread on both landing craft and tanks on the western half of the beach had been terrific.

  From various vantage points amidst the debris of the fortifications once protecting the Vierville Draw but now no longer exposed to fire from there, the NSFCP could clearly discern the gun emplacements on Pointe de la Percée. But set as they were well into the eastern face of the promontory and a trifle back from the point itself, they were neither visible from the sea nor exposed to any direct fire from offshore. They were intended to be wholly safe from fire from seaward and so they appeared to be. For not only could the Texas not see the emplacements on Pointe de la Percée, but a good substantial part of the rocky point of the cliff itself lay between the emplacements carved into the precipice and the guns of the Texas off the coast.

  Still there was a way, for heavy naval guns at any rate. Directed by the same NSFCP, the Texas next opened fire with her main battery on the exposed end of the cliff itself. Under that tremendous battering, the rock started to give way. Before long, the whole face of the cliff, together with all the guns there emplaced, tumbled into the ocean.

  It is not of record as to whether the Nazi commander of the fortifications on Pointe de la Percée, who at 0800 was reporting that the invasion had been smashed at the water’s edge and “hurled back into the sea,” survived to report that shortly after 1300, Pointe de la Percée itself had been smashed and all his guns (and he perhaps with them) hurled forward into the same sea.

  It was with good reason that Bradley, who all morning had been left to agonize helplessly over the situation on the beachhead, reported with relish that the first message to reach him directly from Gerow of the V Corps read:

  “Thank God for the U. S. Navy!”

  By a little after 1300, naval gunfire from all along the beach h
ad knocked out every major gun position and shortly thereafter the advancing G.I.’s had overrun the remaining machine-gun nests topping the bluffs. The defenses of the Atlantic Wall on the Omaha Beach had all crumbled. The way to the interior for the troops still pouring ashore was cleared at last—once the remaining obstacles, the minefields, and the debris covering the beachhead were removed by the engineers.

  The issue on the beaches themselves had been decided. The scene shifted now from the battle of the beachhead to the battle of the build-up—from the bloody struggles of small groups of men battling each other amongst the obstacles and the defenses of the Omaha sands to a much larger question.

  Could Eisenhower now, without any ports, somehow get across those open beaches into Normandy men enough and the vast tonnage of heavy military hardware and supplies he needed to make a fighting army of them, before von Rundstedt and Rommel between them could concentrate there from the overwhelming forces they had already in France the shock troops and the Panzers needed to crush him in counterattack inland?

  That now was what was becoming Bradley’s major headache. For Bradley on the Augusta, just beginning to receive the news from Colonel Talley in his Dukw that our G.I.’s, no longer pinned down, were at last swarming over the bluffs and moving inland, had cause now to ponder his own grim judgment made on the Near Shore on the eve of shoving off for the assault:

  “Just as soon as we land, this business becomes primarily a business of build-up. For you can almost always force an invasion, but you can’t always make it stick.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Tailing along, behind the Invasion Armada as it sailed away from its ocean rendezvous, Point Yoke south of the Isle of Wight, bound for the Far Shore, came Captain Dayton Clark and his motley flotilla comprising Force Mulberry. They and the Artificial Harbors with them in tow for Normandy were the devices on which rested what chance we had to make the invasion stick.

  Clark himself was embarked in a 110 foot subchaser; Stanford, his deputy commander, in another. Both tiny tubs were having a rough time of it in heavy seas. So also were Lieut. Barton and his squadron of little ST harbor tugs, hardly seagoing vessels either. Then came more queer vessels of all kinds, mostly British, from ships with horns projecting over their bows intended to help in linking up the Whale sections, to shallow-draft ancient excursion side-wheelers pressed into service as tenders, all rolling wildly now they were exposed to the open sea, and a stormy one at that.

  Astern came dozens of merchant ships and that dummy battleship, the Centurion, going like victims to the sacrifice, all to be sunk to form the Gooseberry breakwaters. For them, the seas on this, their last voyage, were nothing to be concerned about.

  And finally, astern of all, came the first flight of Phoenixs, looking like nothing ever seen at sea before, ten massive blocks of concrete towering above the waves, moving majestically along at three knots on long towlines astern the ocean-going tugs. They, of course, could not pretend even to keep up with an armada steaming along at ten. It was obvious to everyone that should the Nazi E-boats sortie out of Cherbourg, the Phoenixs, far astern of all else and their major protective convoys, so slow moving as to be practically stationary, would form ideal targets. Should the E-boats, if able to believe such monstrosities were real and not simply hallucinations brought on by battle psychosis, fire torpedoes at them, they couldn’t miss.

  And ultimately behind those Phoenixs would come more Phoenixs, mingled with Bombardons, Whales, and the Lobnitz pierheads, all lumbering along behind tugs, all to be assembled finally on the Far Shore in their proper pattern.

  It took Captain Clark and his mongrel fleet a long time to cross. Night had fallen on D-day while still they were at sea—a night for them made tense by complete ignorance of how the assault flung ashore in the storm had gone—whether our G.I.’s were firmly on the beach and they could proceed with their part, or whether Dr. Goebbels had been a good prophet and our assault had been smashed before the Atlantic, Wall. The night sky ahead was laced with fiery tracers, vivid flares burst here and there over the dark Channel—very evidently, whatever had happened on the beachhead during the day, Goering and his Luftwaffe had come over Omaha for a night air attack and were then engaged in making it.

  Dawn came on D + 1. Captain Clark with his part of Force Mulberry moved into the area off the Omaha Beach, already jammed with thousands of ships; Commander Stanford with his force peeled off to starboard, headed for the Utah Beach.

  Clark examined the bluffs and the cluttered area of sea just in front of them. From long before, based on soundings shown on the French charts of that coast, the locations for the Mulberry Harbor and its breakwaters had been laid out. But were those French soundings, made, fifty years before, still reasonably accurate on a shoreline notorious for shifting sands? He must find out before he sank his floating breakwater units.

  Accompanied by Commander Passmore, Royal Navy, who in a tiny British survey boat only thirty feet long, the Gulnare, had made the passage across the storm-beaten Channel with her much bigger sisters, Clark started out to check. He and Passmore with handlines sounded the site for his Gooseberry line first, found it in reasonable agreement with expectations. The Gulnare set out the marker buoys for the first six ships to be sunk, and moved on to survey the sites for the Phoenixs.

  Clark, grim, tense, and already worn from months of battling on the Near Shore to make a reality of the units needed for Mulberry, as he sounded the depths for his first breakwater also surveyed the scene inshore of him. The Nazi artillery emplacements on the bluffs and cliffs not half a mile off, had, thank God, all been knocked out on D-day. Some small arms fire, sporadic but annoying, was still coming, oddly enough, from tunnel ends you could see in the cliff faces—Nazis would suddenly pop into view there, fire on the beach below, just as suddenly retreat into the tunnel, safe from reprisal. Till somehow the G.I.’s on the plateau could trace out the intricate tunnel system leading from the bluffs to the villages inland, and flush out the snipers using them as bases, there was no stopping that.

  All along the beach, small landing craft and some somewhat larger—LCVP’s, LCT’s, and LCI(L)’s—were busily pouring troops ashore, ferried in from troopships still prudently some miles at sea. And Clark swiftly saw why prudence kept them there. For the beachhead before him, surprisingly enough, was still the target for directed enemy artillery fire—from well inland. Apparently all the mobile field artillery of the 352nd German Division was now massed some miles back in camouflaged positions in the wooded high ground there. And controlled by Nazi observers hidden in the tunnel network piercing the bluff faces, somehow still in direct communication with those guns, all that was necessary to bring down on any spot along the beachhead a galling fall of bursting shrapnel was to provide there a decently attractive target for artillery.

  So while the little landing craft, relatively fast on their feet so to speak, and well dispersed along the beach brought in the troops, the really large transports, the ocean-going fleet, stayed far offshore, well out of artillery range. And they were going to remain there too, until Gerow’s G.I.’s, pushing inland should, it was hoped, in the next few days overrun those positions and shove the Nazis and their artillery far back into the hinterland, out of range of Omaha.

  But that did Clark no good. He was going to have to bring ocean-going freighters close in to shore that very day, within easy range of those unseen batteries, to sink them on his Gooseberry line for his initial breakwater. And that sinking problem, involving all his ST tugs to hold a vessel in position against the tidal currents while he blasted out its bottom and set it down, was now going to be complicated by having to be done under enemy artillery fire—something never anticipated.

  But there was no way out.

  The first Liberty ship destined for the Gooseberry line, the James lredell, started to make its approach. Clark, with Lieutenant Commander Bassett in charge of the ST tugs for the Gooseberries, boarded her, accompanied by Lieutenant Hoague and his specially trai
ned crew of sinking specialists to do the actual blasting.

  As the James lredell came inshore, the first vessel of anything like her size to come within range, some shells from inland began to fall in her vicinity—none very close, as she was still a moving target. The bursts were close enough, however, to convince the merchant skipper and his crew that this was nothing they wished any further part in. They refused to go any farther. Fortunately, however, the renovated crews of the ST tugs offered no objections, so with the captain and the crew of that freighter removed, Clark and his tugs took over completely. With a few shells bursting about but none hitting her, under Clark’s direction Bassett and the ST tugs brought the lredell in to the marked position about half a mile offshore, and held her there a brief moment while they fired the prepared explosive charges in her holds and blew out her bottom. Down went the James lredell. Enough of her upper hull and her superstructure remained above water, however, to make a fine shelter in her lee.

  Captain Clark and his forces in swift succession brought in two more freighters and very neatly put them on the bottom also astern the James lredell—each bow slightly overlapping the stern of the vessel ahead, to leave no gaps in that line of sunken ships as a breakwater.

  But by now these activities were awakening great interest in quite diverse spots—the Nazi fire control observers ensconced in their hideouts on the bluffs, and the thousands of G.I.’s still jammed aboard the transports offshore, waiting their turn for disembarkation, all with their eyes glued to the beach, straining to see what awaited them there.

  To the Nazi gunnery observers on the bluffs, only one conclusion seemed logical—the Americans were starting to bring in their larger ships to speed up unloading from close inshore. And while, expecting no such thing—they as observers for the batteries inland had not been able to get much fire concentrated on that first ship as it came inshore—still they must have been lucky—a stray shell had evidently touched off some explosives aboard, and they had sunk it!