by Oliver North
I was supposed to get to Omaha beach at 0700 but I didn’t land until around 0845. And even then we were taken to the wrong place. We were 1,000 yards from where we were supposed to land—but with all the wreckage from the assault wave of the 116th, it was the only place we could get ashore.
There were medics working on the beach, but they couldn’t cope with all the casualties. There were bodies, parts of bodies, and guys moaning and bleeding everywhere—it was a terrible sight and you felt so helpless that you couldn’t do anything for these guys.
On D-Day I was supposed to be artillery liaison for the 116th Infantry. But we only had one howitzer that had made it to the beach. Since one gun can’t do much, we turned it over to the 7th Field Artillery Battalion of the 1st Division and joined the infantry.
A Company, 1st of the 116th—the lead assault unit—was almost wiped out completely by direct hits from the German 88s firing from the flanks—part of the direct fire across Omaha beach. I went to check in with the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Mullins.
That morning he was everywhere—running up and down the beach, moving people along, trying to get things organized. He’d shout, “Get up and go—if you stay here you’re gonna die! So you might as well get off this beach.” It was that kind of leadership that gave us the incentive to keep moving. By D-Day afternoon he was dead—killed by a German machine gun.
When a captain was killed, a lieutenant took over. If a lieutenant was killed, the sergeant jumped in. We were well trained to get the job done, which was also another incentive to keep moving. Besides, if you didn’t get off that beach, you’d be run over by your own stuff. Despite the German fire, wave after wave was still coming in—heavy artillery, tanks, and jeeps were coming ashore—the landing craft wending their way through the obstacles that were still in place.
Some very brave small unit leaders got the men up and the infantry and engineers blew pathways through the barbed wire entanglements, mines, and obstacles. By mid-afternoon they were crawling—a foot at a time—up the draws and ravines that led up to the high ground where the German trench lines and fortifications were. By nightfall on D-Day we had pushed to the top of the cliff, probably half a mile from Omaha beach.
American soldiers reach the shore after their landing craft are attacked.
Though the 29th Infantry Division, landing on the right side of Omaha beach, had the toughest time and the highest casualties on D-Day, things were only marginally better on the left side, where the 1st Infantry Division landed. Staff Sergeant Walter Ehlers of Manhattan, Kansas, had to get his parents’ permission to join the Army with his older brother Roland. They had both seen action with the 1st Infantry Division in North Africa and Sicily in the same rifle company. Roland had been wounded in Sicily, so on 6 June 1944 when they both landed at Normandy, they did so in different companies.
STAFF SERGEANT WALTER D. EHLERS, US ARMY
Company L, 3rd Battalion,
18th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division
Omaha Beach, Normandy, France
10 July 1944
Two days before D-Day my platoon was assigned a special mission. As soon as we landed in the second wave we were to punch through a ravine to the high ground about 500 yards off the beach. As it turned out we came in right after the first wave, about two hours ahead of the second wave. When we got to where we were supposed to punch through, the beach hadn’t yet been cleared and everyone in front of us was pinned down.
It was something because all the way into the beach in our Higgins boat we had been watching all these waves of planes passing over us—and the firing of all those big naval guns from the battleships and cruisers—and then closer in, the rocket ships firing. But when we got to the beach, there were all these guys getting hit from these German emplacements. Some of the rockets struck the German pillboxes and hit them, but they didn’t do anything to them because they were so fortified.
We hit a sand bar. And I asked the coxswain driving the Higgins boat, “Is this as far as we’re going?” And he said, “We can’t go any farther, we’re on a sand bar.” So he let the ramp down and we got out—and naturally, on the other side of the sand bar, we went down into the water almost over our heads. My second in command, a sergeant, was so short he was pulled under the water. But we all managed to get to the beach.
When we got to the high water mark there was this incredibly brave beach master—standing there under fire—and directing traffic! I ran up to him and asked, “What direction do you want us to go from here?” He said, “Go straight ahead, and follow that path—otherwise you’ll be in a minefield.” So we did, despite the many bodies on our right and left. They were the guys from the first wave who were killed trying to get through the mines.
We raced inland some distance, and came to a row of barbed wire and two men from an engineer unit were lying there. One of them said, “We’re pinned down! As soon as we move, they fire on us.”
I told him, “We’ll cover you. We’ll fire up into the trenches while you guys blow the barbed wire with your Bangalore torpedo.” They did it—although one guy was killed in the process. We rushed into the German trenches and I was feeling pretty good because I had gotten my squad of twelve soldiers across the beach without being killed even though the first wave had 50 percent casualties, and the second wave suffered 30 percent casualties. Some of the companies and individual squads or platoons even lost 100 percent to casualties.
None of these guys had ever been in combat before and some of ’em wanted to hold up and dig in. But I told them, “We can’t stay here, you’ll get killed.” So I just kept them moving. As we ran up into the trenches, the Germans started running from us. We took a pillbox from behind and captured four Germans. I sent them back down to the CP with one man from the squad.
From the high ground where we were, we could look back and see the beach and the wave with K Company—my brother’s company and the one we had served in together in North Africa and Sicily—as they landed. That night I heard that the K Company commander got killed on the beach. And so did a lot of other guys in the company—the guys I knew and some close friends. I asked if my brother had made it, but nobody knew.
On D plus two—the night of June 8—we had just dug in when a German patrol bumped into our lines. They opened fire right in front of us. Our company commander told me to take a patrol and go after the Germans, so I set out with four of my men to follow these guys. I was the only person in this squad that had seen action before, but after two days of pretty bad combat, they had learned quickly.
It was pitch dark and we couldn’t see but we could hear the Germans—up ahead of us, and moving faster than we were. We were cautious but they must have felt threatened, and took off fast. Then we ran across a briefcase that one of them had dropped. I picked it up and brought it back to the CP. Our officers opened the briefcase; it had maps and documents inside, showing the enemy’s second and third line of defenses.
The next day, the ninth of June, we were in the attack again and I was leading my squad from hedgerow to hedgerow across the fields when we were fired upon. I told the guys, “We don’t want to get caught out here in this field, hurry to that next hedgerow.”
When we got to the hedgerow where the firing was coming from we could hear voices and I warned my squad, “Here comes some Germans!”
They saw me and fired first but missed and I got all four of them. I crept further up the hedgerow and saw more Germans in a machine-gun nest. I told my guys to reload and fix bayonets, and we charged the machine gun. I shot the gunner and killed him, and the others ran away.
A little while later we practically bumped into another machine gun, right at the corner of the hedgerow. We knocked out that machine gun with rifle fire and grenades and then charged up the ridge on the other side of the hedgerow.
Just over the crest we came upon two big German mortar positions with about ten men in them. They were more surprised than we were and we killed them all and captured their mort
ar tubes. We captured one more machine gun before dark and some of the guys in the squad said that I had killed eighteen Germans that day.
On the morning of the tenth the Germans launched a counter-attack and we were told to pull back because we were about to be surrounded. We were told to cover the withdrawal of the rest of the company but before we could pull back we started taking fire from the hedgerows in front and both sides of us.
I saw some Germans setting up a machine-gun nest in the corner of the hedgerow so I shot them but I got hit in the side by a bullet that turned me around, and as I’m falling, I saw a German up in the hedgerow and I shot him, and he fell to the ground.
As I rolled over I saw my BAR automatic rifleman go down so I crawled over to him, put his arms around my neck, and dragged him back to the protection of our hedgerow. Then I ran back and got the BAR so it wouldn’t fall into enemy hands.
By the time I got back to our lines with the BAR the medics were there, treating my wounded rifleman. As they started to load him into the ambulance I asked my company commander, “Captain, can you have the medics look at my back before they leave because I’ve been hit.” He turned me around, and he said, “Oh my God, you should be dead! You’ve been shot clear through.” When they raised my shirt they saw a bullet hit a rib, went in and out and into my pack where it hit a bar of soap, passed through my mother’s picture and out the back of my pack.
I didn’t want to leave my men so I had them dress the wound. It was okay as long as I didn’t wear my pack because it rubbed up against the two holes where the bullet went in and out. So I carried a bandolier of ammunition across my shoulder instead, and it didn’t bother my wound.
A month later, on the fourteenth of July, Captain Russell, the new K Company commander, came and told me that my brother Roland had been killed on D-Day.
Later on, in Belgium, I was promoted to second lieutenant and the company commander and first sergeant came to me and said, “Lieutenant Ehlers, we have to get you out of here.” I asked, “What’s the hurry?” I still had my battle fatigues on, and was planning to go back up to the line. But the CO said, “We’ve got to get you back to Paris to get your Medal of Honor before you get killed!”
I was put on a jeep and sent back to Paris, where General John C. H. Lee awarded me the Medal of Honor. It was first time I’d ever been in an officer’s dress uniform. Afterwards I rejoined my outfit, and after we had crossed into Germany, I got wounded again.
On that occasion, the New Testament that my mother had given me must have fallen out of my pack. Years after the war, a German woman mailed it to my mother, because her address was in it. She was pleased to see that I had read from it a lot before it fell out of my pack. She told me that she prayed every day. Where would we be without mothers who pray for us?
Wounded Rangers are treated after they scaled the cliffs.
The Germans that Walt Ehlers would fight all the way into their homeland were slow to realize what was happening at Normandy. It was mid-morning before Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was even informed of the attack. He abruptly ended his visit to his wife in Germany and hastened back to Normandy.
Hitler wasn’t told about the invasion until even later—his military advisors and commanders were afraid to wake him. He didn’t get up on D-Day until close to noon, and it was four in the afternoon before Hitler decided to release two Panzer divisions for a counter-attack. By then it was too late.
By nightfall on D-Day the Allies had landed over 150,000 troops on the five invasion beaches. There were more than 5,000 Allied casualties, but they had cracked Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Within days, a quarter of a million more men, thousands of tanks, trucks, and nearly a million tons of supplies would be pouring into Fortress Europe. And Dwight Eisenhower’s unsent message accepting responsibility for a disaster at Normandy would wait four years before becoming public.
CHAPTER 12
FREEING FRANCE FROM HITLER 1944
Hitler’s delayed reaction to Overlord cost the Wehrmacht dearly. By the morning after D-Day, the breach in his Atlantic Wall was all but irreparable. Despite horrific American casualties at Omaha on 6 June, the Führer’s belated release of the 12th SS Panzer and Panzer Lehr Divisions meant that the German armor, now under repeated attack from the air, would be unable to prevent consolidation of the Normandy beachheads. By 10 June, Eisenhower landed sufficient forces to close the gaps and connect the separate British, Canadian, and American lodgments.
While German reinforcements struggled to get to the battle at the Normandy beachhead, Hitler turned to his “secret weapons.” On 12 June he launched the first V-1 “Buzz Bomb”—a crude version of the modern cruise missile—against London. Though nearly half of the eighty V-1s per day that were launched against England misfired or went awry, the Führer believed that the weapons could save Germany—even after an errant missile hit his headquarters bunker on 17 June during his only visit to the Normandy front, hardly a good sign.
U.S. soldiers celebrate after liberating Chambois.
Then on 19 June Hitler got some unexpected help—from the weather. A fierce, three-day-long Atlantic storm grounded Allied air power, allowing German armor reserves to move into position around Caen. High waves struck the Allies’ artificial harbors—smashing Mulberry B at Omaha beach and damaging Mulberry A at Gold. The British effected quick repairs and were able to resume offloading troops and 11,000 tons of equipment and supplies daily, but the American Mulberry was destroyed—along with nearly 300 ships and landing craft. The storm did what the crippled Luftwaffe could not accomplish. For weeks thereafter, the Americans were forced to laboriously transfer personnel and materiel into small landing craft for deliveries ashore.
Despite these setbacks, less than three weeks after D-Day, the Allies had landed almost a million men—twenty-five divisions—at Normandy. And fifteen more divisions in England were ready to “come across” to back a breakout from the hedgerows of bocage country.
Despite years of Allied over-flights and intelligence collection in France, no U.S. or American commander had anticipated how difficult it would be to break through the nearly impregnable hedgerows that divided the Normandy farmland into 100- to 200-yard-wide rectangles. Comprised of earth, tangled roots, and vegetation, the banks were often ten feet thick and equally high. Impervious to artillery, tank, and small-arms fire, the bocage were perfect defensive barriers, providing excellent cover and concealment for well-camouflaged German defenders—who turned the fields between them into death traps for the American, British, and Canadian attackers.
Bulldozer tank
In the period 12 June–1 July, three British/Canadian offensives against the main German defenses at Caen foundered in the narrow roadways, canals, and hedgerows along the coastal plain. On the Cotentin Peninsula, the U.S. 29th, 4th, 9th, and 90th Divisions were all bloodied by battles in the bocage. When they finally broke through and captured Cherbourg on 26 June, the port Eisenhower had counted on utilizing immediately was rendered unusable. What the Allied bombing and artillery hadn’t already destroyed, the 6,000-man German garrison demolished before they surrendered.
The night Cherbourg fell, General Friedrich Dollman, commander of the Wehrmacht 7th Army, committed suicide. On 3 July, after Hitler ordered courts martial for all involved in the loss of Cherbourg, von Rundstedt urged the Führer to sue for peace. The old Prussian general was fired immediately and replaced by Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge the next day. Little more than a month later von Kluge would also be dead at his own hand—on 18 August he committed suicide after being implicated in the plot to kill Hitler.
By 3 July, the Americans had secured the entire Cotentin Peninsula and began to push south. The new objective: St. Lô—a strategically important crossroads and railhead on the banks of the River Vire. Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley believed that if St. Lô could be captured quickly, the long-sought breakout into open French countryside could alleviate the pressure on the British and Canadians at Caen.
Ta
king and holding St. Lô required that the Allies seize and secure Hill 192, the dominant terrain feature in the area. On 11 July, a company of the Wehrmacht’s elite 3rd Parachute Division held this commanding terrain. The mission of capturing it fell to the 38th Infantry Regiment of the 2nd Division. One of the platoon commanders in that bloody fight was twenty-two-year-old Lieutenant Charles Curley from Virginia.
LIEUTENANT CHARLES CURLEY
Company E, 2nd Battalion, 38th Infantry,
2nd Infantry Division
Hill 192, Normandy, France
11 July 1944
Hill 192 really is not a big hill—it’s only six hundred feet above sea level—but from the top of it you could see the English Channel and the rest of the countryside for miles around—including all the approaches to St. Lô. The Germans needed to hold it for their artillery forward observers—because they didn’t have aerial observers flying over the battlefield like we did. A German parachute infantry company was holding this high ground and really meant to keep it.
We were ordered to take the hill, but to get to it we had to cross five hedgerows. These hedgerows were five to fifteen feet tall—six to ten feet wide at the base—and full of rocks, trees, and roots. We tried to dig into them to set up a base of fire but it was almost impossible. The army demolition engineers tried using TNT, put it on the ground, and blew that first hedge. There was a terrific explosion. Stuff went up into the air but when the smoke cleared, the hedgerow was still there. I told the engineers to stop because every German artillery forward observer for miles around could see these explosions and know right where to zero in on us.
