by Neil Oliver
Stephen E. Ambrose in D-Day, his heart-stopping account of the events of June 6, names Lieutenant Robert Mathias, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, US 82nd Airborne, as the first American to die. A couple of hours after Danny Brotheridge’s lifeless eyes were closed for him by a comrade, 28-year-old platoon leader Mathias was in position at the door of the Dakota carrying him and his men to their drop zone. The red light was on and he and his men were standing ready. The sky around the plane was ablaze with tracer rounds and as he braced himself for the green light—the signal to jump—a shell exploded close by the plane, sending shards of metal knifing into his body. Knocked to the floor by the blast and the wounds, he was up again in a moment, driven by sheer, bloody determination. The light turned from red to green and with a great shout of “Follow me!” he leapt out into the abyss. Though his parachute deployed successfully, he was probably dead before he hit the ground. His comrades found him where he’d come to earth, with the silk of his chute wrapped around him like a shroud. Had he stayed behind in the plane—let his men go without him—the medics might have been able to save him. But that was not the way of Robert Mathias any more than it was the way of the 82nd Airborne.
Out in the dark of the English Channel, while brave men breathed their last elsewhere, the many piled aboard their landing craft to await the invasion. They’d made the first part of the crossing from England in larger transport vessels escorted by a fleet composed of battleships, cruisers and destroyers. From 0100 hours onward, the job of loading them into their LCVPs (landing craft, vehicle and personnel) had begun. These smaller, lighter vessels—each loaded either with a platoon of 36 men or with a combination of men and vehicles—were lowered by small cranes down the sides of the transports and into the water.
The American infantrymen had been fed a breakfast of spam sandwiches and coffee; their British counterparts, fried eggs and toast and a shot of rum. Many of the LCVPs would now wait, roiling and rolling in the choppy waters off the Normandy coast, for as much as four hours until their allotted time came. That seemingly endless limbo inevitably turned spam and coffee, eggs and rum into a misery of seasickness that would weaken and disorient thousands of the men to the point of desperation and collapse long before they had the chance to show their mettle. The prospect of getting off those damned boats and onto solid ground—any ground—began to seem like the best idea in the world, come what may.
For the infantrymen of two US Army infantry divisions approaching Omaha just before their “H-Hour” of 0630, heaven was a place high above them and far away. Only a special kind of man-made hell awaited them on the beach. Those luckless warriors were heading for what both the Allied and German strategists knew to be a perfect killing field—the toughest target of D-Day. Those boys and men of the American Infantry in 1944—with an average age of just 26 years—were among the best and brightest troops ever assembled on the field of battle. Yet they were on the way to one of the worst places in the world.
A five-mile crescent between Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes in the east and Vierville-sur-Mer in the west, Omaha Beach was book-ended by near-vertical cliffs at either end. It was overlooked from inland by a grassy bluff as much as 100 feet high. Between the beach and the bluff, at high tide, would-be invaders faced crossing a 10-foot-high bank of shingle, then a paved road, then a V-shaped anti-tank ditch and finally a marsh. For the first few hours after low tide, when the American troops were timed to arrive, there would be an additional 300–400-yard strip of sand to cross as well.
Rommel had seen to it that interlocking fields of fire of every kind—especially from machine guns and 88mm anti-tank guns—covered every inch of the beach. But Omaha was crucial to the success of D-Day. Once taken, it would link the American beach at Utah in the west with the British and Canadian beaches of Gold, Juno and Sword in the east. Failure at Omaha would leave a gaping hole that might fatally undermine the whole operation. Yet the planners of Overlord knew well just how high a price might have to be paid to secure those five miles of sand and shingle.
The forces tasked with taking and securing Omaha were composed experienced men of the 1st Infantry Division—who would land on the eastern half of the beach—and the untried, green recruits of the 29th Infantry Division who had to secure the west. The 29th were to be stiffened by eight companies of US Rangers.
Given the wholly undesirable nature of the terrain and the strength of the German defenses, Omaha was to be the target of heavy aerial and naval bombardment before any attempt was made to put the infantrymen ashore. Once the gun emplacements and machine gun nests on the bluff had been pounded into oblivion by high explosives, the men would land behind waves of tanks. Navy demolition teams and engineers would use explosives to clear the underwater mines and obstacles, creating safe corridors through which the LCVPs would deposit their cargoes of men and machines. Taking shelter from any remaining enemy fire—in deep craters left by the bombardment—the infantry, tanks and jeeps would then steadily work their way off the beach and into the countryside beyond.
None of that happened.
Low clouds threw the B-17 bombers off target so that their payloads fell harmlessly, sometimes miles inland. The battleships didn’t train their big guns on the beach long enough to make any difference either. When the ramps began to go down on the landing craft, the men inside looked out not at terrain turned brown and grey by countless explosions, but at untouched shingle, grassy banks and perfectly intact machine gun nests and artillery emplacements.
To make a bad situation even worse, unexpectedly high winds had created a rolling swell that worsened the seasickness and threw just about every vessel off course. Instead of being put ashore in carefully planned sequences, spaced evenly along the beach, coxswains were struggling to maintain any kind of course whatsoever. Of 200 landing craft in the first wave at Omaha, 10 were swamped while still trying to make their runs to shore. Supposedly amphibious tanks were lost as well, sent straight to the bottom by heavy seas. Men aboard craft making their initial approaches were soon looking out at the demoralizing sight of men bobbing hopelessly in deep water, casualties of earlier failed landing attempts. Almost no one and nothing was anywhere near where it was supposed to be—or at anything like a designated time.
Coxswains and boatswains in charge of the LCVPs lowered their ramps in desperation, bellowing at the men aboard to get into the water and allow the helpless, unarmed vessels to make for the brief sanctuary of deeper water and the chance to collect more men from the larger boats waiting off shore. Hopelessly out of position, whole platoons often stepped out into deep water. Weighed down by heavy kit, many sank to the bottom without hope of making it to shore. Others struggled free of webbing and straps and attempted to swim for it. The “lucky” ones made it to the shallows and the shingle—but often without so much as a rifle with which to begin fighting the war.
Dead and dying were everywhere, terrible wounds that would live on for lifetimes in the minds of those who saw them. Those still alive were crawling into whatever cover they could find, in front of the shingle bank or beneath the flanking cliffs. Highly trained, superbly equipped men who had embarked their landing crafts several hours before, ready to reinvade a continent, were arriving on this French beach, in many cases, in just the clothes they stood up in. Rather than fighting men ready to wage war, they were more like shipwrecked tourists. Elsewhere, ramps went down to expose the hapless souls inside them to withering, devastating fire from machine guns, 88s and everything else among the completely intact enemy arsenal. Whole platoons disappeared in bloody mists without even the chance to take a step into the water.
All along Omaha Beach it was the same. Even where initial landings were made onto sandbars, the men arriving there still faced the prospect of wading out into stretches of water—often many tens of yards wide and neck deep—that still separated them from the beach itself. Company A of the 116th Regiment was alone in making it onto the shingle in approximately the right position. Everywhere else, men stumbled
ashore in great clumps. Rather than carefully spaced waves stretching from one end of the beach to the other, platoons of men arrived together in groups, hundreds of men strong, providing perfect targets for German machine gunners whose only challenge was to decide whom to cut down first.
By around 0800, the American troops were exactly where Rommel had hoped—and expected—that they would be: their force cut by a half by murderous fire; survivors demoralized and pinned down between pitifully inadequate cover; neither fully deployed as a fighting force nor able to withdraw and regroup. So far at Omaha, the Atlantic Wall was doing precisely what it had been designed to do.
But it was out of this hell that men emerged. While most of those who’d made it ashore crouched or lay behind whatever cover was available to them, others realized that there was only one thing to be done—and that was to get off the beach, come hell or high water. (High water was a mere few hours away and they were already in hell.)
Rather than waiting to be picked off by the defenders—and swept back into the sea like so much flotsam—leaders of men found their hearts and voices and started organizing the fight back. Colonel George Taylor, regimental commander of the 16th Infantry Regiment, arrived on the beach as part of a later wave, at about 0800. Flanked by a couple of lieutenants, he made it out of the surf and then had to drop down flat on his face on the sand as bullets hissed around his ears. Taylor found the remnants of his torn and battered regiment crouched down behind a seawall. “If we’re going to die, let’s die up there,” he shouted, pointing toward the high ground of the bluff. “There are only two kinds of people on this beach: those who are already dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here!” With that, the real invasion of Europe began.
Colonel Charles Canham, commander of the 116th, had made it ashore just before Taylor. His landing craft became snagged on an underwater obstacle on its final approach and when the ramp went down a barrage of machine guns, mortars and 88s opened up on the men inside it, killing several of them before they even had the chance to get wet. It’s widely believed that the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan are based on the conditions experienced by Canham’s wave of landing craft. Shot through the hand, he refused medical attention—preferring instead to reach the survivors of his regiment and get them moving. “Get the hell off this beach and go kill some Germans,” he yelled, waving his Colt .45 in his good hand. (Later the following month he would accept the surrender of Lieutenant General Hermann Bernhard Ramcke after the Battle of Brest. Ramcke was initially unimpressed by the lower ranking Canham and demanded to see some credentials. Canham gestured towards the tattered and battle-weary American infantrymen he’d brought with him as an escort. “These are my credentials,” he said.)
Despite the terrible suffering and heartbreaking losses, the American Infantry were not swept back into the sea as Hitler had wished, and believed they would be. Nor indeed were any of the Allied D-Day landings. (Terrible prices were paid elsewhere too—at Juno, the Canadians suffered a death toll of 50 percent, comparable to that experienced by the 1st and 29th Divisions.) At Omaha the American Infantry not only held onto their blood-soaked sliver of occupied Europe, but by the end of the day they were through the Atlantic Wall and out the other side (if only just). In the face of the most appalling circumstances, leaders like Canham, Taylor and Brigadier General Norman “Dutch” Cota stubbornly set about the business of reaching the narrow draws through the bluff and forcing ways through them with wire cutters, Bangalore torpedoes and the pure, true grit of fighting men. In time, as the month of June gave way to July, the Wehrmacht would come to feel the irresistible weight of a glacier of men and machines grinding toward them from the US of A. But on that June 6—and on the rest of those hellish first days, while the Allies in Europe were still hopelessly outnumbered—it was little more than human backbone that kept them on the beaches and in the fight.
As darkness fell on July 6, around 175,000 American, Canadian and British men had penetrated Normandy, as planned. In the ships and boats waiting offshore in the dark, thousands more men and vehicles waited to do likewise. Behind them, thousands upon thousands more waited too. A colossus was crossing the sea and climbing out onto the European mainland. It would not be denied.
And as ever in war, it wasn’t all about high-ranking men. All along the beach at Omaha—and on other beaches besides—the difference was made as well by NCOs, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, privates. Unnamed men, forgotten now by history, rose in the face of calamity and saw what had to be done—and that they would have to do it by themselves, for their brothers. Bravery doesn’t come with rank, any more than valor is handed out alongside stars and pips and gold-colored braid. It comes from the hearts of good men.
A last word goes to Private Robert Zafft, 115th Regiment, 29th Division, Omaha Beach. Remembering his arrival in Normandy on that day like no other, he said:
“I made it up the hill, I made it all the way to where the Germans stopped us for the night, and I guess I made it up the hill of manhood.”
When Britannia ruled the waves
It had been a natural decision to have the Discovery designed and built in a Scottish shipyard. Scott came into his prime when Scottish shipbuilding was the greatest on the planet, a phenomenon. By the end of the 19th century, something like 80 percent of Britain’s ships were built in Scotland.
But this great industry was not based on the River Tay at Dundee. The true masters of the art, the giants, were to be found on the River Clyde between Glasgow, Govan and Greenock. As well as heroes and manly men, we used to celebrate our industries—not least because those industries built our men as well as our status and wealth. There was a time when “Clyde-built” meant “the best,” and people the world over assumed that all the great ships on the seas had come out of Glasgow’s mighty river, accompanied by the obligatory Scottish engineer in the engine room. “Clyde-built” referred to a certain type of manly man as well—tough, loyal and uncompromising.
My mom worked in the offices of a Glasgow shipyard in the years before she met and married my dad—and it’s part of our family history that in childhood they both attended the launch of one of the greatest ships ever to come out of that city. They were both just a year old when they were taken to witness the event, from opposite banks of the river, by their respective families.
It was a day and a ship that went down not just in our family history, but also in that of the whole world. She became an emblem of a time when the world was a different place—and Britain and her men held a different place within it…
While the bottle shards fell and bubbles ran, she remained still, frozen by her own inertia for one last moment. She’d been painted white for the occasion—the better to be seen and immortalized by waiting photographers—and she dominated the skyline like a manmade glacier. Then, anointed with champagne and coaxed into life by that great city’s cheers, all 1,000 feet and 81,000 tons of her began to move. Huge chains danced, thunder rolled and the river’s waters parted to receive her.
For the three years of her construction she’d been known only by her yard number: 534. Now it was different. Moments before, Mary of Teck—Queen Mary, Consort of King George V—had given the leviathan her own name. It was as HMS Queen Mary that she thundered down the slipway and entered the Clyde for the first time.
All the schools had closed in honor of the great occasion—September 26, 1934—and it seemed the entire population had turned out.
The new ship, a wonder of the age, pushed ahead of her a great wave as she came. It was only the presence of the River Cart directly opposite the yard, a wide-mouthed tributary that opened on to the Clyde, that had enabled the ship, bigger than RMS Titanic, to be launched at all. As her great length crossed the Clyde and nudged into the Cart, a wall of water rose and ran, surging toward and past the hordes of spectators gathered to see this latest of the Cunard Ship Company line take her place where she belonged. Scores who’d stood too cl
ose were caught out and drenched by the passing torrent.
Ten million rivets; 257,000 turbine blades; 200,000 horsepower from her steam engines; 2,500 square feet of glass; space for 2,139 paying passengers and 1,101 crew; 2,000 portholes and windows for them to look through; 700 clocks to measure the journeys and 600 telephones. Everything about her sounded like an exaggeration. She carried three steam whistles, each weighing a ton, that could be heard ten miles away.
Britannia still ruled the waves and the world knew it.
The Yangtze Incident
By the time the Queen Mary’s hull was laid down in 1931 there were already legends aplenty in the Clyde’s past. Great passenger liners for Cunard like RMS Aquitania, or her sister ship RMS Lusitania, torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in 1915; capital warships like HMS Australia, HMS Barham, HMS Inflexible, HMS Tiger and HMS Hood, greatest of all the pre-war battlecruisers and brightest symbol of Great Britain’s invincibility. RMS Elizabeth, sister ship of the Queen Mary, would come next, and HMS Indefatigable, an early aircraft carrier, and HMS Vanguard, the last battleship built anywhere in the world. When the end of World War II silenced the call for warships, life was sustained by a balancing rise in merchant shipping.
All of these leviathans came out of just one yard—John Brown’s—and yet there were dozens more working round the clock just to meet demand. In 1967 RMS Queen Elizabeth II (QE2) was the last hurrah for passenger-liner building on Clydebank before John Brown’s became part of the government-sponsored Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. UCS went into liquidation in 1971 and the following year RMS Alisa became the last ship ever to be built on those historic slipways. It brought to an end 101 years of shipbuilding on the site.
