Lieutenant Archie ‘Lin’ Maltbie was twenty years old and part of the Hell Hawks’ 388th Fighter Squadron. From California, he had wanted to fly ever since seeing a tri-motor Ford delivering mail when he was a boy. After leaving school, he had a job with the Douglas Aircraft Company, helping to make SBD dive-bombers for the navy. He kept expecting his draft, but after turning nineteen with no sign of the official letter, he decided to volunteer for the air force. Accepted, he was singled out for pilot training and got his wings in December 1943. After transitioning to the P-47, he was posted to Britain, crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary and reaching Scotland in April 1944. Ten days later, he was joining the Hell Hawks. After six weeks of shooting up locomotives and bridges, suddenly the invasion was on and, like the fighter boys of the 56th, they were hastily painting invasion stripes one minute and the next flying right over the invasion force.
They passed over Utah Beach ahead of the B-26 Marauders, then attacked a railway bridge and an embankment at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte on the western side of the Cotentin. It was a low-level raid, for which they had each been given a 1,000lb bomb under either wing. As well as dodging flak, they also had to keep craning their necks to look for enemy fighter planes. ‘We got flak,’ said Maltbie.14 ‘We got a lot of flak, but there were no German planes at all.’
Next up were the heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force. Some 659 B-17 Flying Fortresses and 418 B-24 Liberators set off towards the invasion beaches. First, though, it was the turn of the naval guns with their opening salvoes.
As dawn spread over the Normandy coast, there was no longer any mistaking the scale of the invasion force out at sea. ‘I’m not ashamed to say,’ admitted Obergrenadier Karl Wegner, ‘that I was never so scared in my life.’15 One of the newly recruited 17-year-old soldiers that had helped to form the 352. Division, he had been posted to 3. Kompanie, Grenadier-Regiment 914 and was now manning a machine gun at a strongpoint overlooking the track running off the beach towards the village of Vierville. Having never been in action before, he was terrified about what he was about to face, yet could not help but gaze in amazement at what was appearing before his eyes. A few miles down the coast, Franz Gockel, at WN62, was also staring at the scene emerging before him. A terrible, forbidding silence had descended and for him and his comrades the tension grew palpably.
At 5.10 a.m., the first Allied naval guns opened fire, targeting the German coastal batteries, including the four Kriegsmarine guns at Longues-sur-Mer, halfway along the coast between Omaha and Gold Beaches. This battery, perched on cliffs, had come under immense aerial bombardment three times already, including by the RAF a couple of hours earlier, but the guns and observer post were protected by thick roofs of concrete, so the guns were still intact and now opened fire in turn. Suddenly the silence was riven by the sound of screaming shells being lobbed back and forth over the sea.
At 5.50 a.m. the battleship USS Texas opened fire for the first time, with her ten immense 14-inch heavy guns directed on to the Omaha sector. At WN62, Franz Gockel watched mesmerized as the big naval shells hurtled into the ground all around them, throwing up vast columns of dirt, stone and dust. ‘It was,’ he noted, ‘only the beginning of hell.’16 A few minutes later, the first wave of the Eighth’s bombers hove into view. Gockel was standing in his concrete bunker behind his machine gun, which was positioned on a table pointing out to sea through the viewing slit. As the bombs began falling he immediately ducked down under the table, trying to make himself as small as he possibly could. The sound was thunderous and in moments their bunker was full of dust and smoke. ‘The earth trembled,’ he wrote.17 ‘Eyes and noses were full of dust. Sand gritted between our teeth. We had no hope of help, our planes stayed away and we had no flak. Unhindered, the bombers could drop their deadly cargoes.’ Within minutes, debris had buried much of the strongpoint. Daring to glance up, he saw a bomb land directly on top of another casement and watched as dirt, bits of concrete and wire were flung into the air.
In fact, Gockel was more alone than he might have realized, because already decisions had been made higher up the chain that would have a devastating bearing on the defenders’ chances in the hours to come. Not only had General Hans Speidel still not contacted Rommel, but General Erich Marcks at LXXXIV. Korps Headquarters appeared to have completely lost his head. It was the Germans who had invented airborne operations and, although they were part of the Luftwaffe rather than the army, someone of Marcks’s calibre and experience should have known perfectly well that not only would the airborne troops quickly need support from follow-up troops arriving by sea, but the airborne troops now falling from the sky were doing so at night, over quite a wide area, and would be landing on unfamiliar territory. They would be as disorientated as the defenders on to whom they were falling and would inevitably take a number of hours to achieve any kind of meaningful attack. In other words, Marcks could have afforded to keep a cool head and wait to see how matters developed in the ensuing hours before committing his reserve. In any case, there were plenty of German troops already in situ in the Cotentin to deal with the invaders.
Despite all this, at 2 a.m. Marcks’s staff immediately ordered the corps reserve to move west from its central position behind the Normandy coastline in the direction of the Cotentin and the area to the south of Carentan. The corps reserve had been drawn from the 352. Division and consisted of Grenadier-Regiment 915, commanded by Oberstleutnant Karl Meyer, and Fusilier-Bataillon 352. Meyer had been given overall command of this force, and at 3 a.m. they had set off, two battalions moving by bicycle and the rest being transported by French drivers in requisitioned trucks. As if that wasn’t enough, Grenadier-Regiment 914 was also ordered to send troops to investigate reports of Allied airborne troops in the Vire Valley south of Carentan – these were the dummy paratroopers of Operation TITANIC, a plan that was inexpensive and cost nothing in human life but which was already proving a very effective ‘force multiplier’. As a consequence, Marcks had sent his entire corps reserve towards the American airborne drop and some dummy paratroopers hours before they would be needed to help repulse the landings.
The same mistake was being made in the east. Although Major Hans von Luck had committed one company from his regiment to battle with the British airborne forces, he had held back the rest of his troops, keenly aware of the orders for 21. Panzer not to be committed without express permission from Heeresgruppe B. Not only was General Feuchtinger, the divisional commander, in Paris, so too was his chief of operations, Oberstleutnant Wolf Freiherr von Berlichingen, who was the only member of the divisional staff with panzer experience. This had meant the division was effectively rudderless. After a breakneck journey from the French capital, Feuchtinger arrived at the divisional command post at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives at 5.20 a.m. and von Berlichingen shortly after. They then ordered the rest of the division not already in the Caen area to move straight away to the area around Bellengreville, to the south-east of Caen and on the eastern side of the River Orne, even though that ran directly against orders from on high. Their intention was to throw their troops immediately against the British airborne forces. At 6 a.m. they implored Speidel to let them go into the attack. Around the same time, Marcks’s headquarters was demanding that Speidel subordinate 21. Panzer to LXXXIV. Korps so that it could be fully committed to attacking the British airborne forces east of the Orne. Speidel finally agreed at 6.45 a.m., and at 7 a.m. 21. Panzer was put under the command of General Marcks. Minutes later, Feuchtinger was given orders to advance his division east of the River Orne.
Within half an hour, thousands of British troops would be landing on the beaches to the west of the Orne, and fifteen minutes after that the Canadians would be landing too. But 21. Panzer was already advancing some way to the east. This meant that neither the only panzer division close to the coast nor the main corps reserve were where they needed to be for a swift counter-attack against the seaborne assault. All too frequently over the intervening years, it has been the Allied command t
hat has been picked over and criticized, but in these first crucial hours of D-Day it was General Erich Marcks, usually seen as one of the very best German commanders in the West, who was responsible for the biggest blunders of the day.
CHAPTER 11
D-Day: The American Landings
When Lieutenant Yogi Jenson went on watch at 4 a.m., the coast of France was already visible, lit up by bombs falling and exploding from the RAF’s heavy bombers. It reminded him of watching from Falmouth, back in 1940, the night bombing of Plymouth further up the coast. Above him, gliders were being towed across the sky. Then an hour or so later, as first light crept over the sea, he looked back and saw the entire invasion fleet behind them. ‘What a stupendous sight it was!’ he wrote.1 ‘Thousands of fighting ships and transports all on the same course bound for the Continent.’
A little further to the west, Captain Chet Hansen was on the deck of USS Augusta with the US First Army commander, General Omar Bradley. On a ship this large, armed and armoured, Hansen had had a comfortable feeling of security, so much so that as they crossed the Channel he found it hard to believe this was it – the invasion at long last. Nor did the swell seem too bad, although that was because he was on a 48,000-ton battleship rather than in a flat-bottomed landing craft. Then suddenly they could see the coast – there were fires ashore, and the noise of anti-aircraft guns reverberated above the sound of aero-engines. Above, the moon was obscure, only occasionally and briefly flitting out from behind the cloud. They were approaching Omaha Beach.
Just before 5 a.m., Hansen saw a B-25 bomber suddenly catch fire away to their port side. Trailing a long tail of flame and dropping lower and lower, it banked around Augusta before erupting completely into a vivid, angry ball of fire. Two men could be seen bailing out, then the nose dropped and the stricken bomber crashed into the sea, a ball of flame quickly extinguished and gone for ever. ‘The invasion has now suddenly become alive,’ noted Hansen, ‘and the plan on paper is real.’2
Not far from Augusta, on board Prince Baudouin, were Captain John Raaen and the 5th Rangers, and at 5 a.m. the ship’s crew were ordered to their stations. Then came a second announcement over the claxon: ‘Attention on deck!3 Attention on deck! United States Rangers, embarkation stations!’ Raaen moved up on to the boat deck, then counted his men and counted them again, and checked his equipment once more: bandoliers, grenades, three-days’ rations, Tommy gun, Colt 45. Then he checked his men’s equipment. Now they were climbing into the assault boats hanging from davits on the side of Prince Baudouin, all British LCAs, thirty-six fully equipped men and four crew to a boat. Ahead, the dark looming shape of the coast could be seen dimly silhouetted against the slowly lightening sky.
After circling until all seven LCAs of the 507th Assault Flotilla were loaded, they began heading in towards the coast, bursting through the swell in their flat-bottomed craft at around 5 knots. The swell was actually worse, now, in the early hours of 6 June, than it had been twenty-four hours earlier, and waves of 6–8 feet smacked into them and showered them with sea water. In no time they were all drenched and the volume of water coming in meant they had to begin bailing out with their helmets. At 5.50 a.m. they had already passed many of the great warships when suddenly there was a terrific eruption of noise.
‘Sirs,’ said the naval officer commanding their LCA, ‘that is the battleship Texas opening the bombardment of the coast.’ Now every other warship opened fire along the invasion front: 9 battleships, 23 cruisers, 104 destroyers and 71 corvettes, an enormous force of staggering fire-power, the destroyers closing up to within 1,000 yards in places, the battleships and cruisers further out.
Like Raaen and his fellows, 19-year-old Sergeant Bob Slaughter and the men of Company D, 116th Infantry, were also now on the water, having clambered into their British LCAs and been lowered by davits from the parent LSI (large), SS Empire Javelin. With so much of the US Navy in the Pacific, the naval part of the invasion was predominantly in the hands of the British. The US contribution was not insubstantial – 200 warships and 865 landing craft – but of the 1,213 warships in total, 892 were Royal Navy and of the 4,126 landing craft of various types, 3,216 were British and manned by British crews. It was mostly British, not American, vessels and crews now leading the assault forces at Omaha.
For a while Slaughter and the rest of the platoon in his LCA circled round and round waiting for the entire assault wave to be ready. The swell continued to smack against them, soaking them completely within a few seconds. The roar of the engines, the wind and the sea made it hard for the men to hear one another – not that anyone felt much like talking. Bob Slaughter was cold, sodden and shivering. They had all been given ‘puke’ bags and Dramamine anti-seasickness tablets, but Slaughter didn’t feel at all sick until he put his gas cape over his head for warmth; in moments he was pulling off his helmet and vomiting into it. Throwing the contents over the side, he rinsed it out with the water already sloshing around the bottom of their vessel.
All the invasion beaches had been divided into sections and subsections, with code names that ran across the phonetic alphabet, and also colours. Omaha had been divided, from west to east, into four main sectors: Charlie, Dog, Easy and Fox; Dog was then divided again into Green, White and Red, and Easy and Fox into Green and Red sectors. The 116th Regiment of the 29th Division, as well as the Rangers, would be landing on the western side of the beach, between Charlie and Easy Green, and the 16th Infantry of the 1st Division would be landing between Easy Red and Fox Green. Also due to land were two tank battalions equipped with ‘DD’ – Duplex Drive – Sherman tanks. These rather improbable machines, each weighing over 30 tons fully loaded, were protected by a waterproof canvas covering and equipped with a propeller drive that enabled them to ‘swim’ through the water. In training, they had worked far better than might be imagined. No one, however, had tried launching them into a heavy swell such as the one now coursing across the approach to the beach. What’s more, the plan was to launch them some 6,000 yards from the beach. That was 3½ miles, and anyone with an ounce of common sense would have realized it was ludicrously over-ambitious in the current circumstances. Fortunately, the US Navy lieutenant in charge of the 743rd Tank Battalion recognized this and instead made the sensible and correct decision to forge ahead in the landing craft and take them directly on to the beach in the 116th Infantry’s sector. The same could not be said for the officer in charge of launching the 741st Tank Battalion towards Easy Red and Fox Green. The DD Shermans were ordered into the rolling sea at 5.40 a.m. Unsurprisingly, several sank almost immediately.
Also now heading towards Easy Red was 20-year-old Corporal Walter Halloran of the 165th Signal Photographic Company. Equipped with a Bell & Howell fixed-focus single-lens Eyemo movie camera wrapped in protective plastic, a musette bag holding ten cans of film and orange Signals Corps bags in which to send the footage back to England, he was armed only with .45 Colt pistol. He also carried his rations and personal items, along with a basket containing two carrier pigeons strapped to his back, which had been given to him at the last minute. Part of a two-man team that included stills photographer Pfc Wes Karalin, Halloran had been attached to the 16th Infantry and was due to be among the first wave of assault troops, there to capture the historic Allied invasion of Normandy for the tens of millions of Americans waiting back home and also for posterity. Normally, the company was split into teams of three, but the third in this case was a Jeep driver and there wasn’t space for him in the initial assault. ‘So we agreed I’d meet him in an apple orchard,’ said Halloran.4 ‘We did some map work and I said, “If I make it, I’ll meet you in a couple of days.”’ Whether he would make it, however, was a moot point; it was bad enough clambering down rope nets into the Higgins boat that was bobbing up and down far too much for comfort. Somehow, he got on board without breaking anything, but since then had been as sick as a dog. He was no longer afraid, however; he just wanted to get off the damned boat.
Sherman DD tanks were also
to be part of the 4th Infantry Division’s assault on Utah Beach on the eastern foot of the Cotentin Peninsula. The task had been given to three companies of the 70th Tank Battalion, fifty-four tanks in all, of which five were dozer Shermans, with bulldozers attached to the front. Utah, like the other beaches in Normandy, was long and deep, but the high tide was edged by dunes. The plan was for engineers to blast paths through with explosives and then the bulldozers would clear the sand and debris out of the way.
Company B were aboard four LCTs of four DDs each, and among the crews was Sergeant Carl Rambo. From the Deep South, he had been born and raised in Tennessee, although at the time of his drafting he was working as a caterpillar driver in a construction firm in Pennsylvania. Of his draft in Pittsburgh, only seventy-five were sent to the 70th, every one of them a high-school graduate with a trade and most with experience of working heavy equipment. This was certainly a logical selection process for tank crews, who not only needed to know how to operate large vehicles but also how to keep them working. Mechanical knowledge was a huge advantage, and in this the United States had a head start over every other warring nation because it was, by some margin, the most automotive nation in the world. At the start of the war, one in four Americans had some kind of motorized vehicle; in Germany, by contrast, that figure was closer to one in fifty.
Rambo had been drafted in 1941 and was serving in North Africa during the joint Anglo-US invasion in November 1942. ‘On the ship going to North Africa,’ said Rambo, ‘I tried to figure out how I could fight this war honourably and stay alive.5 I thought about this a lot on that trip.’ He had so far managed to do both, surviving Tunisia and Sicily, and was, by now, commanding his own tank. The 70th had become a battle-hardened and experienced armoured unit and, with men like Rambo among their number and two amphibious invasions already under their belt, they were the ideal support for a division such as the 4th, which had yet to see proper combat in the war. They had, however, had a taste of it on 28 April when, during a practice nighttime amphibious assault, they had been attacked by German S-boats. Two LSTs had been sunk, two more damaged, 746 men killed and a further 200 wounded. It had been a disaster.
Normandy '44 Page 20
