Normandy '44

by James Holland

  The 70th Tank Battalion, however, had been untouched, and had carried out their part of Exercise TIGER without a glitch. Now, on the morning of 6 June, Rambo and his fellows in Company B felt quietly confident. Around 6 a.m., they were about to launch when 276 B-26 Marauders came over and pasted the beaches, flying parallel rather than at 90 degrees to the beach as had the heavy bombers of the Eighth along the rest of the invasion coast. There, plenty of bombs had still fallen on and around beaches, but they had not destroyed the thick casements and, because of the drop delay to avoid hitting their own forces, even more bombs had landed inland, beyond the immediate crust of the German defences. At Omaha, for example, where 329 B-24s had dropped their loads, there simply was neither the room nor the time for them to fly parallel to the coast, because Eighth Air Force heavy bombers were not trained for night operations. Their window of attack had been short, and so there had been no alternative but to attack in normal formation, across the front rather than alongside it. As a result, the damage to the defences had been considerably less than had been hoped for.

  At Utah, on the other hand, there had been fewer and smaller medium bombers and so more air space in which they could operate. And very effective they were too. ‘They really saturated that beach,’ recalled Carl Rambo.6 ‘Germans were shooting at them and then one plane must have been hit in the gas tank as fire was belching out of the bomb bay before it blew apart.’ Bits of debris fluttered down all around their LCTs, nearly a mile out. Further drama happened moments later when one of the four Company A LCTs hit a mine. Rambo and his LCT were only 100 yards away and he watched as a couple of the tanks were blown 50 feet into the air like matchboxes. The LCT was broken in two, but one half was still floating. One of the men on board had been hurled 75 yards away, but miraculously survived and swam back to the wreckage, only for it to capsize, flinging him into the water again. This time he was picked up by an LCA, but the rest of the tank crews on that LCT had been killed.

  Just after six, the rest of the 70th Battalion DDs launched into the sea. Only the driver was actually inside; the rest were on top, the waterproof canvas screen around them, ready to swim for it should the worst happen, but Rambo’s crew slipped in ‘nice and easy’, and at just 1,500 yards rather than the 6,000 yards at Omaha.7 Here, the waters were sheltered from the worst of the westerly winds by the Cotentin and so the swell, although still choppy, was nothing like as severe as that running across the northern Normandy coast. Rambo and his crew, with the rest of 70th Tank Battalion, were on their way.

  From their positions on the bluffs overlooking the beach, the defenders waited with mounting fear and anxiety. For both Karl Wegner and Franz Gockel, this would be their first taste of action; both had been in the army for less than nine months. What was happening before them was a scene of utter and overwhelming intensity for which they could not possibly have been prepared. The barrage of the naval guns was devastating: collectively the Omaha Bombardment Group could bring to bear 183 guns of 90mm or more plus a large number of quick-firing cannons. By contrast, the Germans didn’t have a single gun of that calibre.

  The mined stakes in front of WN62 were blown to smithereens as the shells crept up the beach and towards the bluffs. ‘A rolling pin of smoke, dust and flames came towards us, cutting down everything in its path with howls, whistling and hissing,’ wrote Gockel.8 ‘We sat small and helpless at our weapons, here we prayed and took refuge.’ Shells were landing all about them, shrapnel and grit and stone clattering around their casement, splinters hurtling through the viewing slits. For all this, not one of the six men in Gockel’s bunker had yet been physically injured. Nor had any in Karl Wegner’s gun position at the other end of the beach.

  Out in the water, the landing craft were getting ever closer to the beach. It was fast approaching 6.30 a.m. Bob Slaughter was still feeling as though his guts had been ripped apart and they were all beginning to sense this wouldn’t be the easy ride they had been expected to believe. John Raaen, meanwhile, was waiting off shore, circling and wondering how the assault Rangers at Pointe du Hoc were faring. Opposite Franz Gockel, nearing the shores of Easy Red beneath WN62, Walter Halloran was thinking he didn’t care what lay on the beaches – he just wanted to get clear of the sea.

  Around Pointe du Hoc and across the bay north of Carentan, at the foot of the Cotentin Peninsula, the lead landing craft of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division landed at Utah Beach at 6.31 a.m. behind a naval bombardment. The weather was miserable: wind, low cloud and drizzly rain, although there was so much sea spray it was hard to tell that it was raining. The infantry and tanks were supposed to land between the exits numbered 3 and 4 by the Allies, north of the village of Les-Dunes-de-Varreville, but the wind, strong currents and extremely poor visibility meant they actually hit the beach either side of Exit 2, right next to WN5, which was well over a mile further to the south. This strongpoint was manned by a handful of men from 3. Kompanie, Grenadier-Regiment 919, 709. Division, commanded by Leutnant Arthur Jahnke. He was a 23-year-old Knight’s Cross-winning veteran of the Eastern Front and highly capable, but the men under his command weren’t up to much.

  Along the beach were obstacles and plenty of wire, while at the strongpoint and behind there were minefields and the flooded areas of a couple of miles’ depth before the ground gently began to climb. At the strongpoint were a handful of guns encased in bunkers and eight tracked Goliaths, but they had received brutal treatment from both the Ninth Air Force’s Marauders and naval fire. By the time the first troops came ashore, the lone 88mm high-velocity gun had been badly damaged, one 75mm and both 50mm guns had been destroyed, as well as all machine-gun nests, an ammunition bunker and the control mechanisms for the Goliaths. Jahnke had been hoping for support from the battery of 122mm guns a couple of miles away at Saint-Martin-de-Varreville, but unbeknown to him that had been bombed and knocked out several days earlier.

  Among the first to land was the 4th Division’s executive officer, Brigadier-General Teddy Roosevelt Jr, son of the former president, First World War veteran, former Governor-General of the Philippines, multimillionaire businessman and Assistant Secretary of the Navy. His had been an extraordinary career and life, and now here he was, fifty-six years old – with a son, Captain Quentin Roosevelt, about to land at Omaha – coming ashore as the first Allied general on D-Day to set foot in Normandy. He was also about to provide the clarity of command needed. Swiftly realizing they had landed at the wrong part of the beach, he made the instant decision to remain where they were and attack from there. ‘We’ll start the war from right here!’ he told the 8th Infantry’s battalion commanders.9 And that was exactly what they did.

  The first tanks landed just after the infantry and although Jahnke’s lone 88mm fired one shot and knocked out a Sherman, its barrel then blew and it troubled the attackers no more. In the minutes that followed, all the 70th Battalion’s DD tanks made it safely to shore. Carl Rambo’s Sherman came on to the beach just after that of his company commander. Dropping the canvas screen, they moved towards the dunes and the concrete sea wall, towards which engineers were already carrying blocks of TNT on their backs. Rambo watched them build a pyramid of these blocks then detonate them. When the dust, smoke and sand had settled, there was a big hole and a Company C Sherman dozer was surging forward to clear a path. Suddenly, Rambo spotted a wounded infantryman and immediately clambered down from the turret to help him – and in so doing, broke one of his golden rules, which was to look after his own crew, not stop for others. ‘He was nearly dead,’ said Rambo, ‘and I couldn’t do anything for him.10 I never should have gotten out of my tank.’ On this occasion, however, he got away with it. With the route through the dunes already cleared, they rumbled forward, crushing chunks of concrete as they went, and when they were through they made towards the causeway across the flooded marshland beyond and down Exit 2 in the direction of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. So far, the men at Utah were having a pretty easy time of it.

  The s
ame could not be said for those now landing at Omaha. Of the five exit points from the beach, the most heavily defended were those roughly at either end – the Vierville Draw, labelled ‘D1’, and the Colleville Draw, ‘E3’ on the attackers’ maps. The two other principal draws directly facing the attackers – ‘D3’ and ‘E1’ – were also well defended but not as heavily, while in between there were no fixed defences at all. The aim had been to get on to the beach to overwhelm the enemy in quick order, but nearly all the German troops manning the key strongpoints had survived the morning’s bombardments. There weren’t many of them. Only ten Widerstandsnester directly overlooked the beach and there were others further inland at Colleville and at the village of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, halfway between Colleville and Vierville. Each was manned by between thirty and fifty men. WN62, where Franz Gockel was stationed, was the strongest, but even so had a permanent complement of just 27 men of Grenadier-Regiment 726 of the 716. Division, plus four others from the 352. Central command of the I. Bataillon lay within WN63, to the east of Colleville. This meant that at the crust there were only around 350 men in total. Along the beach, the strongpoints were designed to be mutually supporting, but the moment one of them was knocked out of action the entire defensive position might quickly unravel. What’s more, while it was true that the bunkers and casements had so far survived all that had been thrown at them, they had been hastily built with low-grade materials.

  Most of the men, Franz Gockel and Karl Wegner included, were Grünschnabel. Wegner worried that the moment the enemy bore down on him, he would freeze. The men on the bluffs facing the Americans coming ashore at Omaha have often been portrayed as hardened combat veterans, fanatical elites of the Wehrmacht. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Most were young men, terrified out of their wits, wishing they could be anywhere but on the coast overlooking the gargantuan invasion force blackening the sea. They had among them, however, some 85 machine guns, each firing at a rate of 1,400 rounds per minute, or 23 bullets per second. From their clear viewing positions on the bluffs, the moment the landing-craft ramps went down and American troops began making their way out, those Germans – so long as they didn’t freeze up – could hardly miss. Nor did they. But it was nothing to do with being elite, highly trained, fanatical Nazis and everything to do with being utterly terrified and survival instincts kicking in.

  Things were going badly wrong for the 116th Infantry as they headed towards Dog Green near the Vierville, D1, draw. Two LCAs of Company A were destroyed, killing all on board; one received four direct mortar hits. That was sixty men, or a third of the company, gone in a trice. The remaining four landing craft, carrying the other two assault platoons, landed in the smoke, spray and rain, and at 6.31 a.m. the first ramps on Company A’s LCAs and LCVP Higgins boats were lowered.

  ‘Fire, Wegner, fire!’ yelled Obergefreiter Lang, the corporal in their bunker.11 Seeing all the Americans pouring out of their landing craft and into the water, Wegner was transfixed, astonished by how vulnerable they looked. Suddenly, Lang brought his pistol butt down on Wegner’s helmet. The loud clang jolted him immediately and, bringing the butt of the MG42 tight into his shoulder, he closed one eye and felt his finger squeeze the trigger. Immediately the machine gun burst into life, spewing hundreds of bullets across the 400 yards or so that separated him from the invaders. He saw men fall, saw the sand ripped up, and watched other men dive for cover. ‘Now was not the time to think of right or wrong,’ he said, ‘only of survival.’12 A further ninety-one men from Company A, 116th Infantry were cut down in a moment. A mere twenty made it across the 350 yards of beach to the sea wall.

  At WN62, Franz Gockel was also thinking of survival. He had opened fire as the first wave landed directly in front of him; these were two assault platoons of Company E, 16th Infantry, which had been due to land on Easy Green, further to the west. Other assault parties from Company I landed even further east, some 2,000 yards off course at the edge of Fox Green. Waiting until those landing had made their first tentative steps, Gockel squeezed the trigger. The MG42 had its faults, but there was no question that it could spray a huge number of bullets on to a target very rapidly – bullets that now tore into the young men trying to get clear of the beach. He tried to rationalize what he was doing. So many had died at home, victims of Allied bombing, and they had been unable to fight back. ‘Here, we were facing the same opponent,’ he wrote, ‘but unlike the many defenceless civilians, we could defend ourselves and we wanted to survive.’13

  Struggling ashore was Walter Halloran, still clinging to his camera and musette bag. Not a tall man, he had jumped off the ramp and into water that was far too deep, but had managed to keep his head above the surface and struggle ashore. Then he ran for it. All around people were screaming and crying out, but he kept going. ‘If you stopped to help a guy,’ he said, ‘then there were two casualties not one.14 Because the moment you stopped moving you got shot.’ Despite this, halfway up the beach he ducked down behind a beach obstacle and, lying flat on his stomach, lined up his camera and began shooting. Some of the footage he took at that moment remains the only live action footage of men advancing – and being cut down – in that first wave of troops moving across Easy Red. ‘There’s five soldiers coming ashore,’ he said, ‘and the furthest on the left is shot and killed and falls over.15 I was lying on my belly – it’s a low angle shot.’

  Those first fifteen minutes on Omaha were carnage, although mostly only at Vierville and Colleville. Men were drowning, weighed down by too much equipment and dropped too far out; others were being hit on the water and on the beach, by machine guns, by mortars, by rifle fire. Disaster was also unfolding further out at sea. Of the Shermans that had been launched to support the 1st Division, only two out of thirty-one tanks of the 741st Tank Battalion managed to make it ashore – all the rest had sunk, and most of the crews with them, underlining the terrible, tragic folly of the decision to launch them so far out. Some managed as much as 3,000 yards and all, it seems, had been aiming for the church spire of Colleville. Unfortunately, both the swell and the current were running eastwards, pushing them off course. In an effort to keep orientated on the church, they had been moving at an angle and against the flow of both the current and the swell. The waves had smacked against their sides and over the protective covers. And then they had sunk.

  At 6.45 a.m., General Bradley joined Captain Chet Hansen in the operations room aboard USS Augusta. They were around a mile off shore, and hopeful the Rangers would already be ashore at Pointe du Hoc. They could see rockets being fired, smothering Omaha Beach. From where they were watching, it looked utterly one-sided.

  ‘I don’t understand this lack of return fire,’ muttered Major-General Bill Kean, Bradley’s chief of staff.16 ‘Do we have another Anzio?’ The landings at Anzio in Italy, in January, had been initially largely unopposed.

  Bradley smiled. ‘That’s unlikely.’

  Captain John Raaen was wondering much the same thing about the progress of the Rangers. He and his men had been circling off shore since about 6.15 a.m. For the most part they had been keeping their heads down. On LCA 1137, the Rangers of HQ Company had an SCR-300 radio and were trying to listen to what on earth was going on above the din of the guns and battle. ‘After H-Hour,’ said Raaen, ‘suddenly the air was just full of messages, so we were listening carefully.’17 What they were hoping to hear was a signal from Colonel Rudder’s Force A that they had successfully climbed Pointe du Hoc and destroyed the guns there. On Raaen’s LSA they managed to pick up something about ‘Charlie’ from Force A, but that was all. Round and round they went. Seven o’clock came and went, then at 7.10 the decision was made to revert to Plan B: the rest of the Rangers would land directly on to Dog Green on Omaha Beach.

  The Rangers’ Force A had, in fact, been delayed. Just under 2 miles out, the British guide craft mistakenly changed direction and began heading to Pointe de la Percée instead. It was a bad mistake, although the swell, the immense amount of spray, the
low cloud and smoke from the naval gunfire no doubt helped cloud judgement. Colonel Rudder, no naval navigator but a man who had studied every detail of his objective in minute detail, suddenly realized what was happening and managed to get the force back on track. It had, however, set them back by half an hour. Consequently, the first Ranger craft touched down just after 7 a.m. – the time at which they were supposed to have completed the mission.

  Successive waves were now arriving at Omaha, although the smoke and dust of battle, combined with the misty low cloud, meant the beach was almost completely hidden from the sea and coxswains in the landing craft were becoming confused and landing wherever they could. For the assault troops, this was, in fact, an advantage; poor visibility cut both ways. At the western, Vierville end, Companies B, D and C were following the decimated Company A, but a number were landing further east, driven off course by the currents and wind, where the German defences were not so strong. The first boats from Company B, for example, landed unexpectedly near rocks, which provided some cover from the shooting. Although the men were dropped in water far too deep, with coaxing and goading from Staff Sergeant Odell Padgett and Lieutenant Leo Pingenot, they managed to get out and make a dash for the beach wall. ‘They crossed the beach,’ ran the After Action Report, ‘with a loss of one killed and three wounded.’18

  Company C also landed off course, about 1,000 yards to the east, at Dog White, and, for the most part, ten minutes early at 7.10 a.m. No German strongpoint sat directly above them, and some of the bushes and vegetation on the bluffs had caught fire, providing a helpful smokescreen. The first assault boat initially lowered the ramp too early, but the coxswain raised it again and pushed forward. ‘The enlisted men,’ ran the After Action Report, ‘reached the shore safely.’19 The second boat landed well in shallow water and the men poured out and ran fast to the sea wall. ‘None of the men were wounded on this run,’ it was reported, ‘despite the small arms.’ The fourth section landed in waist-deep water. ‘Small arms was received but there were no casualties between the boat and the sea wall.’ Following behind was the fifth assault section, which landed in very shallow water. Because the tide was coming in fast, the distance to the sea wall was now less than 100 yards. ‘Only one casualty was incurred en route to the sea wall.’ These men – almost the entire company – were now, like Company B, sheltered by the 4-foot-high sea wall, fully armed, with radios and assault engineers, and ready to push on.