The rapid build-up of troops and the establishment of a watertight and connected bridgehead was the absolute priority for the Allied commanders. Achieving this trumped everything. While during the planning there had been lofty talk, from Montgomery especially, of driving beyond Caen on D-Day, deep concern had also been expressed that the entire enterprise might fail. On D plus 1, the mood in the Allied camp was this: huge relief that the invasion had so far gone considerably better than many had dared hope but not quite as well as the best-case scenario. There was, though, no complacency and the urgent need to join the bridgehead together and speed up unloading was, rightly, of paramount importance. The invasion could not, under any circumstances, be allowed to fail – a reality that trumped absolutely every other consideration.
Once they had ensured that threat had gone, the Allies could go all-out on the attack. It would be madness now, everyone agreed, for some units to press ahead too far without proper support, leaving themselves with vulnerable flanks and open to being cut off. What fighting the Germans so far had taught the Allies was that they always counter-attacked and their instinctive predilection was to be aggressive. Different units could, of course, push and probe forward but, broadly speaking, this needed to be done on a wide front at this early stage in the campaign. Montgomery’s reputation had been founded on the build-up of overwhelming materiel and a steady and methodical drive forward using heavy fire-power to support the infantry and armour, and precisely this approach enabled the number of front-line troops to be kept comparatively small, which in turn saved lots of lives. It was a method that suited machine- and technology-heavy armies made up largely from conscripts from western democracies. Cut and dash might, conceivably, result in a decisive breakthrough, but far better, at this stage, to maintain pressure all along the front, which would, in turn, put pressure on the Germans in Normandy, whether it be the battle-scarred men pushed back from the coast, or those newly arriving.
Eisenhower reached Normandy before midday and during the next few hours the course of action for the days to follow was agreed without dissent or argument. Clearly, though, the focus of the fighting would be in two main areas. The first would be between Omaha and the Cotentin – it was essential that Isigny and then Carentan were taken swiftly – and then around Caen, where already, it seemed, German armour was beginning to concentrate, just as Montgomery had predicted.
‘It is sometimes difficult in this life to admit that one was wrong,’ Air Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory wrote to Eisenhower on Wednesday, 7 June, ‘but I have never had greater pleasure than in doing so on this occasion over the operations of the American Airborne Forces.’11 After all the fuss he had made and his unsettling hysteria, the least he could do was eat humble pie. For all the mayhem, there was no question the airborne operations had been considerably more successful than any the Allies had attempted before and that they had more than achieved their primary goal of securing the flanks and creating havoc for the defenders. More glider reinforcements had arrived at both the British and American areas during the evening and night of D-Day and again on the morning of 7 June; these had gone as well as most had hoped and far better than some, like Leigh-Mallory, had predicted. Out of the three battalions of the 325th Glider Infantry that had landed, for example, only fifty-seven men were missing, and around 90 per cent of the regiment was ready for action in support of the 82nd Airborne within a couple of hours.
The biggest problem was the time it was taking paratroopers to reach their designated areas. By midnight on D-Day, the 82nd still had only around 2,000 men and the 101st 2,500 – roughly a third to two-fifths of their strength. Had those still missing managed to move at a speed of just 1 mile per hour, then three-quarters of those dropped would have been able to go into action against their allotted objectives. All too many found themselves caught up in debilitating firefights or pinned down for hours on end, which absorbed huge amounts of time and also restricted their ability to move.
‘On June 7,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Alexander, ‘we were under constant fire.’12 He was still commanding 1st Battalion, 505th PIR, while Brigadier-General Jim Gavin, the XO of the division, was commanding the men down the road at Chef-du-Pont. Most of the men had been digging in furiously and were now in foxholes along the hedgerows and around the buildings of La Fière. The task of the paratroopers was to make sure no German troops got across the causeway and threatened their positions and, with them, the Americans’ western flank on the Cotentin. The issue was whether they could hold out, with dwindling ammunition, until reinforcements arrived. From his own foxhole, Alexander could see German infantry moving about in Cauquigny, the far side of the flood area, but he and his comrades had only .30-calibre machine guns, a handful of mortars and a single 57mm anti-tank gun which was down to just six rounds. This gun and the mortars had to be held back in case the Germans tried another assault across the causeway and the bridge.
At 8 a.m. a furious mortar barrage opened up, spraying jagged fragments, clods of dirt and grit along their positions. Then four tanks began trundling along the causeway, a Panzer Mk III in the lead, followed by ageing French models captured back in 1940. The 57mm gun was wheeled out and, when the tanks got close enough, paratroopers with bazookas jumped out of their foxholes and opened fire. The first two tanks were swiftly knocked out and the other two pulled back. More heavy artillery fire now rained down on them. Casualties began to mount rapidly.
Not far away, the Dubosq family were still doing their best to help the Americans. Geneviève was worried about her lieutenant with the shattered leg. Late the previous night she had gone to check on him and saw he was stricken with a fever, covered in sweat and barely able to talk. He was still alive the following morning, however, though how much longer he could survive without seeing a doctor, they weren’t sure. Geneviève’s mother had tried to find him some medical help. After milking the cows at the farm a short distance further back from the river, she handed out much of the milk to the Americans dug in there and asked them for a doctor. There wasn’t one, but the paratroopers promised to send help to Lieutenant Wingate as soon as possible.
Later that morning, three Germans approached their house, unseen by the Americans. One had been hit in the leg and had lost a lot of blood, while a second had a bullet in his heel.
‘Please, madam,’ said the third, an unwounded officer, in good French, ‘the boy has lost a lot of blood. He will die if you don’t help him.’
Bringing them into the house, Madame Dubosq did what she could while the officer sat disconsolately and Geneviève gave him a bowl of coffee. Suddenly, one of the wounded Americans, Kerry Hogey, came into the room. He and the German officer stared at one another, then the German offered his hand. Cautiously, Hogey took it. ‘I am astonished,’ wrote Geneviève.13 ‘Both men smile to each other and sit together by the fireplace.’
A Jeep arrived soon after and an American came in to see how Lieutenant Wingate was faring and to reassure him he would soon come back with medical help. On his way out, he turned to the German officer and said, ‘Get ready to come with us when I’m back. You can show us where the Germans are.’ After he’d gone, the German asked for a pen and some paper so he could write to his wife. ‘I am going to die today,’ he told them. ‘I won’t see my family again.’ Madame Dubosq tried to reassure him, but he shook his head sadly. His comrades would shoot him if they saw him with the Americans. Sure enough, when the Jeep returned, the Americans gave Wingate some pills and left the rest with Madame Dubosq, then took the German officer away with them. They’d not gone a hundred yards when a German machine gun opened fire from the far side of the water. Those in the house could only watch helplessly.
Some hours later, however, they saw the German officer again, this time struggling in the water near the house. Madame Dubosq hurried out followed by her daughter. Geneviève’s mother screamed at her to go back inside as rifle shots rang out, but it was clear Madame Dubosq could not manage alone and so, ignoring her mother,
Geneviève ran to help. The German had been hit in the chest – blood was bubbling under the surface of the water. Weakened by his wound and from being in the water for some three hours, his strength was fading fast. Somehow, they managed to pull him half clear, Geneviève staying with him and keeping his head above the water while her mother ran for help.
Geneviève talked to him, desperately trying to reassure him. They talked of God, of his family, and she told him secrets she had never told anyone. Then he asked her to sing to him. ‘Here I am,’ she wrote, ‘an eleven-year-old girl, singing a beautiful song in the middle of a swamp, with a dying man in my arms.’14 She was cold, exhausted and her body ached from holding his head up. The German appeared to be asleep but then awoke at the sound of Madame Dubosq returning. But after reminding them to post his letter to his wife, he closed his eyes once more and died.
Some miles to the west, the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne were feeling less imperilled and had successfully linked up with the 4th Infantry, while more men were continuing to flood in. Some kind of cohesion was gradually reasserting itself and a Division HQ was established with General Maxwell Taylor at the helm. The one major source of disappointment was that Carentan remained firmly in the hands of Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6. The town and the canal and river locks and bridges had been the objective of the 501st PIR, with the 3rd Battalion of the 506th to help, but the latter had been cut to shreds by German Fallschirmjäger lying in wait as the Americans descended, and the rest of the 501st had simply been neither numerous nor strong enough to burst their way through. The dubious allocation of troops concocted by Taylor, Ridgway and the airborne planning teams, in which the most challenging – and important – objective had been left to a force not strong enough for the task, had come home to roost.
So it was that early on the morning of 7 June, the remaining two battalions of the 506th – some 225 men from the 1st Battalion and 300 from the 2nd – were ordered to head south through the Cotentin village of Vierville and on to Saint-Côme-du-Mont and then to Carentan. The fate of the 3rd Battalion, shot up the day before, was still not known to either regimental or divisional headquarters; on that second morning it was a lost battalion. Easy Company was put on alert at around 5 a.m. and, in the absence of Lieutenant Meehan, Lieutenant Dick Winters was still acting commander. ‘Winters, I hate to do this to you after what you went through yesterday,’ Captain Clarence Hester, the battalion ops officer, told him, ‘but I want Easy Company to lead the column toward Vierville.’15 With the 1st Battalion ahead of them, Vierville was secured fairly swiftly and easily. Winters then led Easy in an attack on Angoville with the help of a couple of light Stuart tanks and they took the village even more easily. The company was then placed in reserve, while Dog Company headed towards Côme-du-Mont. Here they had a tough fight and were unable to break through. They also took high casualties – the Dog Company commander, Captain Jerre Gross, was killed and so too was the 1st Battalion commander, Lieutenant-Colonel William Turner, shot in the head by a sniper in full view of many of his men. ‘Combat in Normandy,’ noted Winters, ‘was proving an extremely dangerous business.’16 Now that Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6 were primed and ready, it was clear they were not going to give up Carentan willingly.
Oberleutnant Martin Pöppel certainly had no intention of doing so. His 12. Kompanie in the III. Bataillon of Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6 had been braced the previous evening for an attack, but reports from observation posts suggested the Americans had pulled back for the night. Pöppel had barely snatched any sleep at all but had been dozing early that morning when Allied bombers thundered over. Now, throughout this second day of battle, he and his men remained ready at their posts; most of the action, though, appeared to be coming from the far side of Carentan around Côme-du-Mont. News reached him that the I. Bataillon had already suffered heavily. Later, 9. Kompanie was ordered across the river and canal to help with the fighting raging there. Enormous explosions could also be heard to the north and to the north-east, which he reckoned must be coming from the enemy warships. ‘We can also hear the noise of battle from that direction,’ he noted.17
Fierce fighting raged throughout much of the day to the west of Omaha Beach and around the batteries of Pointe du Hoc and Maisy. After their very easy destruction of the guns at Pointe du Hoc, the Rangers had found themselves isolated at the moonscape of the original gun position as the Germans had emerged from where they’d been sheltering underground and had then been reinforced. Rather like the 82nd Airborne on the banks of the Merderet, the Rangers had been valiantly holding out with rapidly depleting ammunition. Unbeknown to them, rescue was at hand from the rest of the Rangers who had landed at Omaha and from a company of the 116th Infantry, who were battling their way west through stiff resistance by the remains of the 352. Division and what reinforcements hurried forward.
Captain John Raaen had spent the night of D-Day out in the open to the west of Vierville.18 The day’s fighting had ended when they met some stiff resistance as they pushed westwards along the coastal lateral road towards Pointe du Hoc. Quite a large Ranger force had been assembled – the 5th Rangers as well as three companies of the 2nd Rangers, Company C of the 116th Infantry and even some Shermans of the 743rd Tank Battalion. ‘The night of D-Day,’ recalled Raaen, ‘I learned the difference between a hay stack and a manure pile.’ In the early hours of the 7th, he attended an O Group meeting with General Cota and senior officers in their group. He struggled to concentrate, though, as by this time he’d not slept in forty-eight hours.
Some Rangers had managed to break through to Pointe du Hoc the previous evening, only for the position to come under sustained attack twice during the night. By the morning, Colonel James E. Rudder had just under a hundred men, half of whom were wounded, including himself and the British Commando liaison officer, the 6-foot-6 Lieutenant-Colonel Tom Trevor. Now dug in nearby were Karl Wegner and his two comrades from their beach-top bunker, who with their new, hastily cobbled-together company had been moved westwards along the coast. Reinforced with extra ammunition, Wegner was conscious that a stand-off had occurred, even though they were more numerous than the Rangers they now surrounded. ‘They were far better soldiers than us,’ said Wegner.19 ‘We couldn’t make headway against them and they were too few in number to make a big attack against us.’
German troops had moved overnight so that, while the Americans now had a bridgehead around Omaha, there were plenty of men defending the coast between Vierville and Pointe du Hoc. The mission of the mixed Rangers and Company C, 116th Infantry group was to battle their way through and somehow link up with the beleaguered Rangers at Pointe du Hoc. First, though, they had to see off a counter-attack launched at seven that morning. It came a few hundred yards from where Captain Raaen was dug in, but seeing a number of Shermans standing by idly, he ran over to one, jumped on to it and knocked on the hatch. A bleary-eyed tank commander emerged and Raaen told him to unleash some fire-power against the German attack. Quickly getting into action, the Shermans helped force the enemy attack back. Soon after that, Raaen was ordered out on patrol with just three other men, treading very carefully for fear of enemy mines. Spotting two Germans up ahead, they opened fire and pursued them until they lost them. They then heard the revving of engines behind them and realized the column about to drive for Pointe du Hoc was getting going.
Rejoining the rest of the column, he was told to head to the 29th Division CP and report the Rangers’ plans. This took him back to the beach, where, having made his report, he was able to take a Jeep, fill it with ammunition and drive it back up to Vierville and on to rejoin the relief column heading towards Saint-Pierre-du-Mont, the village before Pointe du Hoc. Several times, snipers took shots at Raaen’s Jeep. One bullet skimmed his helmet and spun into his lap. Then a machine gun opened fire and, quickly using a hedge as cover, both he and Corporal Jack Sharp, who was with him, got out of the Jeep, took cover underneath and, having released the handbrake, crawled and pushed the vehicle past the next
gap until they were clear. Soon after, they reached a fork in the road, which posed a dilemma – which direction should they take? After careful examination of spent cartridges and battle debris, they chose the right. This turned out to be the correct call, because soon after they finally rejoined the column and were able to distribute the ammunition.
The Ranger relief column reached Saint-Pierre-du-Mont at around 11 a.m., but although they were now only 1,000 yards from Pointe du Hoc, here German resistance stiffened. Artillery and mortars rained down, while snipers and machine-gun fire – from Karl Wegner among others – covered every approach and, although the Rangers and accompanying tanks returned fire, they were unable to force their way through. Now they were doubly surrounded – at Pointe du Hoc and at Saint-Pierre-du-Mont. Raaen was about to be sent off on a lone mission to find out what the situation was at Vierville and whether reinforcements were on their way, when an officer from the 29th Division arrived on a bicycle and assured them the 29th’s 175th Infantry had just landed and that relief from the 116th was coming. It might have been, but not that day.
That evening, the Shermans pulled back along with some of the men. Raaen, although only a young captain, was left in command of the rest – three Ranger companies and Company C of the 116th. ‘We had practically no anti-tank weapons,’ he recalled, ‘and so we just holed in expecting to be run over by German tanks.’20
Across the invasion front to the north-west of Caen, the Canadians, and to a lesser extent the British troops from Sword, were coming to blows with the altogether more formidable armoured forces of the 12. SS ‘Hitlerjugend’ and the 21. Panzer-Division. By 1944, German infantry divisions had been reduced in size, so generally speaking had three regiments of two battalions each, rather than the older version of three regiments, each with three infantry battalions of around 900 men each. This meant their overall size dropped from around 15,000 to 12,000 men. Armoured divisions, on the other hand, and especially Waffen-SS panzer divisions, tended to be swollen and above their authorized establishment. The ‘Hitlerjugend’ Division was a case in point, with a total strength of 20,540 on 1 June, with substantially inflated battalions in its two panzer-grenadier regiments, all of which were motorized, as well as having just under a hundred Panzer Mk IV tanks and almost fifty Mk V Panthers. The division also had a self-propelled gun regiment (tracked guns that could move in their own right rather than having to be towed) and a lot of artillery support, with nearly 150 guns all told, including twelve 88mm high-velocity anti-tank guns attached to five of the six battalions, while the sixth still had six; there were seventy of these extremely potent guns in the division. This was a lot – a huge number compared with ordinary Wehrmacht infantry divisions and almost as many as an artillery-heavy British division.
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