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INVASION
THE STORY DF D-DAY
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NORMANDY INVASION
_
Monument to a dead American soldier on the shell-blasted shore ofNormandy.
INVASION
THE STDRY DF D-DAY by
BRUCE
BLIVEN. JR.
If. Sterling Publishing Co., Inc
New York
A FLYING POINT PRESS BOOK Design: PlutoMedia
Front cover photograph: Bettmann/Corbis Frontispiece photograph: United States National Archives Interior photographs courtesy of The Naval Historical Center
and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bliven, Bruce, 1916-
Invasion the story of D-Day/ Bruce Bliven, :
p.
cm.
—
Jr.
— Updated ed.
(Sterling Point book)
Originally published:
New York Random House, 1956. :
Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-1-4027-4521-8 (trade)
ISBN-10: 1-4027-4521-4 ISBN-13: 978-1-4027-4141-8 (pbk.)
ISBN-10: 1-4027-4141-3 1.
World War, 1939-1945— Campaigns— France— NormandyJuvenile literature.
I.
Title.
D756.5.N6B55 2007 940.54'21421-dc22
2006032145
2468
97531
10
Published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.
387 Park Avenue South,
New York, NY 10016
Original edition published by
Copyright
Random House, Inc.
© 1956 by Bruce Bliven, Jr.
New material in this updated edition Copyright
© 2007 by Flying Point Press
Map and diagram of LCVP copyright © by Richard Thompson, Creative Freelancers, Inc. Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing c/o Canadian
Manda Group,
165 Dufferin Street
Toronto, Ontario, Canada Distributed in the United Castle Place, 166
High
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BN7 1XU
Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd. P.O.
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in
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Sterling ISBN-978-1-4027-4141-8
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For Allen, David, Douglas, Eric, Joey, Keith,
Mark, Peter,
Terry,
Tom, Tony and Wallace
CONTENTS
1
The Great Assault
1
2 Attack by Section 3
6
Operation Overlord
21
4 Mounting the Attack
27
5
Ike Says "Go!"
38
6
Out of the Sky
44
7
Bad Weather
55
8 First Waves
9
62
The German Defenders
10
The Rangers
11
Standstill
12
First
13
Lambert Would Try
14
Infantrymen
at
Pointe du
67
Hoe
75
85
on High Ground
Now
90 98 105
CONTENTS 15
Shuford and the Chief
112
16
Dawson's Good Throw
126
17
They Led the Way
130
18
The Toehold
135
19
The End Had Begun
142
Index
151
About the author
161
x
INVASION
THE STDRY OF D-DAY
X
CHAPTER
1
THE GREAT ASSAULT
THE END OF WORLD WAR
II
BEGAN ON JUNE
6,
1944.
That was the day American, British and Canadian
who had sailed across the Channel from England,
troops,
invaded the continent of Europe. They attacked a mile strip of the coast of
Normandy
in
fifty-
German-held
France. It
was the
greatest
amphibious, or water-borne,
assault in the history of warfare. If
this
you is
talk
the
about "D-Day," most people assume that
D-Day you mean, although
by the army
to
mean
the term
the day of any attack. June
is
6,
used 1944,
INVASION
outranks
all
the other D-Days there have been, and
the chances are that the world will never again see an
amphibious assault on such a huge scale. In the future, no
one
is
going to think what the German dictator, Adolf
Hitler, thought: that the
whole coast of a continent can be
defended by building a concrete and barbed-wire barrier along
its
seashore.
The growth of
development of guided and
air
power and the
ballistic missiles
have made
Hitler's idea ridiculous. It
wasn't ridiculous in 1944. At that time the use of
airborne troops
who dropped
chutes and gliders, and
was brand new.
to the battlefield in para-
who could fly over fortifications,
Parts of three airborne divisions
were
used in the Normandy assault, but theirs was an assisting job.
They delivered the
first jab.
The main
knockout punch— was to be made by
effort— the
six divisions of
infantrymen who traveled to the battlefield by boat. It
had
was against just such a seaborne invasion that Hitler built his defensive line, his "Atlantic Wall," as
called
by
it.
The
coastline of Europe
foot, all the
had been
he
fortified, foot
way from Denmark down to the southern
THE GREAT ASSAULT end of France.
It
wasn't really a wall.
It
was
a
network of
obstacles placed in the water to rip the bottoms out of
small boats and, on land, mines, pillboxes, forts, gun
emplacements and machine-gun
nests,
connected by
trenches and protected by barbed wire barriers. Hitler
thought
The
it
was strong enough
Allies (as the
were
to stop
any invasion
force.
Americans, British and Canadians
called) agreed that the Atlantic Wall
was very
strong.
No matter how many men take part in a landing, some few must be the
General Irwin
first
ashore.
Rommel inspecting the fortifications ofthe
"Atlantic watt.
INVASION
They lead the way for all the others to follow. Those who land first have a peculiarly tough job. In the minutes while they are leaving their boats and wading ashore, they are exposed and almost helpless. If the
enemy is
alert
and ready to defend
its
shore, crossing the
beach is another awkward time for the invaders. Beaches are generally flat
and open, with no shelter from bullets.
About the best an
assault force can
do
is
to get across a
beach fast.
And then
the
fairly quickly,
than the
first
men
ashore have to be supplied,
with supporting weapons more powerful
rifles, light
machine guns and light mortars they
can carry with them.
The ground
assault troops in a
must
seize a fairly large piece of
hurry and build up strength within that
beachhead. Until they do, even a small defending force
maybe able to drive the invaders back into the sea. So the early hours of an amphibious assault, even
under the best
of circumstances, are a gamble. Hitler believed that his army, protected by tions
its fortifica-
and blazing away with a variety of weapons, would
THE GREAT ASSAULT be able to stop the Americans, British and Canadians or close
He
to,
the water's edge.
believed the
assault before
The
at,
Allies
it
Germans could smash the
great
really got going.
thought
differently.
They hoped
their first
few soldiers ashore would break through the beach fortifications
and proceed
far
enough inland on D-Day
establish the first toehold in Europe.
great weight of the
And
to
that then the
combined armies, pouring through
the small opening in the Atlantic Wall, could go on to win the
war against Germany.
The question was: Could the leading break open the
first
assault troops
holes in Hitler's defensive line?
That was what the soldiers themselves, before the end of D-Day, would answer.
depended on them.
The success of
the invasion
X
CHAPTER
2
ATTACK BY SECTION
THERE WERE MORE THAN 2,800,000 MEN the Allied expeditionary force.
Of
these, only a
thousand were going to lead the landings. And
two
o'clock in the
at
IN
few
around
morning of D -Day they were about ten
miles from the French coast.
Most of them were aboard the
large transports
on
which they had crossed the Channel.
Now
they began to load into the small landing craft
used for the actual attack.
The night was dark and rather cold. Every man was nervous even though the Germans, so far,
had done nothing to show they knew what was coming.
ATTACK BY SECTION There were some reassuring ideas with which a soldier
could
infantrymen
the
face
job
ahead.
The
first-wave
knew that they were going to get help from
thousands of specialists— soldiers, sailors and airmen—
who had been jobs.
carefully rehearsed in various assisting
That was a comforting thought.
And
it
was
possible, the assault troops
felt,
that
if
everything worked according to plan, the landings might
be
fairly easy.
But those who were veterans of other,
earlier,
landings
knew that in an amphibious assault the plans never work perfectly.
Some of the men were not so much afraid as tense from days of waiting for
D-Day
to
come. The suspense had
mounted by the hour.
And
so, for
some of them, the order
to load into the
landing craft came as a kind of relief.
The
assault boats
were
called LCVP's-initials that
stood for Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel. They were the smallest of the
many different
kinds of landing craft
INVASION
that
had been designed by the
They were
II.
built to
least, into quite
Allies during
World War
run right onto the shore— or,
at
shallow water— where their square bows
could be lowered, like small drawbridges, to become
unloading ramps.
An LCVP
could carry 32 men, and a 32-man section
was the basic unit, or team,
The infantrymen got over the
rails
in the attack.
into their
LCVP's by climbing
and down the sides of the transport
ships,
using huge rope cargo nets as ladders. They had practiced this
England.
maneuver repeatedly during It
their training in
was not easy to do in the dark, carrying heavy
and awkward equipment, and with the boats waiting
at
the bottom of the nets tossing in the choppy water. Both
the
wind and the waves were higher than the
hoped they would the small boats
be. But,
Allies
had
on the whole, the loading of
went well.
There were no seats in the LC VP's. The men took positions in the bargelike interiors of the boats
three rows. Those in front ashore. It was too
would be the
in,
roughly,
first to
rush
crowded for everyone to sit at the same
8
ATTACK BY SECTION time, so the soldiers took turns standing, squatting or ting.
The water was much too rough
position.
for comfort in
sit-
any
As the LCVP's loaded up and pulled away from
the big transports, they began to rock and pitch.
Waves
slapped them, sending cold spray flying through the
air.
Before long everybody was soaked to the skin.
Each boat section carried
knew
it
power. The
terrific
men
and the knowledge was one of the things that
gave them confidence.
A typical boatload in the first wave ried, first of
all,
of the assault car-
standing in the bow, the boat section
leader (a junior officer) with five riflemen. carried semiautomatic
Garand
The riflemen
rifles (called M-l's)
each had 96 bullets in clips of eight with him. the extra clips in pouches on the wide
web
and
He wore
belt
around
his waist. Tied to the suspenders that helped support his
belt
were some of the five hand grenades and four smoke
grenades he carried. In addition, in one of the big pockets in his special assault jacket,
he had a half-pound block of
TNT and the fuse to set it off. Next came four men,
also
armed with
rifles,
who made
INVASION
up
a special wire-cutting team. Their job
was
to
open
gaps through barbed wire with the big cutters they carried.
Behind them were two Browning Automatic teams with two called, is
more
men
like a
lead around in rapid
to a team.
A
BAR,
as the
machine gun than a fire.
Rifle
gun was
rifle; it
sprays
Each team carried nine hun-
dred pounds of ammunition.
Then came two men with bazookas,
the amazing
weapon which looks like a length of stovepipe and fires a small,
bomblike rocket.
yards, but when
it
hits,
range
Its
is
only a few hundred
the rocket not only explodes with
great force, but can burn
its
way through thin steel plate.
Each bazooka man had an assistant to load the device and carry the extra rockets.
He was armed with
a carbine, a
light rifle.
A four-man light mortar team came next. They carried a 60-millimeter mortar (whose barrel
is
than 2 A inches wide) and twenty mortar l
the
a shade
shells.
more
Many of
men thought that the mortar was the infantry's most
effective
weapon.
It is
a tubular device that lobs
10
its
shell
ATTACK BY SECTION high into the It is
air,
so that
accurate. And,
it
when
can reach over walls or
the shell explodes,
it
hills.
shatters
thousands of fragments that zip off in every
into
direction with the force of bullets.
Any man
near the place where a mortar shell goes off sure to be
standing is
almost
hit.
A flamethrower team of two men followed the mortar section.
Their flamethrower spurted slightly
gasoline through the
air. It
was
set
on
fire as it left
nozzle and burned furiously for some it hit.
The flamethrowers were
to
little
burning
The team was
jelly to
be used against the
German
to spray a pillbox with
men
keep the
the
time after
concrete pillboxes and gun emplacements in the fortifications.
jellied
inside the pillbox from
shooting, at least until the fire burned out.
During that time, the
last section in the boat,
demolitions team of five men, was to perform all.
men
in squarish
TNT. Some of
called "satchel" charges.
it
was
special
The demolitions
job— perhaps the most daring of carried
its
the
packages
Some was lashed on the ends of
poles perhaps ten feet long.
The demolitions men were to 11
INVASION
advance
all
the way across the beach and plant their TNT
German
against the concrete walls of the
pillboxes, or
gun emplacements, or whatever the strongpoint particular section of the beach might be.
on the
rifle,
mortar, bazooka and
in their
They counted
BAR teams to keep the
Germans
in the strongpoint fully
advance.
They counted on the flamethrowers, immedi-
ately before the planting of the
point with
fire.
occupied during their
TNT, to douse the strong-
Then, while the Germans were
at least
temporarily stunned by the violent attack, the demolitions
men were to make their final rush. They were to set
down
the
TNT wherever it would
do the most damage,
pull the gadget that set off the fuse, and, in a
few seconds'
way
of the blast.
time, hurl themselves back out of the
The TNT,
if
properly placed, could blow up almost any
pillbox.
The
assistant section leader,
brought up the aid
rear.
second in command,
He had with him one or two medical-
men with first-aid supplies, who wore big red crosses
painted on their helmets for easy identification.
12
ATTACK BY SECTION
LCVP
2
"Higgins Boat'
Medics
I
Assistant Section
Leader
Five-man Demolition Team
Typical Assault Formation
Two-man Flamethrower Team
aboard the LCVP
Four-man Light Mortar Team 2
2
two-man Bazooka Teams
two-man BAR teams
(Browning Automatic
Four-man Wire Cutting Team Section Leader 5 Riflemen
13
Rifles)
INVASION There were 192
six
such boat sections— a
total of
about
men— in each assault infantry company.
And each
of the first-wave companies
was
to attack a
piece approximately 1,000 yards wide of one of the five
main beaches.
The five beaches had code names. From west to east, in were
order, they land),
Omaha
dians) and
When men)
called
Utah (where Americans were
(Americans), Gold (British), Juno (Cana-
Sword
(British).
you said that there were
six divisions (90,000
in the attack, plus reinforcements of a
ferent kinds,
it
But looking trymen,
sounded at
who had
defenses,
it
like a great
only the
first
wave of
assault infan-
for example, the first
on the beach
eight infantry
wave of troops
companies— 48 boat
sections containing a total of 1,536 soldiers.
all,
dif-
many men.
to start the actual attack
was made up of only
it
dozen
seemed like very few indeed.
On Omaha,
because
to
And Omaha,
was in many ways the most important beach of
had two divisions assigned
14
to
it.
The 28,500 men
in
ATTACK BY SECTION those two divisions waited to follow in the footsteps of the
first 1,536 soldiers.
While the first- wave
assault boats, fully loaded, waited
for a signal to start their ten-mile
run
in to the beaches,
they circled in groups, plowing through the choppy sea after
each other
like circus
H-Hour (which the
horses in a big ring.
stands for the minute of an attack in
same way that D -Day stands for its date) had been set
at 6:30 for
both the American beaches, Utah and Omaha.
At 4:30 a.m. the LCVPs got the order to
The
go.
circles of boats straightened out into lines,
small navy guide boats leading the way.
The
lines
with
moved
toward the beaches.
As soon
as the
run began, many of the boat sections
found themselves in what seemed
The
spray,
to
trouble.
which had soaked everybody from the
got heavier.
needed
minor
like
Some LCVP's were
filling
run their automatic pumps
start,
with water and
at
top speed. In a
few cases even that was not enough. The infantrymen
15
INVASION
had
to take off their
helmets and use them to
was unfortunate because diers
it
bail.
This
wasted strength that the
sol-
would need later. Nor was that all. Despite the anti-
seasickness
pills
they had been taking, the
men
got
sick— not just a few of those with the weakest stomachs,
but most of the men. Some, of course, were
much
sicker
than others, but even a slight attack of seasickness exhausting.
The combination of wet
is
cold, seasickness
and the cramped conditions in the heavily loaded LC VP's
was discouraging.
On
the other hand, the noise of the
the shore cheered the
men up.
All fifty miles of coast
pounding.
It
bombardment of
had started
were getting a tremendous
at 3:15,
when more than
1,100
Royal Air Force bombers had blasted the invasion area
with nearly 6,000 tons of bombs.
And
just half
an hour
before the landings, 1,365 heavy bombers of the United States Eighth Air Force were to
drop another 3,000 tons of
high explosives on Hitler's Atlantic Wall. They were 100-
pound bombs for the most part, but with some 500-pound blockbusters mixed in for the biggest strongpoints.
16
And
ATTACK BY SECTION
Troops
fifteen
in
a LCVP approaching Omaha beach, June
6,
1944.
minutes before the attack, medium bombers and
fighter-bombers of the United States Ninth Air Force
would sweep the whole to the
coast,
paying special attention
most troublesome German gun positions.
That was by no means
all.
The guns of both the British and American navies were pummeling the
coast.
More than 700
in the giant flotilla that
were there in size
of the 6,000 ships
had been assembled
to serve as floating artillery.
from huge battleships such
17
for
D-Day
They ranged
as the Texas, the
INVASION Arkansas, the Warspite and the Ramillies, whose biggest
guns could throw their shells as
far as 17 miles,
down to
rocket-launching boats, hardly larger than the LCVP's.
These rocket-launching boats were to
fire clusters
of
high-explosive, self-propelling shells over the heads of
the assault troops at the last safe
moment— when
they
were just 300 yards from the beach. Each rocket boat was to
drop 1,000 rockets on the beach in a few minutes' time.
There were cruisers and destroyers with thousands of shells to fire. artillery
Tanks and self-propelled armored
guns were to blast away
at the
field-
beach from the
landing craft that had carried them across the Channel.
Then they were to follow the first wave of troops ashore. There had never been a bombardment anywhere of such size and sive
intensity.
The
total
weight of high explo-
dropped on the Normandy coast that morning was
almost incredible. The plan was to "drench" the Atlantic
Wall with bombs and describe
it,
for the
shells.
That was a good word
to
bombardment was to fall, literally, like
rain.
The
assault troops
had every reason
18
to
hope that the
ATTACK BY SECTION
USS Nevada firing her forward 14-inch guns offNormandy, June 6, 1944.
Germans would be wiped out and
their strongpoints
shattered before the landings. As they listened to the
thunder of the explosions, their confidence grew. The fantastic
rumble of the battleships' gunfire was perhaps
the most comforting noise of the general
all.
Their
booming rumble, sounded 19
shells,
amid
like freight cars
INVASION
rolling
downgrade, high in the
they could blow up
sky.
They sounded
as if
Normandy all by themselves.
So, despite their discomfort, the
men
in the boats felt
keyed up. One section leader remembered afterward that his
men
jabbered away, as they came
in,
with great
enthusiasm. They talked about what a mess the bom-
bardment must be making of the Atlantic Wall. "That place
going to be a shambles," one of them
is
predicted.
Not
until later,
when
the assault boats were within a
few hundred yards of the shore, did the truth begin
to
come clear. The
fact
was
that an amazing
number of Germans
and German guns survived the heaviest bombardment in history.
20
X
CHAPTER
3
OPERATION OVERLORD
WORLD
II
WAR HAD STARTED ALMOST
years earlier, on September
1,
1939,
FIVE
when Germany
invaded Poland. England and France had promised to
defend Poland. But they were unprepared to
and
as a result they
spring, France
army had
to
were
terribly beaten.
By the next
had fallen into German hands. The flee
fight,
British
the Continent and escaped from
the French port of Dunkirk with frightful losses. In the
summer
of 1940 the Nazi Germans, with their
the Italians, controlled
all
21
allies,
of western Europe.
The
INVASION
German
air force
began
its
attempt to
bomb
the British
Isles into rubble.
Nevertheless, the British immediately began to think
about getting back onto the Continent. They started planning an attack across the Channel— even though
seemed more
likely that
it
they would become the invaded
rather than the invaders. Hitler threatened to invade England. as to
assemble a
fleet of
He went
so far
barges along the French coast,
planning to use them as assault boats. But he hesitated
because he realized the risks of an amphibious attack. Also, if
he knew that the British navy would destroy
necessary, in an attempt to
fleet. Still,
The
smash
German
invasion
the idea was tempting.
British
knew
as well as Hitler did that if the
Germans could make the landing would be
a
itself,
lost.
successfully,
Some English home owners,
England
feeling that
they would prefer death to surrender, got together pitchforks and filled pots with ordinary pepper to faces of the invading
throw in the
Germans. At one point the British
22
OPERATION OVERLORD talked about stopping Hitler's assault by pouring
oil
and
gasoline on the English Channel, setting fire to
it,
and
burning the invasion barges— and the desperate idea least
at
made good propaganda.
Meanwhile, Royal Air Force fighter
and Hurricanes, lashed back
Spitfires
German
air force,
the Luftwaffe.
And
forward to the
day
at
the great
the British Prime
Winston Churchill, and the
Minister,
looked
pilots, in their
British people
when England would
attack.
Then
Hitler postponed his English invasion plans.
was, from his point of view, one of his greatest errors.
It
He
made another bad mistake in June, 1941, by declaring war on Russia,
then his
until
partners also
ally.
His Italian and Japanese
made mistakes. They both attempted more
than they had the strength to handle. Italy pushed the
war
into
North
Africa.
into the conflict,
Japan brought the United States
on December 7th of that same
year,
by
attacking Hawaii (Pearl Harbor), the Philippines and
other American possessions in the Pacific.
23
INVASION American military strategists, like the British, began to plan for the day when the Allies would invade Europe to destroy the powerful
In August, 1942,
beginning to turn
German army.
when
its
the United States
test raid across the
Channel.
the small French port of Dieppe.
The
made
It
raid
a small,
was aimed
was
it
Yet despite
at
a disaster.
Nearly half the 6,100 British and Canadian soldiers took part in
just
peacetime strength into military
power, the British and Canadians actually
amphibious
was
who
were killed or captured. its
frightful cost, the
the Allies a valuable lesson. This seaports, like Dieppe,
Dieppe raid taught
was
that the built-up
were too well
fortified to
be
attacked successfully, and that the great assault had better
aim for open beaches.
But a large invasion, depending on great quantities of ammunition, gasoline, food and countless other supplies,
would need
a port or excellent unloading facilities in
France. So the raid inspired an idea Allies
which worked: The
would bring the port with them. On D-Day they
24
OPERATION OVERLORD towed from England
all
the parts of two temporary ports
which they put together These included ships floating piers, cranes
off the flat
to
and
Normandy beaches.
be sunk as breakwaters and hoists.
Right after Dieppe, things began to go better for the Allies.
In the
fall
of 1942 the British 8th Army, com-
manded by General Bernard Law Montgomery, the
Germans and
defeats that desert.
was
And
Italians in
Egypt— the
a series of
them out of the North African
to drive
farther west, nearer the Atlantic side of
Africa, a thousand-ship British
force landed.
first in
defeated
As
it
advanced
to
and American invasion
meet Montgomery, the
enemy was caught in a powerful two-way squeeze. In January, 1943, Prime Minister Churchill and Presi-
dent Franklin D. Roosevelt met Africa.
turned.
By then they
felt
at
Casablanca in North
that the tide of the
The Russians had stopped
the
war had
Germans
at the
Russian city of Stalingrad, and were throwing them back
from the Volga
seemed
River.
The North African campaign
certain to be a decisive success.
25
While the next
INVASION
step
was
to
knock
Italy out of the war,
joint staff of British
no small matter, a
and Americans started
to plan in
earnest for the great cross- Channel invasion.
They hoped
it
would be ready by
1943, they gave the project
its
known as Operation Overlord.
26
early 1944. In May,
code name.
It
was
to
be
X
CHAPTER
A
MOUNTING THE ATTACK
THE PREPARATIONS FOR THE GREAT ASSAULT had been going on
at full
speed for two years. Their size
and complexity were almost more than any grasp.
Even
at
SHAEF (Supreme
man
could
Headquarters, Allied
Expeditionary Force), the brain center of the attack, only a
few
that
officers
were
in positions to appreciate everything
had been and was going on.
The men little
knew comparatively
in the assault sections
about the big operation.
They realized, of course, that they were the spearhead of a mighty effort. But none of them
leading the
way
for a total force of
27
knew that they were
more than 2,800,000
INVASION men, including 36 divisions and the vast number of men, mostly in the supply services, that are required to keep a division
on the
battlefield.
(A huge number, seemingly—
unless you knew, as the officers at
SHAEF knew, that the
German commander, General Gerd von Rundstedt, had about 60 divisions under his
The
command in France.)
assault troops understood, generally, the impor-
tance of what they were about to try to do.
impressed, none the
less,
by
visits
They had been
from both the Army
Group Commander, General Montgomery, and the man in
command
Dwight all
of the entire expeditionary force, General
D. Eisenhower,
who had
talked briefly to nearly
the leading combat units.
But
much
of
The men in the
what had been going on was top first
secret.
boat sections observed the results of
many actions they had heard practically nothing about.
They noticed,
for instance, that there
were no German
planes in the sky.
But they didn't know why.
The answer involved
a fabulous battle story— of air
28
MOUNTING THE ATTACK battle, in this
part of the
At this
200
case— that had been fought and won
as
one
D-Day preparations.
critical
moment, the Germans had fewer than
fighter planes available for the defense of France.
Most of those they had were not going
ground— for
lack of gasoline.
to get off the
Most of those
that took to
the air were not going to fight— primarily because they
were so heavily outnumbered. That was a sign of one great job the Allied air forces had done. For two years our bombers had been destroying
Germany's gasoline-refining and plane-manufacturing factories.
This was just as important as meeting and
defeating
German
planes in the
air.
In the two months
before the assault the Allied airmen had set out to wreck the railroads the
German army would need for a counter-
attack. In April
and
May
1,437
French locomotives had
been bombed or machine-gunned out of the secret Allied helpers in France— the in
action.
And
men and women
movement— had blown up
the French resistance
another 292.
We
had already
won
the
war
29
in the air at the cost of
INVASION thousands of American and British earlier victory, the assault
But the
Without that
would have been foolhardy.
men in the assault boats knew very little about
the air war.
German
lives.
They had not been briefed on the fact that the
fighter-plane force
had been crippled beyond
recovery in an air battle in February, 1944. So decisive was this victory that the
Commander
Forces, General H. H. Arnold,
of Gettysburg for
its
of the American Air
compared
it
to the Battle
importance in American history.
The leading ground troops merely noted the They were glad
to see that
meaning that they belonged
the planes in the sky
all
were striped with painted bands
results.
like
Christmas candy-
to the Allies, not to the
Germans.
It
was obvious,
in the
same way,
that the
German navy
hadn't been able to interfere with the Channel crossing.
There had been no signs of German submarines or
pedo
boats.
The Allied
navies had
of the invasion's sea routes.
30
tor-
won complete control
MOUNTING THE ATTACK The men approach
in the landing boats
had gone so smoothly, but they did not
sail
understand
how it had happened.
The answer was result of
were delighted that the
that our
command
months of 'round-the-clock
of the sea
was the
fighting over the
whole Atlantic Ocean, from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope.
One been
of the Allied navies' greatest successes had
won
only the day before D-Day. Late on the after-
noon of June
5th, British,
Canadian and American mine
sweepers had finished clearing ten separate paths through the fields of floating mines that the Germans had
sown
in the English
Channel.
It
had been an even more
dangerous job for the small boats than mine sweeping usually
is
because the Channel's
tidal
currents are
unusually strong. But the small boats had done
it.
They
had made the Allied invasion fleet's crossing safe. Since the assault troops hadn't
known much about the
danger of mines, they could hardly appreciate what the
mine sweepers had done. The
31
soldiers
were more
inter-
INVASION
ested, having in arguing
been the
sailors' guests for several days,
whether navy food was better than army
food.
Most of them thought
diers
were especially envious of the navy's white bread
it
The American
was.
sol-
because they had been eating (and not liking) English
bread that was slightly brown in color.
The sheer weight beyond
of the invasion force
was almost
calculation.
The British Isles Colorado.
On
packed with
are not
much bigger than the State of
the eve of the assault they were so jam-
men and
assault
equipment that
it
was
almost funny— if it hadn't been so deadly serious. It
seemed
as if all the
open
fields
along
all
the English
country roads had been turned into parking
Americans alone needed parking space and trucks, and 44,000,000 square
lots.
The
for 50,000 jeeps
feet of out-of-doors
storage space.
We
had shipped
in
20,000 railroad cars and 1,000
steam engines just to move our
own men and
supplies
around England.
Within the
first
two weeks 32
after
D-Day, the Allies
MOUNTING THE ATTACK hoped
to put ashore 725,000
The preparation involved force,
and
all
in
men and
moving such an enormous
the supplies required,
complicated and
difficult
95,000 vehicles.
was among the most
problems any military staff has
ever had to face. It
took more than 6,000 vessels to accomplish the task,
including landing craft, merchant transports and naval fighting ships.
The
Allies
had had
to plan to load,
move, and then
unload more than 200,000 tons of supplies within those first
fourteen days. Once the invasion force was com-
pletely ashore in France,
it
was expected
to
burn
at least
1,000,000 gallons of gasoline a day.
Small wonder that southern England had been trans-
formed into what looked
like a great
open-air ware-
house!
The planning had involved more than
stockpiling
and moving mountains of materiel. Operation Overlord
had taken
a fantastic
amount of detailed study and
lation.
33
calcu-
INVASION There had been experts of a hundred kinds working
on the countless items of information, technique and equipment that were about
to
be
tested.
Among
these
items, to
mention just a few, were long-range weather pre-
dictions,
waterproofing methods, seasickness
pills,
radio
communications networks, concentrated foods, uniforms, camouflage and
new weapons. The
unceasingly, aware that they
experts had worked
would never know
all
the
answers to many questions they had been asked to solve.
Maps— to take just one detail— were a good example. From
the
moment
the landing beaches had been
chosen, which was in May, 1943, intelligence officers studied photographs of the ground as
if
they were
looking for pennies in the sand. They tried to learn every possible fact about the fifty-mile strip: Just
the high-water mark?
Would
where was
How big were the grains
of sand?
the stony shingle just beyond the sand support a
two -and-a-half- ton truck? Where were the best
exits
from the beaches? Did these show as roads, or cart tracks, or dry stream lines? And, above the
Germans done to
fortify
all,
them?
34
just exactly
what had
MOUNTING THE ATTACK
Men had risked their lives
sneak raids to get information. General
who commanded
and
in low-flying planes
Omar N.
in
Bradley,
the American ground troops,
tells
of
one British lieutenant who had been taken in a submarine
one night through the mine
Channel. Then
fields in the
he had paddled ashore, under the muzzles of the German guns, in a tiny rubber boat. All he wanted
sand from a certain spot. planners
knew
that the
He
got
ground
it.
was
And
a sample of
as a result, the
at that place
was sandy
and firm, not muddy as they had feared it might be. All the information
was evaluated and then compiled
on maps. There were even foam-rubber of the beaches
which
rolled
tubular
map
section
was given such
up
scale
like rugs for storage in
cases. Just before sailing time
a
models
model of
its
each assault
own
part of the
beach to learn by heart.
There had never been better war maps.
Special training had been another big job.
The men
in the assault boats
knew
They had been rehearsing their work 35
a lot
for
about
months.
that.
INVASION
They were
in the best possible physical condition.
Every one of them could do 25 push-ups, run three hundred yards in 45 seconds or
barbed wire, carry a
man
less,
crawl 50 yards under
piggy-back for 25 yards, and
then, without stopping to catch their breaths,
march four
miles in 45 minutes.
Every
man
could
swim
at least fifty
yards wearing his
uniform, his boots and his helmet. (Those
been able
to
swim
swimming through
before had learned.
who
hadn't
They had been
the cold English winter in rivers,
streams and emergency water tanks which were part of England's air-raid defense equipment.)
They had
all
taken part in at least three large-scale
dress rehearsals for the assault. to English
They had come in by boat
beaches which were almost exactly
real targets in France.
his job in practices so
troops couldn't
tell
Every
like the
man had had a chance to do
much
like the real
thing that the
they were make-believe— until they
saw that instead of Germans shooting back they were met by umpires waving brightly colored flags. (At one of the rehearsals, in April,
36
German S -boats had
L
MOUNTING THE ATTACK attacked the
mock
invasion
fleet.
They sank two
landing ships; more than 700 Allied
men had been lost.)
Of course a battle can only be rehearsed up to point. sible
Still,
the
large
a certain
sham battles had gone about as far as pos-
toward being the
real thing.
37
X
CHAPTER
S
KE SAYS "GD!
IN SPITE OF ALL had been invasion
By
THE REHEARSALS NO ONE
sure, until just before
would
it
happened,
board the transports and ready to
poned
it
for
looked as
if
were go.
all
But
loaded on at the last
the attack might have to be post-
two weeks or
the weather,
the
actually take place.
Saturday, June 3rd, the troops
minute
when
a
month. The trouble was with
which is beyond the control of any plan.
Only a few days
in the
whole year were
right for the
assault. It
couldn't have been before June, because the last of
the landing craft hadn't been delivered.
38
IKE SAYS "GO!"
There had
to
be a
full
moon
at night so the para-
troopers could see.
A rising tide, from a low before dawn to a high around was needed
the middle of the morning,
to clear anti-
landing obstacles in the water and to land the assault boats.
In June, only the 5th, 6th and 7th days had both the right phase of the
moon and
the right tides at the right
hours.
But on Saturday, the forecast
weather was bad and the
was discouraging. By Sunday
Monday, the for
3rd, the
5th,
it
was
clear that
would be hopeless. The prediction was
weather so bad that the
air forces
to deliver their all-important
wouldn't be able
bombardment. General
Eisenhower postponed the attack for twenty-four hours.
The question was whether it could be made on the 6th. It
was one of the hardest decisions
to make.
a
man has ever had
Bad weather could ruin the assault. But so could
another postponement. To delay any longer meant that the
enemy might break the secrecy with which
were guarded. The huge invasion 39
force, all
the plans
brought
INVASION
General Eisenhower gives the order of the day, "Full Victory —Nothing Else, to paratroopers just before they
board their airplanes.
together in southern England, was a big, easy target for
Nazi bombers, or for the Allies
new pilotless aircraft which, the
knew, Hitler was just about to unveil. And what
would postponement do
was perhaps the
to the
greatest of the dangers in waiting.
assault troops
were
be hard,
impossible, to reach
if not
men's morale? That
at a
high pitch of readiness.
40
it
It
The
would
a second time.
IKE SAYS "GO!"
On Sunday
night,
June 4th, General Eisenhower met
with his main advisers in a large room in a mansion called
Southwick House.
It
was near the town of Portsmouth
on the south coast of England and
it
was used
as head-
quarters for Admiral Sir Bertram H. Ramsay,
commanded furiously,
the naval forces.
who
The wind was blowing
and the rain came down in torrents.
The invasion's nine top commanders sat in an informal group in library
chairs,
surrounded by bookshelves that
were mostly empty, and listened
to the final reports
by
three weather experts.
Group Captain
J.
M.
Stagg,
ologist, said that all three
SHAEF's chief meteor-
agreed that the weather was
going to get better. The winds were going to die
good
deal.
The
cloudy over
thought the
it
rain
would
stop. It
was going
to
down
a
be very
Normandy on Tuesday morning, but they
would be
clear
enough
for the
bombers
to see
German strongpoints that were their targets.
General Eisenhower took a poll of his advisers.
Both Air Chief Marshal
Sir
Arthur W. Tedder,
who was
the deputy supreme commander, second only to Eisen-
41
INVASION
hower, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the air commander, were doubtful. forces skies.
They thought the
air
would not be able to do their job in heavily overcast
"Chancy" was the word they used.
Eisenhower turned
Montgomery, the commander
to
of all the ground forces.
"Do you see any reason
for not going Tuesday?"
Eisenhower asked. There had not been many times when Montgomery hadn't been eager to fight. "I
would say— go!" Montgomery answered.
Eisenhower listened
to everybody.
Near the end of
the conversation he pointed out that not going
was
how
long
chancy, too.
He
thought the question was just
the invasion could be
A
left
"hanging on the end of a limb."
supreme commander can ask
hower had done, but there
is
for advice, as Eisen-
no way
in the
world that
he can get anybody to make his decisions for him. Every-
body
in the
room knew
that.
Smith, Eisenhower's chief of terrible loneliness of his
General Walter Bedell
staff,
was struck by the
commander 42
at that
moment.
IKE SAYS "GO!"
Eisenhower was surrounded by leagues,
and yet no one could
make the fateful choice
all
his
most trusted
really help him.
He had to
by himself.
He thought it over. "I don't see
how we can do anything else " he said.
The word was-"Go!"
43
col-
X
CHAPTER
E
DUT DF THE SKY
THE
PARATROOPERS
were two separate drops
WENT fifty
FIRST.
THERE
miles apart, one on each
end of the invasion area, and both of them inland, behind the Germans' beach defenses.
The paratroopers began
dropping out of the night sky
at 1:30 a.m., five
before the seaborne attack started. the main assault.
The
They were preceding
No one had a tougher job.
larger of the
two drops was on the west, on the
Cotentin Peninsula, behind Utah beach.
American airborne
divisions, the 101st
It
involved two
and the 82nd; a
total of 12,000 parachutists jumping out of 925
rier planes
hours
and then, somewhat
44
later,
4,000
troop car-
men
in
500
IKE SAYS "GO!"
Paratrooper
in full gear
45
climbing into plane.
INVASION
gliders.
These troops were
to set the stage for the attack
on Utah beach.
They were
to seize
key roads and bridges
Utah, and to throw the confusion.
One
across a large
had
to
was
just
behind
it.
to con-
Those causeways,
from the beaches along the entire
front,
be taken. They were the routes that the invasion,
once ashore, would have to follow on
its
way inland.
British paratroopers of the 6th Airborne Division
dropped on the east end of the invasion
Sword beach. They were supposed across the Allies
into
causeways that led from the beach
swamp
like all the exits
behind
Germans guarding the area
of their most important aims
trol several built-up
far
front,
were
behind
to hold the bridges
Orne River and the Caen Canal, which the
hoped
to use.
They were
also to
blow up the
bridges over the Dives River, farther east, so the
Germans
could not bring reinforcements across them. They were also ordered to capture a large
town
called Merville. In
all,
German gun
battery at a
the paratroopers were sup-
posed to take an area of twenty- four square miles.
The moon was
full,
as expected.
46
But on the American
OUT OF THE SKY side thick clusters of low-hanging clouds blanketed the
ground. The carrier planes, flying in tight V- formations, glided
down toward jump
level,
600
feet
above the
ground. The paratroopers stood up, ready to dive out into
unknown
the black
below. But then, in
planes flew into the cloud layer.
pea-soup
open
fog.
The planes had
It
was
many
cases, the
like sliding into a
to veer apart, spreading
their close formations, in order to avoid colliding
with each other.
It
meant that when the paratroopers
the ground they were scattered
all
hit
over the landscape.
That was bad.
A
night drop of this size
was an experiment.
A
depended, everyone knew, on the paratroopers' minutes on the ground. They had to get chutes, find the bundles of
dropped
for them,
until they
equipment that had been
The clouds covered the moon and
made assembly hard. And then the some
units
were
to
fast.
For
into sizable fighting units, the
Germans could pick them off by one's,
that
first
rid of their
and then find one another
had assembled
lot
spend
47
all
two's or three's.
darkness, in
itself,
scattering was so bad
of D-Day just trying to
INVASION
find
one another and get organized.
Division
came down
as far
away
where they were supposed
as
to be.
Men
in the 101st
twenty miles from
More than
half of
the division's bundles of weapons and ammunition lost
because
Germans
into
it fell
controlled.
the whole,
swamps
And
was
or into fields that the
the 82nd Division's drop, on
was more badly scattered than the
lOlst's.
As a result, instead of one large battle, the paratroopers found themselves fighting fifteen or twenty small separate actions.
And
instead of fighting in their regular units,
many of
the soldiers fought in groups that had put themselves
together on the ground.
The men in them had never seen
one another before.
Nobody knew what was happening. Radio communications, in the
mixup, broke down. Several times groups
of paratroopers fought only a few hundred yards
from each other without the friends close at hand.
the
men managed
And
to join
faintest idea that they
scarcely
and
fight
more than
had
a third of
with any one of the
dozens of small groups that did assemble.
48
away
OUT OF THE SKY Casualties killed, or
were heavy. Every
man was wounded,
taken prisoner before the end of D -Day.
After the
Normandy invasion, we never again dropped
parachute troops
And
fifth
at night.
yet, in spite
of
all
that
went wrong, the
air
drop
behind Utah beach was a success. For although the paratroopers were confused, they confused the
Germans
even more. At 1:30 German Corps headquarters reported to
German Army headquarters landing. But,
couldn't
tell
that the paratroopers
on account of the
how
scattering, the
Germans
big the attack was. By 2:30 they
had diagnosed the situation
fairly accurately.
General von Rundstedt, at his in a villa near Paris,
However,
Army Group headquarters
decided that the paratroopers
were not part of a major Allied night the
were
attack. All
German high command
through the
failed to take the
airborne assault seriously enough.
The Germans on the
actual
ground were
just as
hesitant as those at headquarters.
They fought hard when the paratroopers 49
attacked,
INVASION but they were slow to move. They couldn't make any sense out of the pattern of the drops— and no wonder! So, instead of leaping to the offensive
and going out
hunt the Americans while they were
at their
to
weakest,
most of the Germans sat tight in their prepared defensive positions.
That was 101st,
all
the paratroopers needed. Sections of the
men
picking up
as they
moved forward,
struck
sharply toward the inland ends of the causeways from
Utah beach. By 4:30 part of a battalion of the 82nd had rushed into the village of Ste. Mere
an American flag over unit
it.
(It
Eglise,
was the same
flag the
same
had raised when they entered Naples.)
Ste.
Mere
Eglise
was important from
point, since several roads
talion
they heard a gun
fire
By
met and crossed there. The bat-
so doing they knew,
and saw
Germans were doing the
its
muzzle
shooting.
The
main German communications cable
up
a military stand-
used only their knives, bayonets and hand grenades
in their bold attack.
set
and had raised
several roadblocks outside Ste.
50
whenever
flash, that the
battalion cut the
to Cherbourg,
Mere
Eglise.
and
And,
OUT OF THE SKY
D-Day, A German Private's View
June 6, 1944 On
that night of 6 June none of us expected the invasion
any more. There was a strong wind, thick cloud the
enemy aircraft had not bothered us more
cover,
and
that day than
usual But then— in the night— the air was full of innumerable planes.
tonight?" myself.
We
thought,
But then
it
"What
started. I
One message followed
are they demolishing
was
at the wireless set
the other. "Parachutists
landing here— gliders landing there," and finally "Landing craft approaching."
could. In the
was
Some of our guns
fired as best they
morning a huge naval force was sighted— that
the last report our
advanced observation posts could
send us, before they were overwhelmed. And it was the report
we
received about the situation. It
possible to get an idea of what
last
was no longer
was happening. Wireless
communications were jammed, the cables cut and our officers
had lost grasp of the situation. Infantrymen who were
streamingback told us that their new positions on the coast
had been overrun or that the few "bunkers" had either been shot up or blown
51
to pieces.
in
our sector
INVASION
Right
go with
in the
my
middle of all
this
turmoil I got orders to
car for a reconnaissance towards the coast.
With a few infantrymen I reported
orders were to retake a village nearby. While he still
talking to
came
me
His
to a lieutenant.
was
to explain the position, a British tank
rolling towards us from behind,
from a
direction in
which we had not even suspected the presence of the enemy. The enemy tank immediately opened fire on Resistance was out of the question. I
saw how a group of
Polish infantrymen went over to the their
we
submachine-guns and waving
us.
enemy— carrying
their arms.
When
tried to get through to our lines in the evening British
paratroopers caught
At
first I
soldier,
sion.
us.
was rather
depressed, of course.
I,
an old
was a prisoner of war after a few hours of the inva-
But when I saw the material behind the enemy front,
I could only say, "Old man,
how lucky you have been!"
And when the sun rose the next morning, I saw the invasion fleet lying off the shore. Ship beside ship.
And without
a break, troops, weapons, tanks, munitions and vehicles
were being unloaded in a steady stream.
52
OUT OF THE SKY although the Germans fought for the village until well into the night of
D -Day, the paratroopers held on.
The smaller British drop behind the eastern end of the beaches went more
easily.
There was
with
less trouble
clouds and fog and the paratroopers were not so badly scattered.
The British sent in six gliders right at the
of their drop. Four of them slid
down out of the
start
sky with
marvelous accuracy and landed as they were supposed
on the bridges across the Orne River and the
right
to,
Caen Canal. (The
British code
names
for these bridges
were "Cricket" and "Rugger," the two most popular English sports.) Paratroopers, with their faces blackened so they wouldn't
show up
as spots of white in the dark,
dashed out of the big motorless
were
up
theirs in minutes, before the
to the fact that a parachute
ships.
The bridges
Germans
quite
woke
and glider assault was
going on.
The well.
attack
on the Dives River bridges went
just as
At the same time, another group set out to capture
the big
German gun
battery at Merville,
could wreck the assault boat formations
53
whose guns if
they were
INVASION
firing at
over at
missed
H-Hour.
3:15, it,
When
the heavy
RAF bombers came
they tried to knock out the battery. They
but the bombardment nearly killed the para-
troopers. After the
bombers
left,
the paratroopers got up
and took the battery the hard way, attacking through barbed wire and over mine
fields.
And
Hitler's Atlantic
Wall was thereby minus one of its strongpoints.
54
X
CHAPTER
7
AD WEATHER
THE PARACHUTE AND GLIDER LANDINGS HAD thrown the Germans off balance. That in itself was worth as
much as any of the specific objectives the paratroopers
took.
Hours
started the
idea that
it
after the
German
airborne assault had actually
generals were
still
clinging to the
was part of a hoax.
They thought
that the real invasion
would come
in
farther north, at the Pas de Calais, the French side of the
narrowest part of the English Channel.
They thought, jab
in short, that the paratroopers' lead-off
was only a feint.
General Erwin Rommel,
55
who
shared the German
INVASION
anti-invasion
had
said:
command with
"We must
General von Rundstedt,
stop the assaulting forces in the
water, not only delaying, but destroying all
ment while
enemy equip-
still afloat."
The time had come for the Germans to try. But Rommel, as able and energetic a commander as Hitler had,
was not on
duty.
He was
in Stuttgart,
Germany, celebrating his wife's birthday. He had stopped to see her, briefly,
on
his
way back
to his headquarters
from a command visit with Hitler.
The Germans
in
France hesitated, for the moment, to
make their move. The bad weather, which had caused the commanders Germans'
so
much
failure to
worry, had a lot to do with the
understand what was happening.
The weather had been
had canceled
so bad that they
their regular air
and sea reconnaissance
improved only a
little.
Allies
Allied
patrols. It
The Germans were
had
sure that the
wouldn't dare risk the main invasion effort until
the seas had calmed and the skies had cleared.
And
indeed, just before
H-Hour 56
it
began
to look as if
BAD WEATHER the Allies' gamble on the weather might have been too bold.
The paratroopers were managing clouds, but the overcast at six o'clock
in
spite
of the
was too heavy
for
the bombardiers of the United States Eighth Air Force.
They couldn't see their targets, the German strongpoints on the beaches. They had
was
far less accurate.
to
bomb by instrument, which
Moreover, in order to make sure
that they would not hit any of our
own assault boats, now
closing in on the beaches, the bombardiers had been
ordered to wait as much as thirty seconds after they came over the coast before releasing their bombs. As a result of all this,
the bombardiers missed their targets. Instead of
smashing the German beach defenses, they dropped their 3,000 tons of fields.
bombs
into the green
Normandy
In most cases the earth-shaking blasts did
more than
tear
open craters
in
cow
little
pastures, horrifying
hundreds of cows.
The weather had taken the sting out of one vital part of the assault plan.
And the weather was winning another victory over 57
an
INVASION important Allied weapon. The waves were too high for the amphibious tanks, called
They were
a secret
Sherman tanks
and
to
(for dual-drive) tanks.
and most clever invention— 34-ton
that could "swim."
canvas-and-rubber sides float
DD
filled
with
They had air to
collapsible
make the tanks
keep the water out of their turret hatches,
large ventilators sticking
up high
in
back
to get rid of the
engines' exhaust fumes and to supply the carburetors
with
air,
water.
and small propellers to drive them through the
The DD tanks were to "swim" ashore with the first
of the infantry assault boats. Their guns were expected to
be a tremendous help between the time the air-sea
bombardment ended and the was due to follow the
A DD itself
arrival of the artillery that
infantry assault sections ashore.
tank rode very low in the water. All of the tank
was underwater, with
siding, the
gun and the
just a foot or
turret showing.
two of the
That meant that
even in slightly choppy seas there was great danger that
waves could
spill into their
open tops and sink the tanks.
Although the wind had died down, approached
it
was
still
as
H-Hour
blowing from the north-west
58
at
BAD WEATHER more than ten miles an hour. The breakers in
most
places,
were three or four
off the beach,
feet high.
Omaha, the
more important of the two American beaches, was feeling the worst of what was left of the storm.
General over- all
Omar
N. Bradley,
who, under Montgomery's
command of the ground forces, was in charge of
the American section of the sea-borne troops,
was on the
open bridge of the cruiser Augusta a few thousand yards off
Omaha. His
C. Thorson,
staff operations officer,
Colonel
Truman
was beside him. He was nicknamed "Tubby"
because he was remarkably thin. Bradley recalls in his book, A Soldier's Story, that both of them were squinting through binoculars, trying to see
what was happening. The shore fog,
itself was
hidden by the
but they could easily see that the waters between the
Augusta and craft,
Omaha
beach,
now swarming with
were dangerously rough. Thorson
assault
said he thought
the DD's were going to have a hard time getting through the sea. "Yes, Tubby, I'm afraid you're right," Bradley said. "But at this point there's
nothing we can do."
59
INVASION
"Any sign of a letup
in the surf?"
"Not yet," Bradley said.
The tanks
swim ashore were
that tried to
trouble as Bradley feared.
They began
in as
to suffer
much
damage
from the moment they were launched. Waves smashed the
canvas-and-rubber
engine compartments.
headed
siding.
in.
their
One battalion of thirty- two tanks,
for the eastern half of
on the way
Water flooded
Omaha,
They sank while
their
lost
twenty-seven
crews struggled to
keep afloat in life preservers and hoped that rescue boats
would see them and pick them up. (Most of the men were saved.)
Of the
ashore, only
five
DD's from that battalion that got
two swam
other three were taken
in all
under their own power. The the
way in to the beach by the
LCT (Landing Craft, Tank) that had brought them across the Channel. That
was done because the LCT's bow
ramp, which was supposed to open at sea, wouldn't work. So, since
it
couldn't launch
them according
to plan, the
LCT delivered its tanks to the shore. It
was the same
story along the
whole
coast.
Half the
tanks due on Sword, the easternmost British beach, sank.
60
BAD WEATHER Most of those
that got ashore
were put ashore. That's
how they were landed on Gold, the British beach nearest Omaha. But it was rals to
their
order
all
what
The tank detachment commanders had do by themselves. Many were slow to
to
change the plan because in
than to
afraid the
infantry
were
let
it
them swim
took longer to bring the tanks
in,
and the commanders were
DD's would touch down too
when
and admi-
the LCT's to beach themselves along with
DD tanks.
to decide
far too late for the generals
it
late to
help the
would need help the most. And they
right. All the
way from Utah
to
Sword— with some
exceptions— DD tanks were either missing or late.
H-Hour was at hand. The was
men
assault sections
were ending
their long run
in. It
just as well that they didn't realize— especially the
about to touch
down on Omaha— that
had crippled both their
air
and tank support.
61
the weather
X
CHAPTER
S
FIRST WAVES
THE CRUCIAL MOMENT HAD COME. The next three
awesome
question.
or four hours
The
assault sections
not break through the Atlantic Wall. or would not
win the
would answer the
first
would or would
The invaders would
small toehold on the French
coast.
The enormous weight of the whole rested entirely, for the time being,
gigantic effort
on the men
in the first
waves.
Everything depended on them. And, during the decisive first hours, there
to help.
What
was nothing anyone
else could
do
could be done had already been done.
62
FIRST WAVES
Those things that had already failed were beyond correction.
were the LCVP's and the
All that counted, now,
32-man teams aboard them. It
made no
difference, at
H-Hour, how many millions
of men were waiting, ready to follow.
Or how many tons
of supplies had been assembled. Or
how many
all
people,
over the world, were counting on the invasion to
succeed.
What mattered now was whether a substantial number of these few thousand the small boats,
men could manage to unload from
wade
ashore, cross the beaches, and
fight their way inland for at least a
It
was
warfare,
a
few hundred yards.
moment of nearly unbearable drama. Modern
we
think,
is
factory production, and
a matter of science, invention, all
the other measures of nations'
power. As indeed, in the large sense,
But
at
H-Hour on D-Day,
it is.
the situation in the large
sense suddenly faded in importance.
The spotlight turned on the individual men in action. 63
INVASION Each member of each first-wave
had
assault section
countless assistants backing him up. These were not only
men
the service
in the assault, the reinforcements in
England, the troops on their training in civilians
all
way
overseas and those in
the Allied countries, but also millions of
who were engaged man
duction. So each
in
war work and war pro-
in the first-wave assault section
represented everything that those "behind
phrase For
him"— as
the
went— had accomplished. all
of that, the first-wave troops were
men with
names and home addresses.
What they needed most, at the moment, was courage. And courage was something like It
at
that couldn't be issued
helmets or hand grenades. was, in
fact, a
most mysterious
quality.
No one knew,
H-Hour, just who had it, or how much of it. Veterans of
whom
other landings,
some of
amazing courage
in the past, weren't sure
they had
left.
were about nearly
all
The green
to act
had performed with
how much of it
soldiers, including those
who
with extraordinary gallantry, were
afraid that they
might not have enough of
64
it.
FIRST WAVES
And some
first- wave
of the
the grip of unmanageable
troops, feeling themselves in
already
fear,
felt, secretly,
that
they were not going to be able to carry out their specific assignments.
Whatever the answer was about vidual,
to be,
it
was an
indi-
man-by-man answer.
If the first holes in the Atlantic
opened, mere
Wall were going to be
men would do the job.
And, while the assault was by boat section, each
32-man group would remember— whether anyone
not— who had contributed the most
knew about
it
each
moment.
critical
or
else
In that sense, the
every ancient battle;
modern it
battle
was
at
precisely like
depended on the bravery of the
few who led the way.
No one was more aware manders. Their
of this than the assault com-
men had been
well trained.
Now
there
was nothing more the commanders could do to influence the outcome.
They had
to wait to see
65
whether the
first
INVASION
waves, in addition to everything else they needed, had
courage in sufficient supply. "Overlord had run beyond the reach of its admirals and generals," General Bradley
wrote
later,
describing hours
of agonizing suspense. "For the next few tortured hours
we could do little but pace our decks and trust in the men to
whom The Plan had been given for execution."
66
X
CHAPTER
S
THE GERMAN DEFENDERS
THE GERMANS BEGAN TO SHOOT BACK. THEY had been deceptively
quiet,
stunned by the preparatory
bombardment. But the moment the naval gunfire stopped
it
became
the punishment
it
clear that the Atlantic Wall, for
all
had taken, had by no means been
shattered.
On Utah, where the 82nd and
101st airborne divisions
were already taking up most of the German defenders' attention,
resistance
coastal guns fired a air
few
was comparatively
light.
The
artillery shells, set to burst in the
and shower the assault boats with fragments. But
the actual
at
moment of the touchdown on the beach, when 67
INVASION
twenty assault sections of the 4th Infantry Division
waded out of the surf, the Germans were silent. was
It
on Omaha, and on the
a quite different story
three beaches to the east, Gold, Juno and Sword. There
the coastal defenses firing
fired
of
came
with weapons of all
suddenly and started
to life
sizes.
German
artillery shells,
from near the town of Vierville on the western edge
Omaha,
Another
hit
and sank an
LCT
loaded with tanks.
shell scored a direct hit
on a small assault boat
Army-Navy
Special Engineer Task
that belonged to the Force. This
had the hard job of blasting paths through the
anti-landing obstacles before the tide,
coming
in fast,
covered them with water. The engineers' boat was
packed with
TNT and coils of primacord fuse. When the
shell burst
set off the explosives. All the
it
men on board
were killed.
Company A
of the 29th Divi-
Regiment came
in at almost the
Five assault sections of sion's 116th Infantry
same place— in front of the grounded still
in
water about
Vierville draw. Their boats
five feet
deep when they were
some distance from shore. Just as the boats stuck, the 68
THE GERMAN DEFENDERS Germans opened up on them with intense machine-gun and mortar
fire.
The
down. The soldiers started ashore center
file
and then the flank files
boats'
ramps went
in three files: first the
who were supposed to
peel off to the right and left to keep the
bunching and making too good a hit immediately,
and
all
artillery,
target.
men from
But some were
attempts to keep any kind of for-
mation were given up. Some
men
tried to dive
under
water to get out of sight. Others kept moving forward, but the or
Germans raked the surf with bullets. Men were killed
wounded almost every step of the way. Those who got
as far as the
the beach
edge of the breakers saw that the gunfire on
was even worse, and many thought,
desperation, that the water offered protection.
many
in their
A
good
lay in the shallows just off the shore, in panic or
exhaustion. Those near the anti-landing obstacles tried to take cover behind tection. It
the
them. But the water was no real pro-
was only a matter of time before something hit
men who
tried to take cover in
it.
Then those who
were wounded were drowned because they couldn't keep ahead of the fast-moving, rising tide.
69
INVASION
Army troops wade ashore on Omaha beach, June 6, 1944.
In a matter of minutes every one of officers
and most of
wounded.
its
Company
A's
sergeants had been killed or
Its total casualties
were about two out of every
three men. In fifteen minutes the
company was out
of
action.
German
fire
Omaha where came
was
just as hot
on the eastern end of
the 1st Division's 16th Infantry Regiment
ashore. Crossing bands of machine-gun fire caught
70
THE GERMAN DEFENDERS the assault boats as their ramps
went down. Company E
lost 105 of its 192
men. Most of them were
waded ashore
when
to drag
or
hit
while they
they stopped at the water's edge
wounded comrades onto
the reach of the rising tide.
Two
the sand and out of
sections of
Company F
landed in front of the Colleville draw. Colleville was a small
town with
Vierville,
and
its
a
German
strongpoint in
strongpoint was very
Twenty of the men
much
two boats were
in the
it,
like
in action.
casualties
before they got to the shingle, the rocky, slightly raised part of the beach
other fire.
Company F
beyond the sections
Only seven of the 32
beach. Only two of the
first
all
flat
waded
men
in
sands.
Three of the
into a hail of
German
one boat got across the
the company's officers survived
few minutes of the
assault.
Gold beach, ten miles east of Omaha, was hardly any
better.
That was the sector assigned
50th Division. Both the
to the British
Hampshires, landing near
1st
the
town of Le Hamel, and the 5th East Yorkshires, near
La
Riviere, ran into
heavy
artillery fire.
bullets sprayed across the beaches.
71
Machine-gun
Both the bombings
INVASION and the naval shelling had missed a great many of the
German
positions.
During the preliminary bombard-
ment of Gold, one of the German strongpoints had started a
navy's
gun duel with H.M.S. Bulolo, part of the
bombardment squadron. H.M.S.
warship,
came
in
and silenced the
British
Ajax, another
battery.
But that was
only one battery.
On
Juno, where the 3rd Canadian Division
ashore, four tough
German
came
strongpoints were blazing
away. In addition to mortars and machine guns, there
were 50-millimeter, 75-millimeter and 88-millimeter guns, aimed to
sweep the sands from
them were heavier craft. still
artillery set to
either end.
Behind
shoot at the landing
Eighty per cent of the fortifications on Juno were
in
working condition
at
H-Hour.
Sword, the easternmost of all the beaches, was as bad as Juno. It
was the
target of the British 3rd Division,
which Montgomery had commanded and which was
now
in
France in 1940,
in action for the first time since
Dunkirk. The 3rd had to hurry to take the three main strongpoints on
Sword and push through 72
to relieve the
THE GERMAN DEFENDERS airborne lines.
men
One
of the 6th Division behind the
assault boat
commander, Major
C. K.
the East Yorkshires, had been reading to his sages from Shakespeare's play,
Henry
V,
German King of
men
which
pas-
tells
of
the English invasion of France in 1415:
On, on you noblest English,
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proofI Fathers that,
Have in
like so
many Alexanders,
these parts from
morn
till
even fought,
And sheath'd their swords for lack ofargument. Dishonour not your mothers; now attest That those
whom you calVd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now
to
men ofgrosser blood,
And teach them how to war.
The Major's best tradition. in the
literary effort
.
.
.
was
in the East Yorkshires'
One hundred and eighty-five years earlier,
French and Indian War, the regiment had taken
part in the capture of Quebec.
73
On
that occasion the
INVASION
British army's
commander, General James Wolfe, had
read Gray's "Elegy" as he approached the
city.
Not only was the German gunfire savage, but the currents off Sword were especially strong. sion needed
could
all
The 3rd
tidal
Divi-
the inspiration, poetic or otherwise,
get.
74
it
X
CHAPTER
ID
THE RANGERS AT PDINTE DU HDE
EXCEPT FOR THE EASY LANDING ON UTAH, the
first
minutes of the assault were generally worse than
the worst the leading assault sections had let themselves imagine.
But there were successes as well as
One
of
them was
at
failures.
Pointe du Hoe, a rocky hundred-
foot cliff jutting into the Seine
Bay
in the eighteen-mile
gap between Utah and Omaha. The Germans had a battery of six big guns there.
They were 155-millimeter guns
in concrete positions, capable of
dominating
at least the
western half of Omaha and the sea approaches to
75
it.
INVASION
Two hundred men
in a specially trained unit, the
Provisional Ranger Force, at the foot of the cliffs,
were
to land
on the
tiny beach
climb almost straight up, and
capture the battery.
The Rangers' commander was Rudder,
who had been
Bradley
first told
Lt.
Colonel James E.
a Texas rancher.
When
General
him what the mission was, the Colonel
thought the General was just trying to scare him.
As the Rangers' the
Germans on top of the
pered the small trucks
flotilla
somewhat
machine-gun direction,
came
cliffs
to
life.
They pep-
of LC A's and Ducks (amphibious
like the
fire.
DD
tanks) with artillery and
That, plus
some confusion about
made the Rangers forty minutes late.
The destroyer
Saterlee, seeing
why
being held up, swept the top of the its
du Hoe,
assault boats neared Pointe
the Rangers were
cliff with fire
from
all
guns.
But even after the bombardment one German machine
gunner and a number of German
rifle
men
kept the
narrow beach hot. Fifteen of the Rangers
were
76
hit as
they ran ashore.
THE RANGERS AT POINTE DU HOE Each of the LCA's carried mortars
that fired grapnel
hooks with ropes and rope ladders attached to them. The mortar crews fired as soon as the LCA's touched down.
Many
of the hooks, held back by the weight of the wet
ropes, failed to shoot over the edge of the a
dozen
did.
ground on started
The hooks,
top.
like anchors,
cliff.
dug
But about
into the flat
The Rangers, climbing hand over hand,
up the ropes.
But as they were on the way up, Germans arrived directly over their
were
leading.
Then
heads and shot the
down
the
men who
Germans cut some of the
ropes,
and slipped one or two off their hooks.
The destroyer
Saterlee
came
very close range, firing at the
past again, this time at
cliff top.
Rangers on the
beach, aiming well over their companions' heads, picked off some of the
Germans when they showed themselves.
In less than five minutes from the time they had hit the beach, the
first
of the Rangers had crawled over the top.
The others swarmed right behind him. They found an empty marked with the
tableland, incredibly pock-
craters of
bombs and
77
shells.
But the
INVASION concrete gun positions were empty.
The
big guns had
been moved.
The Rangers pushed inland, wiping out several pockets
Army Rangers climbing the cliffs at Pointe du Hoe, June 6, 1944.
78
THE RANGERS AT POINTE DU HOE of German resistance as they went. in
new
firing positions in
from the
cliff,
an apple orchard 1,200 yards
cleverly camouflaged
of ammunition nearby.
They found the guns
and with large stores
The German gun crews had
The Rangers blew up the breeches of the guns
fled.
(the part
that holds the shell in place) with incendiary
hand
grenades, putting them permanently out of action.
For the most part— and especially on
Omaha— the first
of the assault waves had been stopped in
Omaha was
its
tracks.
the crucial beach, the link between Utah
on the west and the British beaches on the east. The coast
between Utah and Omaha was an eighteen-mile stretch of rock
cliff
and marsh. The ten miles between Omaha
and Gold were
all cliff.
The troops on Omaha,
hoped, would move forward
at top speed,
was
it
because the
only place the separate landing forces could link together
was well
inland. Since
the only beach to
Omaha was
so important,
which two divisions were
was
it
assigned.
Thirty-four thousand troops and 3,300 vehicles were
waiting offshore, in the transport area, to follow the
79
first
INVASION
D-Day invasion beach from
80
the
air,
June 6, 1944.
THE RANGERS AT POINTE DU HOE wave across Omaha. An additional 25,000 men and 4,400
more vehicles were waiting behind them. They would be ready to start ashore by noon.
Omaha couldn't fall far behind intricate plan of the assault
and-machines
traffic
schedule, or the whole
would be thrown into a men-
jam on land and sea of disastrous
size.
Yet in the half hour that had gone by, the attack had fallen just
Omaha
about half an hour behind time. was, physically, a hard beach to cross. Gold,
Juno and Sword were
fairly flat,
dunes between them and the the
Germans had
bluffs a
hundred
fortified.
feet high.
little
But
with only low sand seaside towns
which
Omaha was backed by
The American troops had
to
go uphill to take the German strongpoints.
That was bad enough. But there was another reason
why
the offensive against
Omaha was
especially tough.
In planning the assault the Allies had assumed that the Atlantic Wall
troops— men
would be manned by second-rate German
who were
would not show much
older or poorly trained and
fight in the field.
81
who
The Allies knew
INVASION
that General
Rommel was keeping
his first-class field
divisions a short distance behind the beaches, ready to
move them, when the emergency arose, to wherever they were needed most. One of them,
was stationed twenty-five miles St.
Lo.
352nd Division,
his
inland, near the
town of
The 352nd was expected to counterattack, but the could reach the beaches before late
Allies didn't think
it
in the afternoon of
D -Day at the earliest.
But shortly before the invasion
had been ordered
to
move
to
fleet sailed, the
Omaha
352nd
to practice anti-
landing defense maneuvers.
So
this well-trained,
seasoned division was right on
the bluffs overlooking the beach— exactly where the Ger-
mans needed
it— when the battle-tried 1st Division and
the green but well-trained 29th Division touched down.
When
the second
wave of
assault boats reached the
beach, starting at seven o'clock,
it
found that
little
or
nothing had been accomplished.
No one had advanced beyond
82
the beach shingle. Only
THE RANGERS AT POINTE DU HOE nine gaps had been blown through the anti-landing obstacles,
and three of them were only
partial gaps. Just
one of these paths was marked, because the Engineers
had
lost the
markers in the
They had had
a terrible
them had been
killed or
surf.
time. Nearly forty percent of
wounded.
None attacks
of the flamethrower- and demolitions-squad
on the Atlantic Wall pillboxes had even
started.
The five beach exits— the only roads off the beach, and the keys to the
Omaha
effort— were
all still
held by the
enemy. Gunfire on the beach was as hot as, or even hotter than, it
had been
had rushed
at
H-Hour.
A
good many Germans, by now,
to their battle stations, using the
network of
interconnecting trenches along the bluff top. Others,
who had been shaken by shelling,
the preliminary bombings and
had recovered their senses. Artillery and mortar
shells
pounded the sand
matic
rifles
flats.
sprayed their
fire
Machine guns and autoacross the open spaces.
Sharpshooters, aiming from the bluffs, were trying to
83
INVASION
pick off individual soldiers, especially those
stopped
who had
at the water's edge.
And almost all the survivors of the first wave, scattered along the beach shingle, had forgotten about the attack.
Their only idea, of necessity, was staying alive.
84
.
X
CHAPTER
11
STANDSTILL
THE SECOND WAVE OF ASSAULT BOATS RAN into
all
the same troubles as the
first.
One great difficulty was that the boats had been landing and continued
to land in the
there mist in the air and sions,
wrong places. Not only was
smoke and dust from the explo-
but the high beach grass that covered the bluffs had
caught
fire
from the
shellings.
The fog and smoke hid the
beach landmarks from the steersmen of the LCVP's. Besides, the current
storm,
was
expected.
considerably
Some
yards to the
from west
left
to east,
than
stronger
of the boats touched
had
been
down thousands
of their marks. Nearly
85
on account of the
all
of
of them were a
INVASION few hundred yards too
far to the east.
And, since each
assault section had been briefed so carefully on
beach
targets,
its
specific
but not on the beach as a whole, a landing
hundred yards bewildered the men.
error of several
The nine companies
in the
have been spaced
to plan, should
wave, according
first
fairly
evenly along
Omaha's 7,000 yards. Instead they were jumbled, with boats from one
company mixed
in
with those from
were gaps and bunches
another. There
know where
sections didn't
in the line.
Some
they were or where they
were supposed to go. Three boats
in the
the Vierville draw,
Company, off shore.
a tattoo
second assault wave, approaching
met the same
in the first wave.
As
its
sort of reception as
One boat grounded
A
75 yards
ramp went down, machine-gun fire beat
on the bow. Captain Ettore Zappacosta, the com-
pany commander, got about ten yards through the water before he was hit twice, in the leg and in the shoulder.
'Tm hit!" he yelled. "Try to make
it
in!"
the medical-aid man,
on board the boat, shouted.
86
who was still
STANDSTILL But the Captain slumped the waves.
down and
disappeared into
The medical-aid man jumped
after him,
and
was shot and killed before he could get to the spot where the Captain had vanished.
Man by man, every member of the boat section except one was killed or wounded before he reached the beach.
By
this
time the tide was coming in very
advanced eight 7:30. It
feet in the half-hour
was beginning to wash up
fast.
It
between 7:00 and
a line of the dead, along
with wrecked pieces of equipment, especially hundreds of inflated twin-tube
wounded, unable had drowned
life
preservers.
Many
of the
to crawl faster than the tide's progress,
in the surge of the surf. It
was
a terrible
time in which men, driven out of their wits, did strange,
One wounded man, part way across the
desperate things.
sands, lay hugging a live mine.
wrapped around
it,
A life preserver had gotten
and perhaps
it
was the
life
preserver
he was clutching. In any case, his companions tried to tell
him what he was tion.
They
doing, but he wouldn't pay any atten-
couldn't loosen his firm grip on the deadly
explosive charge.
87
INVASION
•
At 7:30— a
hour
full
Omaha beach was
•
after
•
H-Hour— the
at a standstill.
assault
on
A great many men had
died.
Those who were
dead.
Most of the living were lying on the shingle behind
a
alive, for
the most part, looked
low wooden-and-concrete sea wall that had been
to protect the road along the
high
tide.
beach from the waves
at
way
in
The wall was about two -thirds
from the water
to the foot of the bluffs,
or four feet high.
It
built
of the
and
it
was three
gave some protection— although not
enough— from the steady rain of German gunfire. But the Americans behind the wall were paralyzed by
something worse than fear of being
hit
by a bullet or a
fragment of a German shell. They were in a state of shock, like
people
who
have been in a bad accident. They were
numb and dazed. Many of them could hardly move at all. They
realized vaguely that they
the sea wall, and that
German
were
artillery
in
danger behind
and mortar
shells
could easily hit them. Even so— even knowing the peril of
where they were, and seeing that there was less danger at the foot of the bluffs
where they could take cover and 88
STANDSTILL hide— they were too stunned
to act.
The
cold, their sea-
sickness, the frightful experience of seeing their fellow soldiers shot
of
all,
many
down,
of the
The plan was
all
led to a
men
numbing paralysis. Worst
thought the invasion had
so badly scrambled that
sible the attack
it
failed.
seemed impos-
could ever move forward.
The assault had achieved less in the first hour than was expected of it in the
first five
minutes.
Army casualties on Omaha beach, June 6,
89
1944.
X
CHAPTER
12
FIRST DN HIGH
GROUND
THE MIRACULOUS PART OF THE STORY, AS the military historians later found out,
was how the
attack got started again.
In the crisis a handful of heroes
came forward. They
were men who decided that, however hopeless the battle seemed, they themselves would try to do something. Any action, they thought,
the
moment
was better than none. Each man,
of his heroic decision, acted alone.
have been easier for him others like
him
of them did. attack
was
at
if
It
at
might
he had known there were
other places along the beach, but none
They only knew
stalled.
that,
where they were, the
Each man decided, independently, 90
to
FIRST ON HIGH
do his best whether or not,
GROUND
in the long run, his best could
make much difference.
One such man was an officer in C
at Pointe
Lieutenant William D. Moody,
Company of the 2nd Ranger Battalion. He
belonged to the
guns
1st
outfit that
was knocking out the German
du Hoe. But
his particular
another gun battery, closer to Vierville, as
guns were
at a place called
Pointe de
company had its target.
la Percee,
The
some
2,000 yards west of the Vierville draw. They had to be
approached from the
Moody and
side.
sixty-three other
two LCA's, had come boats.
They were headed
west of bluffs
Vierville,
with the for the
first
Rangers, in
wave of
assault
beach a short distance
where the sands narrowed and the
became rocky cliffs.
A German bluffs,
in
Company C
anti-tank gun, shooting from the top of the
dropped two
boat in which
shells into the
water right beside the
C Company's commander,
Captain Ralph
Goranson, was riding. The shells exploded the water. Twelve of the section's thirty-two
91
when
they hit
men were killed
INVASION and several others were wounded. But both LCAs kept going until they grounded on a sandbar under the water.
Although they were
still
some distance
off shore,
And
right away,
the LCA's at once lowered their ramps.
German machine-gun fire
started to sizzle around them.
As the men pushed forward
to get out, bullets raked
them
the ramps and the water just in front of
accurate bursts. Lieutenant off their sible to
ramp
walk
to walk, not
into water
fast in
in deadly
Moody and his men stepped
up
to their necks. It
is
impos-
neck- deep surf, and the Rangers had
swim, because they were holding their
high over their heads to keep them dry. strength to inch forward.
all
their
The German marksmen,
their
It
aim helped by the Rangers' slowness, the thirty-two
took
rifles
hit fifteen of
men from Moody's boat as they struggled
toward the shore. It
was about 250 yards from the edge of the water and
across the sand to the base of the
cliffs.
A
few of the
Rangers made the mistake of crouching in the water or lying at
its
edge.
Most of them were soon hit.
The men who headed
for the base of the cliffs discov-
92
GROUND
FIRST ON HIGH
how weak
ered
water.
It
they were after pushing through the
took the fastest of them three or four minutes to
walk the distance. (They should have been able
to
run
than a minute.) The slowest, including some
in less
who were wounded
it
men
but were able to move, crawled
across the beach. Their dark olive-drab uniforms,
made
darker by being soaking wet, contrasted sharply with the light-colored sand. That
the
made them excellent targets for
German gunners and mortar crews. Just twenty-nine
men got all the way to the foot
of C Company's sixty- four of the
cliffs.
The
cliffs, at
ninety feet base.
tall.
As long
this point,
The
as
were nearly vertical and about
sea had hollowed out caves at their
C Company's
survivors stayed close to
the rocky wall, they were out of the range of the enemy's fire.
Most of the twenty-nine men were content
to stay
where they were. They were too worn out, physically and mentally, to do anything more.
But Lieutenant Moody,
who had been
through as
much as anyone else and had the same reasons for feeling hopeless,
wanted to keep going.
93
INVASION
Moody
could see that the remnant of
couldn't climb the sheer wall of rock
He
C Company
where they were.
decided to try to find a better place. To carry out his
plan, though,
he would need help.
He
looked over the
bedraggled bunch of Rangers and picked out two men.
He
told
them
to follow him,
and
all
three picked their
way to the west, staying close to the cliffs, for about three hundred
yards. All of
them
carried ropes and stakes,
which were part of the Rangers' Finally
Moody
from the bottom possible
way up
special equipment.
spotted a crevice in the all
the
way
cliff
that ran
to the top. It looked like a
the rocks— if there were no
Germans
waiting for the climbers at the top.
Moody reached up and rammed crack in the rocks.
his
bayonet into the
He tested it with a pull to see if it was
firm enough to support his weight.
It
was. With a
handhold on the bayonet, he scrambled up the face of the
cliff a little
Up
the crevice they
The two other men followed him.
way.
worked
their way, jabbing in their
bayonets for successive handholds or toeholds in places
where they couldn't
find any
94
on the rock
itself,
and
FIRST ON HIGH
GROUND
pulling each other along until they
were within about
fifteen feet of the top.
From
there on the
cliff
receded sharply, so that
climbing would have been comparatively easy except for
one
factor.
The Germans had planted land mines. They
were saucer-shaped and buried little
discs filled with high explosive
in the ground.
They would go
pressure— if, for instance, a
crawled over
it.
man
off under very
stepped on one or
Despite the mines, the three-man party
advanced cautiously onto the slope, gingerly probing the
ground with their bayonets before putting
on
it.
Then they drove
their weight
their stakes into the ground,
and
fastened four toggle ropes to the stakes, letting the loose
ends hang
down
the
cliff
beside the crevice.
The ropes
had short crosspieces of wood, or toggles, attached every
few feet, making a ladder of extremely simple design. While Moody and
his
two Rangers were working on
the ropes, with the idea that the rest of C
be able to follow them up the fire
landed pretty close
by.
cliff,
Company would
a splattering of rifle
The three men hit the ground
and waited. There was another burst, wilder than the
95
INVASION
first.
The
coming from the
shots were
where near
Vierville.
Moody
sible
one of his
He and
stakes to guard the ropes.
worked
left
east along the top of the
east,
from some-
men
the other
cliffs,
at the
man
then
taking every pos-
advantage of the uneven ground and the brush to
keep out of sight. They suspected, without being able to see anything clearly, that the
Germans who had shot
at
them were in a large, barnlike stone building six or seven hundred yards away. Halfway to it, they came to the place
on the top of the
cliff
that
was
directly above
where
C Company's other men, with Captain Goranson, were waiting.
Moody shouted down and gave them directions
to the crevice
and the four ropes.
Then it was perfectly obvious to the rest of the Rangers that the cliffs could be scaled. For there
was Lieutenant
Moody,
explaining how
all
in
one piece and
as big as
life,
he and the other two
men had done it. Captain Goranson
led the twenty-five
men
to the ropes along the route
Moody's party had reconnoitered. In short order they all
monkey-walked
to the top like
mountain climbers, using
the toggles on the ropes for handholds, leaning back with
96
FIRST ON HIGH
most of
their weight
on
GROUND
their arms,
and with their
feet
braced against the face of the rock.
By about of the
cliff
7:30
all
twenty-nine of the
and preparing to move
men were on top
east, in
steps, to attack the fortified stone barn.
Moody's
foot-
That gave C
Company— what there was left of it, at least— the honor of being the
first
unit in the
Omaha
ground.
97
assault to reach high
X
CHAPTER
13
LAMBERT WDULD TRY
ABOUT A MILE FARTHER TO THE EAST THERE was another young man who, be stopped.
He was
Private
like
Ingram
Moody, wouldn't E.
Lambert.
He
belonged to another C Company, this one an infantry outfit,
part of the 116th Regiment. According to plan,
Lambert's unit, in six boats, should have touched in front of Vierville at 7:20. It
The men expected had
left
undone
to finish
was
in the
second wave.
up whatever the
in clearing the exit
down
first
wave
from the beach onto
the Vierville road.
The boats
actually landed a thousand or
east of where they
more yards
were supposed to be. Haze and smoke 98
LAMBERT WOULD TRY hung over the landscape, hiding almost
everything,
including the town of Vierville. Lambert and the other
men in his company were unable to recognize any of the landmarks they had memorized from maps. They weren't sure where they were. As they came in close,
about
all
tanks. It
they could see on the beach were several
DD
was hard
still
to tell
whether the tanks were
working. There were no signs of the first-wave troops that
were supposed
them. In
fact,
to
have crossed the beach ahead of
the beach looked very
except the tank crews had been on fifty
much it
as
if
no one
during the
first
minutes. That was precisely the case. Lambert's
company was
the
unit ashore at that particular
first
place.
On
the other hand, being in the
advantages.
place had
The German defenses here were If
where
certainly
should have,
same shattering
fire as
it
quieter
would have met the
the Rangers and
A Company
the 116th. Here the shellfire from the shore
One
its
Lambert's outfit had landed
than those near Vierville. it
wrong
was
of
light.
of the six LCVP's tipped over close to the shore,
99
INVASION
spilling
men and equipment
shallow enough so that the loss in
it
was
ashore.
The
into the water, but
men could wade
equipment— flamethrowers, explosive charges
and mortars— was the most serious part of the accident. Like the other
amazed,
men
in his
company, Lambert was
when he waded out of the surf onto the sand, to
find that the great preliminary air
bombardment had not
hit the beach.
The infantrymen had counted on finding the sandy flats
pockmarked with shallow bomb
craters.
They had
expected to cross the beach by running from one hole to the next, hiding in
no such could be.
craters. It
was
them from German
The
flats
were almost
fire.
There were
as slick as they
a frightening disappointment.
But even though the beach defenses hadn't been damaged, Lambert's
company got
across the open stretch of
sand to the sea wall in good order, with only casualties dry,
five or six
on the way. The men's weapons were mostly
ready to shoot. The unit kept together and was not,
like so
many others, scattered all over the place.
100
LAMBERT WOULD TRY In
fact,
C Company's landing was about as good
outfit's all
any
as
along the beach. Unfortunately Lambert and
the others didn't
know that they were doing well. As
as they could see
(which wasn't
were
grass fires' smoke) they
were supposed to have come
all
in
far
far
on account of the
alone.
The troops
that
ahead of them seemed to
have vanished.
Men who
have been in combat awhile gradually
get used to the surprising emptiness of a battlefield. front line terrain
is
is
likely to look
completely deserted unless the
studied most carefully. Naturally, no soldier
makes himself any more of a doesn't
A
target than he has
to.
He
draw the enemy's attention to himself by moving
unless he has
to,
and then he usually crawls, close to the
ground. So small units have to learn that they have not necessarily been abandoned, even
anybody first
else.
when
Because C Company was
time, they
had not learned
this.
great assault had been called off and
gotten to
tell
them.
101
they can't see
in action for the
They
felt as if
someone had
the for-
INVASION For fifteen or twenty minutes no one did anything. The
men lay low behind the sea wall, trying to keep out of the way of the German rifle and mortar fire, just taking stock of the situation.
At
7:50,
Lambert decided that someone had
something going, and that he would be the
to get
man to try it.
Behind the sea wall there was the narrow beach road. In happier times
promenade. along
its
Now
the
vacationists
had used
it
way
of
advance. Behind the wire was a swampy,
stretch of about 150 yards to the base of the grassy
bluffs.
The problem was
wire. It
to
blow
a hole in the barbed
was not an easy task. The Germans on the
bluffs
were keeping the promenade well sprinkled with fire
as a
Germans had strung barbed wire
inland edge, making a barrier in the
C Company's flat
summer
and occasional
light artillery
rifle
and mortar fire.
Lambert picked up a bangalore torpedo,
a high-
explosive charge in a long pipelike casing especially
designed for blasting a path through mine fields or
barbed wire. bangalore.
He
crawled over the sea wall, carrying the
He ran the few steps to the far side of the road, 102
LAMBERT WOULD TRY shoved the long demolition charge under the wire, and pulled the device that was supposed to set it off, a friction igniter.
Then he threw himself onto the ground, with his arms over his head, waiting for the blast of the explosion. off.
Before Lambert could
failure, a
burst of shots from a
But the bangalore did not go
do anything about the
machine gun hit him,
killing
him instantly.
Lambert died without knowing how important effort,
his
which took only a few seconds, was going to prove.
The moment Lambert was
hit, his
platoon leader, 2nd
Lieutenant Stanley M. Schwartz, jumped in to take his place.
Schwartz darted across the road. Kneeling close to
Lambert's dead body, he set about to make the igniter
work.
On
the second pull,
matter of minutes
The
first
it
set off the bangalore. In a
C Company was on the move.
soldier
who dashed
across the road and
through the hole in the wire was shot down. But the next
man made
it
safely
and dove into an abandoned
trench behind the wire. Others rushed through close
behind him.
103
INVASION
The Germans on the
bluffs turned
machine guns on
the gap Lambert and Schwartz had blown. tried to close the
were too
late.
for a small
opening with
Then they
artillery fire.
But they
After about ten minutes— the time
it
took
group to form in the trench— C Company
went on with its advance. The men
started for the bluffs,
running a short way and then dropping to the ground, taking cover in clumps of grass or behind bushes.
Once they had reached the
rising slope of the bluffs,
they were protected by the folds of the ground and hidden
by the
drifting smoke.
cut shortly after the
A second gap in the wire had been
first
had been blown. Two groups of
men combined and moved up the hill. They advanced in a narrow column, keeping a sharp lookout for signs that the ground had been mined. They found that the German trenches on the top of the bluff had been abandoned, so
they kept right on going for about two hundred yards into
some
flat,
came
at
open
fields.
There German machine-gun
them from both
sides.
C Company halted. But its
advance that far, which Lambert had started, was the real
break we made in the German line.
104
fire
first
X
CHAPTER
14
INFANTRYMEN
ABOUT HALF was
A MILE
NONA/
FARTHER EAST, THERE
a small seaside village called
Les Moulins.
It
had
been strongly fortified, and the Germans were ready and waiting to keep the invaders from using the road that ran inland from the beach to the town. Six boats carrying the
men of F Company of the 116th Regiment landed near
Les Moulins. The three boats on the west made out better than the three
on the east because the grass
smoke— the same smoke company— partly
that
fires'
had helped Lambert's
hid them. But the three boats on the
east took the full fury of German
fire.
For forty-five min-
utes the infantrymen struggled to get across the sandy
105
INVASION
stretch
from the water's edge
half of
them made
to the sea wall,
and only
Those who did were too badly
it.
shaken to continue the attack. The three western sections of
F Company
lost
fewer men, but many of
those they did lose were officers and top-ranking non-
commissioned
officers.
They were badly disorganized
by the time they reached the sea wall.
While the
sections of
first
F Company were
still
moving across the sands, the boats containing battalion headquarters came
in.
Sidney V. Bingham,
Jr.,
The
battalion
commander, Major
got to the road almost as soon as
his leading assault troops.
He
set right to
work
trying to
revive a fighting spirit in the leaderless men, and to find
out what had happened to his scattered battalion. of the radios that had
come
in
with his headquarters
company was working. That made Major
to get
None
it
impossible for the
any information or give any orders to the
battalion as a whole.
But while Major Bingham couldn't organize a strong attack against Les Moulins, he did
force of about fifty
manage to lead a small
men off the beach and into a network 106
INFANTRYMEN NOW German trenches near
of abandoned
house
mouth
at the
tall,
three-story
of the Les Moulins draw.
compared
feeble effort
a
to the attack that
planned and rehearsed. But even a feeble
It
was
a
had been
effort,
on a
beach that was filling with men too shocked and dazed to try anything at
One
all,
was worth a great deal.
of the officers helping Major
wounded. cheeks.
A
shell
Bingham had been
fragment had gone through both his
Whenever he talked, urging men to get up and go,
blood spouted from his mouth. But the officer seemed
determined to ignore
and that made his suggestions all
more impressive.
the
One its
it,
trouble with Bingham's
little
group, besides
being too small and made up of assorted
various units, rifles
fire
was
lack of fire power.
men from
Many of the
men's
were clogged with sand. They jammed or missed
often
enough
fifty soldiers
much power
as
should have had.
The Major tried
way up
to rob the force of as
hard, with a squad often, to
work
his
the bluff and knock out a machine-gun nest that
was causing much of the horror on the sands. He got close 107
INVASION
to the
machine-gun emplacement, but couldn't take
it.
There was nothing to do but retreat to the trenches near the house and try to build up
more strength.
At about half-past eight, while Major Bingham was
still
trying to silence the machine-gun nest, an advance party
of his supporting artillery landed. observers, liaison parties
They were forward
and communications
specialists
of the 111th Field Artillery Battalion, the regular partners in
combat of the 116th Infantry Regiment. (Forward observers,
during an ordinary battle, are placed up front with the
infantry to find out
where
artillery fire is
needed
to help
them. The observers telephone back to the guns, which
then provide it as quickly and accurately as they can.)
This advance party was
much
millimeter howitzers were to land
too early. later.
105-
They would be
used in the drive inland from the top of the the infantry hadn't
Its
bluffs.
So far
made much progress off the beach.
As the landing boat in which he was riding approached Les Moulins,
artillery battalion
commander
Lieutenant-
Colonel Thornton L. Mullins, could see through his field glasses that Bingham's battalion
108
was
in trouble.
He saw
INFANTRYMEN NOW that the invasion's schedule
had been too hopeful, and
that the first waves, instead of having charged over the bluffs,
were just hanging onto the sea wall.
Colonel Mullins'
first
thought,
when he
realized
what
had happened on the shore, was that he would do what he could,
and ignore the fact that the plan had gone
wrong.
all
Mullins' staff intelligence officer, Lieutenant Richard
Brush, was standing in the boat beside him.
"Never mind our
Mullins said to
artillery mission,"
him. "We've got to be infantrymen now."
The artillerymen stepped
off their boat into
They plodded
up around
their waists.
sandy
trying not to pay too
flats
German
bullets that zipped
much
in
water
toward the
attention to the
around them. One bullet
nicked Colonel Mullins' upper arm, cutting the
flesh.
He
ignored the wound.
At the sea wall he found the mixture of men from several different units
dazed and bewildered.
Many of them,
Colonel Mullins noticed, had dropped or thrown away their rifles or carbines. His first idea
men, one
at a time, to find
was
to
persuade the
something to shoot and
109
to start
INVASION shooting back. The beach was littered with equipment
and weapons of every kind. While soldiers
it
seems strange that
would need to be told to pick up guns,
it
was just
what they did need. They were so stunned they needed to be started on the simplest
acts.
The Colonel crawled
along, trying to keep
down
behind the sea wall, urging the infantrymen to snap out of their daze.
He showed some men
theirs for the picking up.
He
rifles that
were
started others cleaning the
wet sand out of the barrels and chambers of
their
weapons so they could shoot with them. The men began to
come alive again and to realize that there was no sense
in lying helplessly
While he was
was
hit a
hand.
A
on the beach.
in the midst of this job, Colonel Mullins
second time.
A
rifle
bullet
went through
his
He kept right on going.
pair of
DD
tanks caught his attention.
They were
both firing their guns doggedly, but they didn't seem to
be firing
at
any particular
targets.
thought he could improve their aim.
them pointed
at the
Colonel Mullins
He wanted
to get
Les Moulins pillboxes, for he knew
110
INFANTRYMEN NOW that the infantry at the
mouth
of the
draw was badly
in
need of help.
He
the sand
where there was no protection at all against
enemy
flats
fire.
left
the sea wall and walked back onto
While the Colonel,
like a parking-lot atten-
dant signaling an automobile driver where to park,
waved
directions,
one of the tanks shifted position. The
Colonel pointed out one of the emplacements near the top of the Les Moulins draw.
The tank's gun fired. Smoke
and a shower of dirt flew into the
air
from what looked
like a direct hit.
Colonel Mullins thought he saw a better beach position for the second tank. It
In order to
make
was
a
few yards farther
along.
sure that the sand wasn't mined, he
walked ahead of the tank, studying the beach. The tank, with
its
before
powerful engine roaring, got set to follow. But
it
could do
third time.
so,
He was
although there was ignore
it.
the Colonel hit in the
still
so
Colonel Mullins
was wounded
for the
stomach. This time—
much to be done— he couldn't
fell
Ill
forward, dead.
X
CHAPTER
15
SHUFDRD AND THE CHIEF
IT
WAS JUST AS WELL THAT COLONEL MULLINS,
before he was killed, and the others in the advance party of the 111th Field Artillery Battalion didn't
was happening
news was
all
know what
to the battalion's twelve howitzers.
The
bad.
The forward observers and
liaison officers
beach assumed that the guns would be ready
on the
to
come
ashore as soon as their gunners were told, by radio, that the beach exits were clear. not, at least, until
almost as
It
never crossed their minds—
hours later— that the
artillery
was
in
much trouble as the infantry.
Each of the guns was loaded on an amphibious
112
truck, a
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF combination boat and automobile called a Duck. The
Ducks were supposed
to sail in
under their own power,
drive out of the surf onto the sand
then go to the first gun positions. slightly better
and the sea a little
have been able to do
The for
on their wheels, and
If the
less
weather had been
choppy, they might
so.
battalion filled thirteen Ducks. There
was one
each howitzer and an extra one for battalion head-
quarters. Things
H-Hour,
as
had begun
to
go wrong hours before
soon as the Ducks were launched from the
big LST's (Landing Ship, Tank) that had brought across the Channel.
The LST's were anchored some
seven miles off the beach. At 2 a.m., dark, the first
Duck had
when
it
rolled out of its LST's
was very open bow
and down a steel ramp toward the water. She had the
ramp
was
slid off
into the sea, burying her nose in a wave.
stern had settled it
them
down with a clumsy squish.
clear that she
Right away
was overloaded. The choppy,
foot waves, slapping against her sides,
Her
four-
were sloshing
a
dangerous amount of water aboard. The weight of the howitzer, by
itself,
was considerable. And,
113
in addition,
INVASION
the
Duck was carrying thirteen
artillerymen, fifty shells
and other equipment a gun crew uses: a radio, telephones and wire, picks and shovels, a camouflage net with
its
twelve steel support poles, sandbags, K-rations (packages of concentrated food that can be eaten without
cooking) and the cannoneers' knapsacks, called musette bags, filled with their personal belongings.
Two
of the thirteen Ducks sank minutes after they
were launched. One of them, caught by the current, was
washed back
against the LST's ramp, crashed heavily
against it, and went
down like a stone. The cannoneers, in
their inflated life belts,
was gone little
forever.
longer.
up, but the howitzer
The second Duck stayed
afloat only a
Then a wave hit her at a bad angle. She rolled
partly over, took
more water aboard, and went down.
The remaining headed
were picked
ten,
for a stretch of
with the Headquarters Duck, water about six hundred yards
from the LST. They were supposed to wait there, moving slowly around in a large the beach that
it
circle, until
was time to come
they got word from
ashore.
Three more of the Ducks, including the Headquarters
114
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF Duck, sank on the way to this rendezvous area. Their story
was much the same: They took water aboard
faster
than the automatic pumps could get rid of it.
Two more went down as they tried to circle, waiting to hear from the advance party. That left only six guns. Half the lllth's
fire
power was
lost,
and the long run into
Omaha beach was still to come. The situation was so bad that the artillerymen in the six afloat couldn't quite believe
it.
Ducks that were
still
Their whole effort for a
year had been devoted to getting ready for this action.
No
one had dreamed that half the battalion's guns would
wind up on the bottom of the Channel seven miles from shore.
After a long wait for didn't come, the six
word from the beach, which
Ducks
started
in.
A Navy
LCVP,
acting as guide and navigator, led the procession.
had gone only a few hundred yards, moving at ahead,
full
They speed
when the waves swamped two more of the Ducks.
The other four kept going toward Les Moulins. In the boat,
first
of the four, close behind the navy guide
was Captain Louis A. Shuford. He was the com115
INVASION
manding
officer of
itzers left.
C
Battery,
which had only two how-
The second one was
Shuford's. Captain Jack
A
Wilson of
Duck behind
Battery,
who had
was
in charge of the third
last in line
contained B Battery's
only one of his four guns
Duck. The fourth and
in the
left,
one remaining gun. Shuford was twenty-five years quiet in manner. ginia
at
good natured and
He had been born and brought up in Vir-
and had been a track
Academy and
old,
Richmond
battery had nicknamed
star at
Fork Union Military
University.
The men
in his
him "Boobytrap" because he was
fascinated by explosives and explosive devices and spent a lot of time experimenting with
Shuford's superior officers rated perfect battery commander.
them
him
as a
as a hobby.
good but not
He hated the paper work his
job required, and he had often been in trouble with
Colonel Mullins because his records were not up to date. It is
safe to say that
that he
no one, including Shuford, expected
was going to be
a hero.
While the four guns were
still
several thousand yards
away from Omaha beach, the second Duck in line, behind 116
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF Shuford's,
began to
able to save
coxswain
it
sink.
Shuford thought he might be
by lightening
in the
its
load.
He
signaled to the
LCVP
navy guide boat, and the
took off
twelve of the thirteen artillerymen. The
Duck was
pretty low in the water, but with about
two thousand
pounds
less to carry
it
stopped going down.
The navy LCVP headed back out
to sea, looking for a
larger boat or a rhino -ferry (one of the
were bringing
in
still
huge
rafts that
heavy equipment) on which
might
it
deposit the cannoneers.
The boat.
four Ducks kept on going without their guide
At about one thousand yards from the shore, where
the boat traffic
was
fairly
heavy with LCA's, LCVP's and
The
other small boats, they lost each other for a while.
crewless Duck, with just
its
gun, one artilleryman and
driver aboard, developed engine trouble. stalled, a splatter of
While
long-range machine-gun
fire
the bluff tore open one of its sides. That finished
water poured into the hold, and minutes filled
later the last
down
it
it
it.
went.
its
was
from
More
A
few
Duck in the procession, B Battery's,
and sank.
117
INVASION
By
time
this
it
was about nine
Field Artillery Battalion
and the
o'clock,
111th
had only two howitzers
left.
Shuford and Wilson maneuvered their Ducks alongside
each other, and lashed them together with rope. Then the two battery
commanders had
were desperate. They were
a conference.
five or six
They
hundred yards
off-
shore and they could see that the Ducks couldn't go any closer.
They didn't know what had happened
waves of the party,
infantry, or to their
to the first
own battalion's advance
but they could see bursts of German mortar and
exploding on the sand
artillery shells
they were
flats.
Knowing that
that remained of the 111th, and realizing
all
that the attack
was hours behind schedule, the two cap-
tains couldn't help feeling that the great assault
had
turned into a disaster. the other
men
crouched low. German bullets and
shell
While they
whining offered
past.
some
talked,
The
in
fragments were
hulls of the Ducks,
protection.
the Ducks
though
thin,
The men were drenched with
spray and they were cold, even though the sun was begin-
ning to come through the haze and smoke that lay over
118
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF the seascape. And, after six hours of riding in rough waters, they were seasick.
Shuford and Wilson agreed that even.though the invasion looked hopeless, they ought to try to get ashore.
They thought they could shooting.
Shuford's
of
its
roll
onto the beach and start
They would use the hoisting device on
Duck
to
lift
Wilson's howitzer out of the hold
Duck. Then Wilson's hoist would be used to
lift
Shuford's gun.
"We might
as well try
Captain Wilson
it,"
ought to be able to knock out
at least
one
said.
"We
pillbox."
But even this simple plan was too ambitious.
A burst
of machine-gun
fire
peppered the two Ducks
with lead and cut the rope holding them together. Shuford's pulled ahead, trying to get out of range. But
one of the bullets had disabling
it.
While the
flurry of bullets hit
it,
hit the
craft drifted helplessly, a
ments
it
breech block of the howitzer,
out of commission for good.
killed
one
second
wounding several of the men. Then
a light artillery shell hit the
putting
engine of Wilson's Duck,
man and wounded 119
a
The
shell frag-
few more. Finally
INVASION
the
Duck caught
fire.
Wilson ordered his
men
to
jump
overboard and jumped with them.
When hit,
Shuford realized that Wilson's Duck had been
he started back to help, but a large assault boat, an
LCI (Landing time
it
Craft, Infantry)
blocked his way. By the
passed, Shuford couldn't see
Wilson, the
Duck
or the
what had become of
gun crew. Suddenly
gun began shooting at Shuford's Duck. One a geyser of water just ahead of
behind. Shuford ordered his sea at
full
it.
Duck
a
shell sent
The next landed
just
speed.
Chief,"
their
gun
and had painted a handsome picture of an
Indian chief on
its
shield.
The Chief was the only gun the
111th Field Artillery Battalion last
up
driver to head out to
The gun crew in Shuford's Duck had named "The
German
had
left. It
represented the
chance for the battalion to play a part in the
assault.
This fact strengthened Shuford's determination to get the gun ashore. Without Wilson's hoist, though, he did
not know how he would go about unloading it.
But he had several problems to solve before he could
120
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF unload. His
Duck was now leaking pretty badly from the
holes the machine-gun fire had drilled in
looked as
if it
couldn't stay afloat
much
its hull.
longer.
It
But
Shuford had no information about where he could land.
He
thought the navy might give him some advice.
was supposed
to
be in touch by radio with the
advance parties and with
its
own
It
artillery's
shore parties which
directed naval gunfire.
Shuford headed for the nearest large ship, an LCI the one that had cut for Wilson.
As
his
him off when he had been searching
Duck came
alongside the LCI, his
driver said, "You'd better hurry, Captain. this thing
is
like
going to hold together
I
don't think
much longer."
Shuford scrambled aboard the LCI.
The navy's radio network was working, just as Shuford hoped, but the news from the beach was bad. Lieutenant Brush, who was
still
near the Les Moulins draw, reported
that the beach there, called Easy Green,
was not yet clear.
His message suggested that Shuford try Fox, the next
beach section to the east of Les Moulins.
121
INVASION
The
radio operator called the forward observers on
Fox. Things
were just
as
bad
there. "Don't
come
to Fox,"
Fox warned. "Go to Easy Green." That
left
Shuford no better off than he had been,
except that he ashore.
knew two
By now
warmer, but the
it
places
was nearly
men
in the
where he couldn't o'clock,
11
Duck were
too
get
and much
numb with
discouragement to notice the improvement. Everyone
was quiet— most unusual
Duck
driver
for twelve cannoneers.
The
He
kept
was the only one with much
repeating what was clearly true: before the
Duck would
aimlessly while the
sink.
men
Shuford again tried to
It
wouldn't be long
For a time the Duck circled
took turns
call
to say.
at the
hand pump.
the shore with a navy radio,
but the news remained bad. None of the beaches was open.
Shuford decided that the only way he could keep afloat
was by tying up
to
one of the rhino -ferries that were
waiting, like him, for a place to go ashore.
he picked carried some of the the
By luck, the one
lllth's jeeps
and trucks and
men of the battalion who made up part of its reserve. 122
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF They didn't know what had happened to the other eleven guns, or realize that the
first
waves of infantry were
battling for the beach exits.
And Shuford and
his
still
men
were too exhausted to tell them. They lashed the Duck to the
raft,
leaving only
crawled onto the
its
ferry's flat deck, stretched out
ever they could find space, and It
was more
like a collapse
didn't last long. Shuford driver,
was
on board. Then they
driver
fell
wher-
asleep.
than ordinary sleep.
And
it
was awakened by the Duck
shaking him awake and shouting that the Duck
sinking.
The Duck was
filling faster
than ever. The water was
slapping around the Chief's big rubber
tires.
There was
no way of getting the gun out of the Duck and onto the rhino-ferry without a good-sized crane.
Shuford spotted just such a crane on another rhinoferry five or six
hundred yards away. He doubted the
Duck could get that far. But he was going to lose the Chief anyhow, so
it
seemed worth
a
try.
All
hands pitched
in to
unload the equipment— everything except the Chief—
from the Duck, cutting the weight down
123
to a
minimum.
INVASION Shuford decided that one man, besides the driver and himself,
would be needed on the short
water. Off they set, with the
Duck
run, to help bail
riding so low in the
water that a single wave sloshing aboard could have sent her to the bottom.
But she made
it.
Shuford jumped onto the second
rhino-ferry, shouting for help. in charge.
was
A lieutenant-colonel was
He thought Shuford was out of his mind. What
so important, he
wanted
to
know, about one stray
howitzer? And a howitzer without a gun crew, at that? It
was
a question
Shuford couldn't really answer.
Instead of trying, he lost his temper and yelled at the lieutenant-colonel.
The
lieutenant-colonel
the faintest idea
was
horrified.
what the Chief meant
He
didn't have
to Shuford.
Still,
he was impressed by Shuford's wild insistence, and he himself operated the crane. The Chief was of the
swung up out
Duck and deposited on the deck of the ferry.
After the Chief was safely aboard, Shuford discovered that the ferry
was bringing
Artillery Battalion.
The
in parts of the 7th Field
7th's job exactly
124
matched the
SHUFORD AND THE CHIEF lllth's.
It
was supposed
Infantry, and, like the 111th,
time. Six of its twelve guns
be supporting the 16th
to it
had been having a hard
had already gone down.
At last Shuford had the answer to his problem. The 7th Battalion needed the Chief, so he presented his
one of the
7th's officers.
into
was
in firing position,
Normandy
to
Late in the afternoon, the Chief
went ashore with a 7th Battalion night she
gun
battery. Before
mid-
pouring high explosives
in support of the infantry's
slow but
all-important advance.
Shuford's wish had if
come
true. Part of the
111th— even
only one gun, and a gun that another outfit had to
operate— was helping the assault succeed.
125
X
CHAPTER
IB
DAWSON'S GDDD THRDW
CAPTAIN JOSEPH Company G
T.
DAWSON COMMANDED
of the 16th Regiment,
which came
in
between the Les Moulins and Colleville draws. Company G,
which landed
at
seven o'clock, thought
the second assault wave, until the
first
it
it
was part of
discovered that
had
it
wave's job to do.
Five of its six assault boats touched
down together on
time and in the right place. They followed three assault boats from two other companies which had crossed the
sand
flats safely,
but were having trouble,
reached the base of the bluffs, with German
when
they
rifle fire.
By the time Dawson's men waded out of the surf and 126
DAWSON'S GOOD THROW
Germans were more
started across the beach, the Fifty of
Company
G's 190
men were
killed or
alert.
wounded
trying to get to the sea wall. In spite of the casualties,
Dawson's outfit was still full of fight. The heavy- weapons
men had
their
machine guns and mortars
time. Protected
by their
fire,
firing in
no
demolitions teams from
each section blew a number of gaps through the barbedwire barrier beyond the beach road.
By
7:30 Captain
through the mine
fields
and the base of the but the
men had
They found one
Dawson had
Some
mines were
climb.
men
proceed cautiously just the same.
part of a safe route by stepping over the
in the
first
assault
wave who
wrong place, and had learned where
at the cost of their lives.
rest of Company
G was catching up, Dawson
man went on ahead
looking for a good place to
While the and one
his
of the mines were fakes,
bodies of two soldiers from the
had stepped
some of
on the ground between the road
bluffs.
to
led
The
bluffs at this spot
130 feet in a little a shallow
draw
were
sloping.
They
rose to
more than two hundred yards. There was straight ahead,
127
deep enough
to provide
INVASION
some cover. Dawson thought that it looked like a good way up, unless carefully,
it
was mined. He and the man with him moved
because the grass and clumps of brush made
mines hard to
see.
They were about halfway up the
stopped them. Neither terribly close.
of the line of
fire.
man was
and
it
hit,
a
machine
but the bullets had
They wriggled back
Dawson thought
machine gun was placed bluff
when
somewhere near the top of the draw,
gun, shooting from
been
hill
slightly
a
few
out
feet,
things over.
The
below the top of the
controlled the whole upper half of the draw.
If
G Company was to use it, the machine gun would have
to
be knocked out.
Dawson sent his man back with a message for the company.
"Keep coming,"
Then Dawson,
it
said.
until
stick to the draw."
alone, started out to clear the way.
crawled far enough to the gunner's sight.
"And
left to
get out of the machine
Then he climbed up, hugging the ground,
he was higher than the gun position.
back to the
He
right,
above and behind.
He moved
approaching the emplacement from
He was
within thirty feet of it before
128
DAWSON'S GOOD THROW one of the three Germans manning the weapon spotted
him and yelled a warning. While the Germans scrambled to
swing the barrel around, Dawson pulled the safety ring
on one of his fragmentation grenades.
He counted three, and lobbed it into the air with a stiff, Then he buried
straight arm.
the longest
his face in the
ground
for
moment in his life. The blast was followed by
the whine of a hundred ricocheting splinters and a slight rain of dirt
and pebbles. Finally Dawson
lifted his
His throw had been perfect. The gun and
were silenced
Now
it
was
gunners
for good.
safe for his
company
to use the draw.
8:30 nearly all of Company G had followed bluff top,
its
head.
By
Dawson to the
and the sections were making ready
to
move
ahead.
The route for
that
movement
Company G
Dawson had opened became
off that
led the
beach
way
all
a funnel
the rest of the morning.
for what, as the
day wore on,
became the deepest and most powerful advance Omaha.
129
off
X
CHAPTER
17
THEY LED THE WAY
THE GERMANS THOUGHT THAT THE OMAHA beach attack had been stopped, just as Rommel had ordered, at the water's edge.
The German de
la
lying
officer in
command of the guns
Percee could see the American dead and
on the sand. There were
also ten tanks
at
Pointe
wounded
and a great
many other vehicles burning. As far as he could make out, no one was advancing.
The center regiment of the German 352nd Division reported to casualties
its
Corps
that,
from the naval
although shelling,
landings.
130
it
it
had taken heavy had stopped the
THEY LED THE WAY At noon Corps told German
Army Headquarters
that
the invasion had been completely smashed.
was about
Hitler
Salzburg for a got the news. at last,"
to
appear
at
new Hungarian prime
a reception
minister
He came into the room smiling.
near
when he
"It's
begun
he announced.
was sure
that the Atlantic Wall defenses
were
holding and that any small beachheads the Allies
made
Hitler
would be wiped out within a week by German counterattacks.
Both the German communications and what they
communicated were poor.
For hours General Bradley, on board the Augusta,
heard nothing except the most disturbing reports from
Omaha. Since dawn he had been
listening to scraps of
information as they came over the navy's radio network.
They had
enemy
all
been bad: messages about boats sunk, heavy
artillery fire,
Ducks swamped, troops pinned
down.
By 8:30 both the 116th and the 16th regiments should
131
INVASION
have been through the beach defenses and a mile beyond the bluffs to the highway that ran parallel to the coast
through Colleville and Vierville.
The minutes
ticked past. Eight-thirty
and Corps had not even reported that the landings
officially to
Bradley
had taken place.
Finally, at 9:45,
"Obstacles
came and went,
Bradley got the
mined,
progress
news from Corps:
first
slow
.
.
.
DD
swamped." That was hardly reassuring.
It
tanks did
.
.
.
little
except confirm the General's worst fears about the tanks.
At noon Bradley heard that the situation exits
was
word. forces
"still critical."
He began
He was
at the
beach
"shaken," to use his
own
to think about shifting the follow-up
from Omaha to Utah and the British beaches
where, he heard, the landings were going well. That
would have been almost unthinkably hard. But the buildup of Allied strength ashore couldn't wait. It
was
1:30 before the General got a
him think the Omaha formerly pinned
assault
down on
message that made
might succeed. "Troops
the beaches
.
.
.
advancing up
the heights behind the beaches," Corps reported.
132
THEY LED THE WAY The news, by the time really four
The
hours
reached General Bradley, was
old.
more
was
delay
it
than
a
matter
communications— although the arrangements
bad
of
to relay
information from the beach to Corps and from Corps to
Army had failed to work properly. The main
was
trouble
that the first advances, as
have seen, were made by small units, in
many
hidden in the smoke or in the grass on the bluffs.
we
cases
Many of
the off-shore observers were watching only the five main
beach
exits,
where almost no progress had been made.
The men who got the Omaha assault moving again, it
had
stalled,
were
the beach exits,
or,
all
in
scattered in the spaces
Moody's
case,
after
between
west of the western-
most draw.
The truth was that by as early as nine o'clock hundreds of men were advancing up the heights behind It
was just hard,
in the beginning, to spot
There were scores of others who, bert,
like
Omaha.
them.
Moody, Lam-
Schwartz, Bingham, Mullins, Shuford and Dawson,
had refused
to stop trying.
133
INVASION
Not
all
their names,
by any means, are known. Not
all
of their actions were noticed or entered in the records.
But wherever an advance was made the pattern was
much (or in
the same.
some
The movement
cases, several
started
when one man
men) took the
first
step.
Nothing, broadly speaking, went according to plan.
New
Omaha
suc-
decisions had to be
made on
the beach.
ceeded because a few leaders showed the others that
something could be done. They led, more often than
by being themselves the
first to
134
make the move.
not,
X
CHAPTER
IS
THE TDEHDLD
THE FIRST SMALL SUCCESSES OPENED THE way to larger advances.
On
the extreme west of
climbed the
cliff,
stone building
Omaha, where Moody had
the Rangers found out that the fortified
was part of
a
maze of German
positions
with an involved network of trenches between them. It
was one of the main
Atlantic Wall strongpoints
guarding the Vierville draw. The Rangers, helped by part of
Company B
and again.
German
It
of the 116th Regiment, attacked
was
resistance.
late
it
again
afternoon before they ended
But the strongpoint did
135
fall at last
INVASION
and
all
during the day
itself to
add
its
it
had been
far too
busy defending
share to the withering fire on the beach.
East of the Vierville draw, where Lambert had tried to
blow the gap
116th pushed
in the
barbed wire, Company C of the
on ahead from the top of the
Rangers, engineers and joined in the advance.
men from
other companies
An assortment of parts of units can
hardly be expected to fight with trol.
five
much precision or con-
Yet by eleven o'clock the column had
mile,
swung
bluffs.
to the right
moved inland a
on the highway, and taken the
town of Vierville. At Les Moulins, where Bingham and Mullins had tried to get the assault moving, the
Germans held on
to the
draw. But Major Bingham, with a small party of
men
from three different companies, had worked past the beach
exit
on
its
eastern side.
With K, L and I companies
moved about
of the 116th, Bingham's group had
half a
mile inland.
Captain Dawson's
Company G
of the 16th, after
got past the top of the bluff,
moved
thousand yards, turned
and fought
left,
136
it
quickly inland for a its
way through
THE TOEHOLD bitter
German
opposition toward the town of Colleville.
The Germans counterattacked. Company G twenty more Like so
casualties,
which
it
suffered
could hardly afford.
many of the other groups on Omaha, Company G
thought
it
was
all
alone except for the Germans. But as
number
a matter of fact a
Company
G's path.
of outfits were following in
There were parts of four other 16th
Regiment companies, and, by mid-afternoon, a battalion of the 18th Regiment,
By dark the sector. It
was only
which was around
Allies
all
backing up
had a toehold
Company G. in the
and half deep
a mile
Omaha beach at its deepest,
in the center, near Colleville.
Vierville,
was not joined up with the
the Vierville draw,
The
right,
center.
But
now open, provided the troops with a
supply route. All the leading units were short of vehicles,
ammunition and supplies. Only seven field
artillery guns,
including the Chief, were ashore, and there was an
urgent need for more tanks and armored vehicles.
Omaha beach had killed,
cost a
lot.
Two thousand men were
wounded or missing.
But most of five regiments were ashore, and
137
in getting
INVASION
there they had almost finished off the 352nd Division.
On
all
German
The crisis was past.
four of the other beaches the assault had gone
far better.
The Utah beach attack had been remarkably successful. The 4th Division was ashore almost for the
intact. Its casualties
day were fewer than 200— thanks,
in large part, to
the job the paratroopers had done in the hours before
dawn. Artillery shells were
still
falling
on the beach itself,
but the causeways from the beach were open and working.
Two battalions of the 8th Regiment were six miles inland, guarding the highway to Cherbourg, and they had joined forces with one of the groups of paratroopers. still
so
There was confusion because
a great deal to be done.
many
other,
units
were
There was
scattered, out of touch with each
and unaware of what was happening any place
except right where they were. But the beachhead itself—
even though many of the commanders of the outfits on the
ground didn't know it— was
in excellent shape.
138
THE TOEHOLD
U.S. soldiers
of the 8th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division,
move out over the sea
On
Gold, Juno and
wall on Utah beach after coming ashore.
Sword the
British
and Canadians
had smashed through the Atlantic Wall and driven
as
much as seven miles inland. At Le Hamel, on Gold beach, the British 50th Division
found the German defenses strong and determined. But after the east,
town of La
Riviere,
two and
a half miles farther
had been cleared, one German battalion broke and
139
INVASION
pulled out. That
left
the road from La Riviere to the
of Bayeux, six miles inland, wide open. tried
town
The Germans
hard to plug the gap. But by the end of D-Day,
moved
the British had
had patrols on
its
to within a mile of Bayeux,
and
outskirts, testing the strength of the
defending troops in preparation for an attack
at day-
break.
From Juno beach, the 3rd Canadian Division's advance had more than matched the assault sections
effort
toward Bayeux. The
had pretty well worn themselves out
in reducing the strongpoints at Courseulles. In
pany, only 27 men, including the
one com-
company commander,
survived the successful attack on the westernmost of the
German and
12
fortifications.
machine-gun
These included three pillboxes
nests.
But the hard going on the
beach had not stopped the division day's fighting
as a whole.
When the
was done, the Canadians had moved from
three to six miles beyond their beach, and one advance
party— men of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders and the Sherbrooke Fusiliers— was ten miles inland, almost to the Caen-Bayeux highway.
140
I
THE TOEHOLD Behind Sword beach, headed for Caen, the 3rd British Division had pushed forward four miles, just past a small
town
called Bieville.
Most important,
had linked up
it
with the bridgehead across the Orne that the paratroopers had seized during the night. miles short of Caen.
was only two
And Caen, in German eyes, was a key
to their defense of France. Paris, less
It
For the route from Caen to
than 150 miles ahead, was
ideal for Allied tanks.
141
flat
and open— and
X
CHAPTER
15
THE END HAD BEGUN
THE GREATEST AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT IN THE history of the world
was
a success.
Everywhere along the sections
fifty-mile front the
assault
had done what Hitler thought couldn't be done:
They had smashed huge holes
And through
in the Atlantic Wall.
those holes, according to plan, poured
the great weight of the invasion force. It
took eleven more
8,
1945— for the Allies
to
its final
defeat.
months— from June 6, 1944 to May to bring the
German war machine
But the D-Day victory had marked the
beginning of that end.
By the end of the first week the several D-Day penetra142
THE END HAD BEGUN
LSTs landing vehicles and cargo on a Normandy beach, June,
tions
1944.
had been joined together into one continuous
beachhead.
Through the rest of June and most of July the battle for
Normandy
raged, as the Allies slowly
expanded
their
original toehold.
By July
25th, seven
after the capture of
weeks from D-Day and
a
month
Cherbourg, the Allies had accumu-
143
INVASION
lated
enough men, equipment, ammunition and gas-
oline to break out of
Normandy
in a bold, powerful
attack.
Once the movement amazingly
fast rate.
started,
it
gained ground at an
In four days— August 19th to 23rd—
the British and Americans trapped the
German 7th Army
between the towns of Falaise and Argentan, and tore
it
apart.
Our armored
divisions, led
by General George Patton,
broke loose and swept across France faster than anyone, in his
most optimistic frame of mind, had thought
possible.
On August 24th
General Jacques LeClerc's Free
French division entered
Paris.
fighting alongside the Allies in
German occupation
These men had been
North Africa during the
of France.
With them,
enough, was the American 4th Division— the
fittingly
men who
had landed on D-day on Utah beach. At the same time a force of French and American troops,
which had landed on August 15th on the southern
144
THE END HAD BEGUN coast of France, seilles,
were
Mar-
in the process of capturing
an important Mediterranean port. From there
they were to
move
River, to join
up with the main Allied armies.
north, along the valley of the
By the second week of September, when the formed a continuous
line
Rhone
Allies
along the border between
France and Germany itself, the rapid advance had to It
stop.
had gone much farther much faster than expected, and
had outrun
its
supply
lines.
Before
it
was necessary for the Allies to capture
could proceed,
it
a bigger port than
Cherbourg and one closer to the fighting front. So the British and Canadians, east
who had moved
north-
from their sector into Belgium, attacked Antwerp,
the largest port on the west coast of Europe. Despite
desperate sion,
German resistance, it was in the Allies' posses-
and being used, before the end of November.
But with the supply problem considerably eased, the
weather turned against the Allies. Day after day the skies
were gray and foggy so that the see the ground well
enough
tactical air force couldn't
to give close support to the
145
INVASION
infantry attacks.
The ground became,
in
many
places, a
sea of mud.
Weeks went by while
the Allies waited for better
weather and regrouped their forces for the next big offensive. This
was
Allied divisions
south. That
to
be the invasion of Germany
were massed
meant the
in the north
and
itself.
in the
Allies took a calculated risk.
They left a weak spot in their line
in the
Ardennes Forest
area.
That was where, on December
16th, after several
days in which Allied aerial reconnaissance had been severely limited, the
four
German
Germans counterattacked. Twenty-
divisions hit a part of the front
Americans had only four
made
in
divisions.
where the
The deep dent they
our lines gave the month-long battle
its
popular
name, the Battle of the Bulge.
The
fighting
was
savage.
The
were heavy. But by the time our out once more, the
losses
lines
on both
were straightened
German army's power was
reduced.
146
sides
greatly
THE END HAD BEGUN By February the
had resumed the
Allies
By the end of March the
entire Allied front
offensive.
had moved
across the Rhine, the last natural defensive barrier
protecting the
German heartland.
In April the armies on
the Western Front took a million prisoners as they swept
ahead into Germany. And the Russian armies, meanwhile,
On
were moving west with almost equal speed. April 26th forward elements of the Allied and
Russian forces met
Torgau, some 50 miles north of
at
Dresden, on the Elbe River.
On
April 29th, the last of the
German
forces in Italy
surrendered to the English and American troops there.
On April 30th, the Hamburg radio broadcast the news that Hitler
was dead.
The highest ranking German
admiral,
Doenitz, sent General Alfred Jodl and Admiral
Friedburg to
SHAEF
official surrender.
Karl von
Hans von
headquarters to give Germany's
General Eisenhower accepted
war in Europe ended
at
midnight on
the grand pattern of Allied strategy,
147
it.
The
May 8, 1945. And, in it
was then
possible
INVASION
to turn the strength of all the nations to Japan's final
defeat,
It
which came on August 14th.
was
for this, finally, that the first
few men
in their
LCVP's had struggled onto the sands of Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.
Only 335 days had elapsed between D-Day and the unconditional a time first
it
German
had become
surrender.
difficult to
hours after H-Hour,
for sure, that the invasion
tion over victory,
was
as
Even
remember back
when
would get natural,
ashore. Jubila-
crowded out the
victory came, about the
the assault sections on soldiers, of their
to the
when no one had known,
thoughts of dark, terrifying moments. think,
in that short
Few
cared to
moments when
Omaha had stalled, and individual
own
accord, had rescued the great
assault.
But General Montgomery was confident that
would remember. He had made D-Day.
It
had been included
the assault troops
men
a prediction before
in a personal
message
to
which had been read to every man just 148
THE END HAD BEGUN as the invasion fleet
had started across the English
Channel.
"To
us,"
Montgomery wrote,
striking a blow for
"is
given the honor of
freedom which will live in history; and
in the better days that lie ahead,
pride of our doings."
149
men
will speak
with
Index
Page numbers in
Africa, North,
italics refer to
23, 25,
photographs.
Argentan, 144
144
Arkansas, U.S.S. (battleship),
Air Force:
German, 21-23 defeat
of,
18
28-30
Army- Navy Special Engineer Task Force,
Royal, 16, 23
United States Eighth,
16,
57
United States Ninth, 17
Arnold, General H. H., 30 Artillery Battalion, see Field
Ajax, H.M.S., 72 Allies,
Artillery Battalion
use of term, 3
American troops,
ii, 1,
Atlantic Wall, 3
bombardment of,
3-5, 14,
See also Infantry
17,
16-20, 67
smashing of, 142
139
Amphibious
68, 83
assault, 1-2, 4,
strength 7,
2-3,
3, 5,
67
Augusta, U.S.S. (cruiser),
70
Atlantic Wall
of,
59,
131
smashed by,
142
Antwerp, 145
.Bangalore torpedo, 102-3
Ardennes Forest, 146
BAR, 10 151
INDEX Battle of the Bulge, 146
Caen, 140-41
Bayeux, 140
Caen Canal,
Bazooka, 10
Canadian troops, see Troops, Canadian
Beaches: invasion, code
names of,
14
no shelter on, 4
Carbine, 10
Casablanca, 25
Channel, English, see English
Belgium, 145
Channel
Bieville, 141
Bingham, Major Sidney V., Jr.,
53, 138, 143,
145
Churchill, Winston, 23
meeting with Roosevelt, 25
11-14
function
of,
make-up
of, 8,
Bradley, General
9-12
Colleville, 71, 126, 131, 137
Omar N.,
Company A (116th Infantry
59-60, 66,
Regiment), 68, 70
76,
Company B
131-33 British 8th
Cherbourg,
"Chief, The," 120, 123-25, 137
106-8, 136
Boat section:
35,
46, 53
Army, 25
Regiment), 135
Company C (2nd Ranger
British navy, 22, 72
Battalion), 91-92, 93-94,
British troops, see Troops,
95-97
British
Browning Automatic
Rifle
Company C
(116th Infantry
Regiment), 98, 100-102,
teams, 10
Brush, Lieutenant Richard, 109, 121
(116th Infantry
103-4, 136
Company E, F (16th Infantry Regiment), 70-71
Bulolo, H.M.S., 72
152
INDEX Company F (116th Infantry
first
break in German
line,
103-4
Regiment), 105-6
Company G (16th Infantry
German Private's view on, 50-52
Regiment), 126-29,
German resistance on,
136-37
Company I, K, L (116th
50-52, 67-79, 81-84, 86-89, 91-93, 105-6,
Infantry Regiment), 136
Cotentin Peninsula, 44
135-37,139-40
and German surrender,
Courseulles, 140
148
H-Hour of, 15, 54,
D
awson, Captain Joseph
T.,
61,
8,
25-26,
Rangers, 94-97
31, 63,
80 air
as
infantry units
power for,
army term,
16-17,
56-57
105-6, 126-29, 135-41
1-2
maps for, 34-35
108, 112-25
assault first,
Montgomery's prediction
wave on:
before, 148-49
62-84
naval forces
second, 85
courage needed
for, 3, 14-15,
68, 70-74, 79-81, 82,
and Artillery Batallions,
date
63-64, 72, 83
high ground reached by
126-29, 136
D-Day, 5-6,
56, 58,
for, 17-18,
32-33, 72 for,
64-65
paratroopers in
first
move,
2,44-57
of, 1
equipment for, 32-34
preparations
153
for,
27-37
INDEX
D -Day (cont)
Dieppe
Rangers' role
in,
75-79, 78,
for,
35-37
147
Dresden, 147
seasickness on, 16 standstill after
Dives River, 46, 54 Doenitz, Admiral Karl von,
91-97, 135-36
rehearsals
H-Hour,
Ducks (amphibious trucks),
88-89 supplies
76, for,
24-25
raid,
32-34
113-24
Dunkirk,
21,
72
toehold on beaches,
135-41 total force
assembled
for,
6,27-28
East Yorkshires, 71-73 Easy Green beach section,
training for, 35-37
121-22
and victory, 142-43
Egypt, 25
and weather conditions,
8th Infantry Regiment,
38-41,50,56-58,58-61 See also Amphibious
139
Eisenhower, General Dwight
assault; Atlantic wall;
D., 28,
D-Day decision by,
Normandy; Operation
42-43
Overlord
DD tanks, 58, 59-61, 99,
Germany's surrender to,
110-11
Demolitions team, in boat section, 11-12
Denmark, 2
39-42, 40
147
Elbe River, 147 "Elegy", Gray's, 74
Engineer Task Force, 68, 83
154
INDEX England, at start of World
French resistance
War II, 21
movement, 29
threatened invasion
of,
Friedburg, Admiral
21-23
Hans
von, 147
English Channel, 22-23, 35, 55,
1,
6, 18,
115,
149
mine sweeping of, 30-31
(jrarand
rifles,
9
German air force, see Air Force,
r alaise, 144
German Army Headquarters,
Field Artillery Battalion (7th),
131
German troops, 4-5, 6,
124-25
50-52, 81-82, 130-31,
Field Artillery Battalion (111th), 108,
112-25
138,
invasion
116, 118
Flamethrower,
surrender
Gold beach,
108
4th Infantry Division, 139
Fox beach section, 121-22 France,
fall of,
sweep
of,
of,
147-48
14, 61, 68, 71-72,
79-81, 139
Goranson, Captain Ralph,
91,
96
21
across, after
147
Poland invaded by, 21
11
Forward observer, definition of,
144
Germany:
Battery A, 116 Battery B,
German
D-Day,
Grenades, section riflemen's,
144-45
French and Indian War, 73
9
Guided 155
missiles, 2
INDEX Italians, as allies of Germans,
JhLamburg, 147
Hampshires
21,23,25-26
(1st), 71
Hawaii, 23
Henry
V,
Italy,
quotation from, 73
H-Hour, of D-Day, 58, 61,
in,
63-64, 72, 83
Japan,
Juno Beach,
Adolph:
coast fortified by, 2-3, 4-5 of,
23, 148
Jodl, General Alfred, 147
Scotia, 140
death
147
15, 54, 56,
Highlanders, North Nova
Hitler,
surrender of Germans
14, 68, 72, 81, 139,
140
147
invasion of England
threatened by, 22-23
-King, Major C.K.,
misinformed on Allied
Shakespeare quoted by, 73
invasion, 131
and
40
pilotless aircraft,
K-rations, 114
Hurricanes (airplanes), 23
JLambert, Private Ingram Infantry, on D-Day,
98-101, 102-4, 104,
3, 8,
14-16, 51, 68, 70-74,
79-81, 82, 105-6, 126-29,
136
Landing craft (LCVP's),
135-41, 139
mortar as weapon See also Troops
7-9, 15-16, 63, 85, of,
10-11
99-100,
La Riviere, 156
115, 117
71,
139-40
6,
E.,
INDEX LCA's, 76-77, 91-92, 117
Merville, 46, 54
LCFs, 120-21
Mine sweepers, in English Channel, 30-31
LCT's, 60-61, 68
See also LST's
Missiles, guided, 2
LCVP's (landing craft), 15-16,
17,
63, 85,
6, 7-9,
Montgomery, General Bernard Law,
99-100,
115, 117
148-49
72,
LeClerc, General Jacques,
Moody, Lieutenant William
144
D., 91-97,
Le Hamel,
71,
135
Mortar, 10
139
Leigh-Mallory, Air Chief
Marshal
25, 28, 42,
Mortar team, 10-11
Sir Trafford,
42
in boat section,
Mullins, Lieutenant- Colonel
Thornton L., 108-12,
Les Moulins, 105, 106-7, 108, 111, 115, 121, 126,
116,
136
136
LST's, 113-14, 143
See also LCT's Luftwaffe, 23
See also Air Force,
German
Navy, British, 22, 72 Nevada,
U.S.S., 19
Normandy, 41,
Maps,
for
D-Day, 34-35
20, 25,
2, 19,
143
capture
M-l rifles, 9
ii, 1,
of,
North Africa,
142-44 23, 25,
144
North Nova Scotia
Marseilles, 145
Highlanders, 140
157
INDEX
Omaha beach, 14-15, 17,
Jxamillies, 18
Ramsay, Admiral
59-61, 68, 70, 70, 75,
79-83, 86,
89, 97,
33,
Bertram
H,41
131-38
Operation Overlord, 26,
Sir
Rangers, 75-79,
78, 91-97,
135-36
66
Orne River,
Resistance movement,
46, 53, 141
French, 29 Rhine, the, 147
±
Paratroopers,
on D-Day,
2,
Rhone River, 145
40, 44-57, 45, 138
See also Troops, airborne Paris, route
open to,
Rhino-ferry, 117
141
Riflemen, in boat section, 9
Rocket boats, 17-18
Rommel, General Erwin, 3,
Pas de Calais, 55 Patton, General George,
144
55-56,82,130 Roosevelt, Franklin D.,
Pearl Harbor, 23
meeting with Churchill,
Philippines, 23
25
Pointe de la Percee,
91,
130
Pointe du Hoe, 75-76, 78, 91
Royal Air Force,
Rudder,
Poland, 21
23
Colonel James
E.,
76
Portsmouth, England, 41
Primacord
Lt.
16,
fuse,
Rundstedt, General Gerd von, 28, 49
68
Provisional Ranger Force,
Russia,
Hitler, 23
76
See also Rangers
war declared on, by
Russian troops, 147
158
INDEX St. Lo, 82
Ste.
Mere Eglise, 52-53
Sword beach,
Saterlee,
76-77
S -boats,
German,
14,
46,
60-61, 68, 73, 74,
36-37
139,
81,
140
Schwartz, 2nd Lieutenant Stanley M., 103-4 Seasickness, on D-Day,
Tanks, DD,
58, 59-61, 99,
110-11
16
Second World War, see
Tedder, Air Chief Marshal Sir
Arthur W, 41-42
World War II Section, boat, see Boat
Thorson, Colonel Truman C,
section
SHAEF, 27-28, Sherbrooke
Texas, U.S.S. (battleship), 17
41,
59-60
147
Fusiliers,
TNT:
140
demolitions team's, 11-12
Shuford, Captain Louis A.,
in
115-25
Engineer Task Force boat, 68
Smith, General Walter Bedell, 42
section rifleman's, 9
Torgau, 147
Soldier's Story, A, 59
Torpedo, bangalore, 102-3
Southwick House, 41
Troops, 89
Spitfires,
23
Stagg, Captain
airborne, J.
M.,
67,
2,
138
American,
41 Stalingrad, 25
139
159
40, 42, 44-57,
ii, 1,
3-5, 14,
INDEX Troops in
Vierville, 68-69,
(conr.)
amphibious
96, 98-99, 131, 135-36,
assault, 3-4,
137
7,17,70 British,
1,
71, 86, 91,
3-5, 14, 51-52,
Volga River, 25
71-72, 139-41, 145 in
Dieppe
Canadian,
raid, 1,
24-25
3-5, 14, 72,
Weather conditions, on
139-40, 145 in
Dieppe
Warspite, H.M.S., 18
raid,
24-25
D-Day, 38-41, 50, 56-58,
Free French, 144-45
German, 4-5,
6,
58-61
50-52,
Wilson, Captain Jack,
116,
118-21
81-82, 130-31, 138,
Wire- cutting team,
144
in boat
section, 9-10
Russian, 147
Wolfe, General James, 74
See also Infantry
World War II: beginning of, 21
United States Eighth Air
end
of,
1,
142-44, 147-48
landing craft designed
Force, 16, 57
during, 7-9
United States Ninth Air Force, 17
Utah beach,
14,
67-68, 75, 139,
44-46,
49, 61,
79, 132, 138,
A
86-87
144
160
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bruce Bliven reporter.
He
began
Jr.
later
his career as a
newspaper
wrote for several national magazines
including Lzfe and The New Yorker. During World War
II,
Mr. Bliven took part in the D-Day invasion as a second lieutenant in the 29th Division Artillery. Following the
war he continued
his writing career
and eventually
wrote more than a dozen books for both adults and dren,
most of them on United
States history.
chil-
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Admiral Richard Byrd: Alone in the Antarctic BY PAUL RINK Alexander the Great BY JOHN GUNTHER
Amelia Earhart: Flying Solo BY JOHN BURKE
The Barbary Pirates BY C. S. FORESTER Behind Enemy Lines: A Young Pilot's Story BY H.
R.
DEMALLIE
Ben Franklin: Inventing America BY THOMAS FLEMING General George Patton: Old Blood and Guts BY ALDEN HATCH
George Washington: Frontier Colonel BY STERLING NORTH
Geronimo: Wolf of the Warpath BY RALPH
MOODY
Invasion: The Story ofD-Day BY BRUCE BLIVEN, JR.
John Paul Jones: The Pirate Patriot BY ARMSTRONG SPERRY
Lawrence ofArabia BY ALISTAIR MACLEAN Path
The Story ofSacagawea BY NETA LOHNES FRAZIER
to the Pacific:
The Sinking of the Bismarck: The Deadly Hunt BY WILLIAM SHIRER The Stouthearted Seven: Orphaned on the Oregon BY NETA LOHNES FRAZIER
Trail
Teddy Roosevelt: American Rough Rider BY JOHN
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JUNE B, 1944NDRMANDY.FRANCE Thousands of ships and planes, a million soldiers, sailors, and airmen— this was the greatest invasion in the history of the world.
Author and journalist Bruce Bliven, Jr. was in Normandy on that fateful June day in 1944. Now he takes us with him to the beaches of France to experience the event that changed the course of World War II. Despite all of the careful planning by the generals, success would depend on the courage and quick thinking of the brave men who waded ashore that morning in the face of a dangerous, well-armed, and well-fortified enemy. Bliven gives us both the big picture of the events of that day along with many personal stories of the individual bravery, initiative, and personal sacrifice that would ultimately ensure victory.
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