Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (47 page)

It was a mess. Lieutenant (j.g.) Harry Montgomery, skipper of LCI(L)-489, reported that “craft of all description were maneuvering in all directions,”
making it impossible for him, or anyone else, to steer a straight course. He could not get to the beach because it was completely congested with “debris, wreckage, broached and sunken boats, burning tanks and vehicles.” Those soldiers who had landed, and those sailors forced to join them when their ships were wrecked, sheltered precariously behind that low ridge of shingle, pressed facedown into the sand as they sought to avoid the machine gun bullets passing only inches over their heads. Soon German mortar fire would erase even that limited protection. And all the while, the relentless tide continued to mount the beach, faster than some of the wounded could crawl, reducing slowly but inexorably the narrow strip of land where men could still live. At eight-thirty, the beach master on Omaha notified Admiral Hall that “they were stopping the advance of follow up waves.” Only two hours after it had started, the invasion of Omaha Beach had stalled.
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BY THEN, THE BRITISH AND CANADIAN FORCES
had landed on Sword, Juno, and Gold Beaches. The British version of the Higgins boats, the wooden-hulled LCAs, which carried thirty men each, began heading for the beach at 6:00 a.m., and they crunched up onto the sand at 7:25, not quite an hour after the Americans. The British and Canadians also faced ferocious resistance, but they had several advantages that the Americans on Omaha Beach did not. First, the naval bombardment there had been far more effective, especially on Sword Beach. Second, the German defenders at Sword and Juno Beaches lacked the advantage of occupying high ground and the ability to create a crossfire over the beach. Finally, the assaulting troops had better tank support, since far more of the swimming DD tanks had made it successfully to shore. Several of the DD tank crews at Sword Beach found that their engines had been compromised with sea-water while en route to the beach, though that did not prevent them from playing a role in the attack. Using their stern propellers, they pushed their tanks as close to shore as they could, and then, with most of the tank still awash in the surf and only the turret exposed, they opened fire on the German gun positions. One coxswain of an LCA returning from Sword Beach for a second load, shouted up to the deck of the transport: “It’s a piece of cake!”
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Behind the tanks and the infantry came the British obstacle-clearing teams. As on Omaha Beach, they worked feverishly to clear as many mines and obstructions as possible before the high tide covered them up. British commandos also came ashore, most notably the First Special Service Brigade, commanded by Brigadier General Simon Fraser, known by his Scottish title as Lord Lovat. As the commandos splashed ashore, Lovat’s piper, Bill Millin, played “Blue Bonnets” on the bagpipes. Lovat then led his commandos in a dash across country to relieve the British paratroopers who were holding Pegasus Bridge over the Caen Canal. Other units conducted house-to-house fighting in Ouistreham, the first urban fighting of the invasion. One element of that assault was a French unit led by Captain Philippe Kieffer. Assigned to secure a German strongpoint outside the city, the French commandos encountered fierce German resistance until Kieffer rounded up a few of the DD tanks; with their support, he routed the Germans out of their position and entered the city.
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The Germans defending the beaches recognized their peril, even if the high command in Berlin and Paris did not. The 84th Corps commander, General Erich Marcks, who was celebrating his fifty-third birthday that day, begged permission to use his tanks in a counterattack. Headquarters, however, remained convinced that this was a mere diversion and denied his request, which prompted the normally restrained Marcks to growl that the decision was “a disgrace.” Not until the British and Canadians were well established ashore and moving inland did Marcks get permission to release his tanks. He organized forty of them into a strike force and ordered the commander to drive a wedge between the British on Sword Beach and the Canadians on Juno. He told the officer in charge, “If you don’t succeed in throwing the British back into the sea, we shall have lost the war.” Though this belated attack had some initial success, the British blunted it with effective antitank fire and then hurled it back. Nevertheless, the ferocity of the German counterattack helped convince the Allied commanders that rather than dash inland at once to seize the city of Caen, they should instead consolidate the front and dig in.
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BACK ACROSS THE ENGLISH CHANNEL
the invasion’s commanders waited anxiously for battle reports. Eisenhower had gone to bed late on June 5,
though he had slept little. He was particularly concerned about the fate of the paratroopers of the airborne divisions. Leigh-Mallory had predicted disaster if the drops went ahead as scheduled, and Eisenhower had overruled him. Now the SHAEF commander awaited reports from the returning transport planes about the fate of those paratroopers. Leigh-Mallory himself called headquarters at 6:40 a.m., just as the first American soldiers were pushing up onto Omaha Beach in their Higgins boats. Ike’s naval aide, Harry Butcher, took the call, and he ran to Eisenhower’s trailer with the report. Butcher found the Allied Supreme Commander sitting up in bed with a western novel in his hands and a filled ashtray next to him. Butcher relayed Leigh-Mallory’s information: twenty of the 850 American transport planes had been lost, and only eight of the 400 British planes. There had been no enemy fighter opposition, and little flak. The drops had been a success. Then Ramsay called. He reported a sortie by a few German E-boats from Le Havre and that the landings were proceeding. Beyond that he had little news. Ike had no choice but to wait helplessly for further reports of the battle he had set in motion. He drafted a quick note to Marshall in Washington: “I have as yet no information concerning the actual landings,” he wrote, adding, “preliminary reports are satisfactory.”
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Churchill, too, was eager for news. He had remained in the vicinity of the Channel ports, “making a pest of himself” according to Brooke, until June 5 when Eisenhower had postponed the invasion for a day. He had then returned to London to await events. Never as sanguine about the outcome of the invasion as the Americans, he bade his wife Clementine goodnight that evening with the comment: “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand young men may have been killed?” As she retired, Churchill went down to his Map Room to read the reports as they arrived, moving the little pins on the maps as necessary. At noon he left to address the House of Commons. He announced the liberation of Rome, which had coincidentally taken place two days before, but as to the Normandy landings, he was unable to tell them anything beyond the fact that the battle was “proceeding according to plan.”
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Roosevelt had originally planned to fly to London to be alongside Churchill during the invasion, but to his and Churchill’s great disappointment, his declining health made that impossible. (“How I wish you were here,” the prime minister cabled the president.) Instead, Roosevelt went to Charlottesville, Virginia, to be with his daughter Anna and her husband. He went to bed on June 5 aware that the invasion was likely to be under way before he awoke. George Marshall called from Washington at 3:00 a.m. (It was 8:00 a.m. in Normandy, and Vyn’s LCI(L)-91 was burning on Omaha Beach.) Marshall told the president that the landings had taken place on schedule. Roosevelt authorized a public announcement a half hour later, and those who heard it also heard Eisenhower’s recorded message to the invading force from the night before: “Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the great crusade ….” As the sun rose and the news spread, church bells began to ring, and factories sounded their whistles. Even as the celebrations began, however, the outcome of the fighting on Omaha Beach remained in doubt.
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OFF THE AMERICAN BEACHES
, the American generals who commanded the men who were pinned down on Omaha Beach were nearly wild with frustration. Omar Bradley, commander of the American First Army, stared shoreward at the smoke-enshrouded coastline from Kirk’s flagship, the heavy cruiser
Augusta
. Off Utah Beach, Joe Collins, the VII Corps commander, and Raymond O. “Tubby” Barton, the 4th Division commander, watched from Moon’s flagship, the transport
Bayfield
, while off Omaha Beach, Leonard T. Gerow, who commanded V Corps, and Clarence R. Huebner, who commanded the 1st Division, were on board USS
Ancon
, the converted ocean liner that Jimmy Hall used as his command ship. All these generals agonized about the circumstances ashore, and they chafed at their enforced absence from the battlefield. The command protocol for the American invasion beaches was that Kirk and the Navy retained full operational authority and control until the generals landed on the beach to assume command. That made the generals little more than high-ranking but largely impotent passengers, at least until they got their boots onto
French soil. It was maddening. They had spent most of their adult lives training for a moment such as this, and they had spent months honing their commands to a hard edge. Yet even as their men were dying, here they were a dozen miles offshore, unable to do much of anything to affect the course of events.
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The
Augusta
was a grand old lady of a warship. Laid down as a so-called Treaty cruiser in 1930, she had been designed to squeeze in just under the 1922 Naval Arms Limitation Treaty’s definition of a battleship. She served from 1933 to 1940 as the flagship of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, and then, transferred to the Atlantic in 1941, she had carried Franklin Roosevelt to Newfoundland to meet Churchill in the first of the Anglo-American strategy conferences. Now she was the flagship of the Western Task Force and the hub of much of the frenetic activity off the American beaches on D-Day.

Kirk and Bradley got on well. They had served together during the landings in Sicily, and they trusted and genuinely liked each other—from the beginning they had called each other “Alan” and “Brad.” Now, at 8:00 a.m. on June 6, 1944, they were both deeply concerned. The forces on Utah Beach seemed to be doing all right, even if they had landed too far to the south. Though resistance there continued, “jeeps and tanks with their human cargoes seemed to be spilling out on[to] the sands without trouble,” as one witness recalled. It was Omaha that was the problem. Kirk confessed to being “worried, very much worried, about Omaha,” and Bradley wrote later of his “grave personal anxiety and frustration.” The few reports that arrived on board
Augusta
from the beach suggested nothing less than a mounting disaster. Those who had landed were pinned down on the beach and not moving, and the clogged shoreline meant that the ensuing waves of landing craft had no place to go. Vessels offshore were jockeying about in obvious and increasing disorder. “I gained the impression,” Bradley wrote, “that our forces had suffered an irreversible catastrophe, that there was little hope we could force the beach.”
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