Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (49 page)

Despite this evident sangfroid, the delay did affect the Rangers’ mission. Instead of landing at 6:30 and on both sides of the promontory as planned, they landed at 7:10 and only on the eastern side. On the other hand, that was precisely where several 14-inch shells from the USS
Texas
had collapsed a section of the cliff onto the narrow beach, creating a spoil of rocks forty feet high. The Rangers clambered up the pile of fallen rock, triggered their rocket-fired grappling hooks, and began to ascend the cliff face. The Germans sprayed them with machine gun fire and dropped grenades over the cliff, but the men kept climbing. The first of them to reach the top dropped ropes for the others, then turned to take on the German defenders. Of the 225 men who began the climb, 108 made it to the top. With so few of them, and arriving piecemeal as they did, it was touch and go.
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A crucial factor in their eventual success was gunfire support from the destroyers. Hard pressed by German light artillery, the Rangers used a blinker light to send target coordinates to the destroyers offshore.
Satterlee
responded first, joined by
Thompson
at 8:30 and by
Ellyson
(DD-454) an hour later. Unable to see the target, the destroyers had to rely on indirect fire, stopping after each salvo to receive a report from the Rangers about the fall of shot. At 9:52 the Rangers called for the destroyers to cease fire, and at 11:30 lookouts in the destroyers saw an American flag flying over the position. Having scaled the cliffs, driven off the defenders, and seized the high ground, however, the Rangers soon discovered that the reported big guns on Pointe du Hoc had been removed, replaced by wooden dummies. They moved inland and set up a defensive perimeter, which they held for the rest of the day and into the night.
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The other destroyers of Sanders’s squadron, operating off Omaha Beach itself, had great initial difficulty identifying appropriate targets. The poor visibility along the beachfront and the excellent German camouflage made it all but impossible to figure out where the German guns were. Some of those guns retracted into underground bombproofs; others were so well hidden that, as one sailor put it, “you couldn’t see it if you was ten feet from them.” In theory, the ships were supposed to coordinate with shore-based fire control parties that would identify the targets and report the fall of the shot, as the Rangers did on Pointe du Hoc. But there was such chaos on the
beach that morning, and such a dearth of working radios, that not until the afternoon did the destroyers establish regular radio communication with spotters ashore. In the meantime, the destroyer skippers were compelled to seek “targets of opportunity.” There was one immediate benefit of their arrival, however: many of the German gunners, fearful of disclosing their location, briefly held their fire, while others shifted their fire to target the destroyers. In both cases that created a blessed, if temporary, respite for the soldiers on the beach.
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Near the center of Omaha Beach, just off the beachfront village of Les Moulins, Commander Robert Beer, the tall, lanky captain of the
Carmick
, scanned the bluffs looking for telltale “puffs of smoke or flashes from enemy gun emplacements.” Because the Germans were using smokeless powder, he saw none, and Beer became impatient, finding the process “slow and unreliable.” As he studied the beach through his binoculars, however, he noted a few Allied tanks trying vainly to fight their way up the draw, or gully, in the cliffs near Vierville-sur-Mer. It was evident to him that they were being held up by heavy gunfire from above, though he could not identify the source of that fire. Several of the Allied tanks were shooting at a particular spot on the bluffs, and, carefully noting the fall of their shot, Beer directed his ship’s guns to target those same positions. The
Carmick
fired a series of rapid-fire salvos from her 5-inch guns into the suspicious area. After a few minutes, Beer noted that the tank gunners had shifted their fire to another site, and Beer directed his gunnery officer to follow suit. “It became evident,” Beer reported afterward, “that the Army was using tank fire in [the] hope that fire support vessels would see the target and take it under fire.” In a kind of deadly pas de deux, the tank men used their shells to point out enemy gun positions, and the destroyer men aimed accordingly.
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Near the
Carmick
, Lieutenant Commander Ralph Ramey, in USS
McCook
, opened fire on two strongly fortified German guns set into the cliff face. Many of Ramey’s friends thought he was the spitting image of the comedian Will Rogers, and Ramey often sprinkled his conversation with country aphorisms, but he was all business now. Ramey and the
McCook
maintained an unremitting fire at the German battery for more than fifteen minutes, and eventually that concentrated bombardment undermined the
rock strata on which the enemy guns rested. The cliff crumbled away; one of the guns flew up into the air and the other plunged down the cliff face.
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A mile or two further east, Commander Clarence Boyd, captain of the
Doyle
(DD-494), maneuvered his ship among the landing craft that were swarming off the Fox Green sector of Omaha Beach. From only eight hundred yards off the surf line, Boyd could see the men ashore “dug in behind a hummock of sand along the beach, and the boats of the second wave [actually the third] milling around offshore.” Absent contact with fire control parties ashore, he posted lookouts to scan the high ground behind the beach for evidence of enemy gun positions, though visibility was “very difficult because of smoke and dust in the target area.” One lookout reported a machine gun emplacement on a steep hill at the west end of Fox Red Beach between Colleville-sur-Mer and Le Grand Hameau, and the
Doyle
fired two salvos onto the site. The
Doyle
then shifted fire to a casemate at the top of the hill and fired two more salvos, and in both cases Boyd was able to report “target destroyed.” More often, however, the results were less conclusive. Lacking other clear sightings, Boyd simply picked out what seemed to him to be logical places for gun positions to be and opened fire on them even if he could not see anything there. Having completed its assignment off Point du Hoc, the
Thompson
joined the
Doyle
off Fox Green beach, and there her commander, Albert Gebelin, whose darkly handsome features reminded some of “a cigar store Indian,” directed his ship’s fire into “a clump of trees” that he thought might be “cover for a field battery.” Whether it was or not, the trees got a thorough pounding.
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Other ships got into the act. A sailor on an LCT happened to be looking at the vegetation along the line of bluffs when he noticed a tiny movement among the bushes, and a second later a shell exploded on the beach. He kept his eye focused on those bushes, and soon another small movement of the brush was followed by another explosion on the beach. He called the skipper over and pointed it out. The officer watched as the pattern was repeated, and he noted the coordinates on his chart. He then got on the short-range TBS radio and called the nearest of the destroyers. Almost at once a destroyer “came barreling in there, popped over sideways, port side to the beach, and turned loose about eight rounds of 5-inch projectiles” into the German gun position.
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Compared to the aerial bombs dropped from high altitude and the big shells fired from ten or fifteen miles offshore, the smaller-caliber destroyer fire was more accurate and therefore far more effective. The bigger 8-, 12-, and 14-inch shells from the cruisers and battleships had made the ground shake, but they had left the German gun positions largely intact. Now those positions were pounded with hundreds of 5-inch shells and knocked out one by one. One witness recalled seeing three 5-inch shells hit within twenty inches of a narrow gun slit on a pillbox, and in at least one case a German artillery piece was hit directly on the muzzle and split wide open. A beach master on Omaha watching the tin cans fire into the cliff later claimed, “You could see the trenches, guns, and men blowing up where they were hit.” There was no doubt in his mind that “the few Navy destroyers that we had there probably saved the invasion.” With more enthusiasm than precision, he insisted that the handful of American ships “destroyed practically the entire German defense line at Omaha Beach.” If they didn’t quite do that, they did change the trajectory of the battle. Inside an artillery bunker behind Omaha Beach, a German regimental commander phoned headquarters to report, “Naval guns are smashing up our strongpoints. We are running short of ammunition. We urgently need supplies.” There was no answer because the line had gone dead.
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For more than an hour, from shortly before nine o’clock until well past ten, the destroyer gunfire was virtually nonstop. And it needed to be. As the commanding officer of LCI(L)-408 noted while heading for the beach just before ten o’clock, “If a destroyer ceased shelling a shore battery for even a very brief time, the battery resumed fire on the craft along the beach.” Of course, the constant firing soon depleted the ammunition stores on the destroyers. To ensure that they retained sufficient capability for emergencies, the Neptune invasion order had specified that the destroyers were to expend no more than 50 to 60 percent of their ammunition before going back to England to replenish. In this crisis, however, the destroyer skippers disregarded that injunction.
Gleaves
-class destroyers carried between fifteen hundred and two thousand rounds of general-purpose 5-inch ammunition. Most of the ships in Sanders’s squadron had fired off between a quarter and a third of that during the early morning bombardment, and
now they expended most of what was left. Between 8:50 and 10:15 that morning, USS
Emmons
(DD-457) fired 767 rounds,
McCook
975, and
Carmick
1,127. Kirk became sufficiently nervous about this that he issued an order that “destroyers must husband [their] ammunition,” reminding them that “our resources are limited.” When the gunners on the
Herndon
(DD-638) ran out of high-explosive ammunition, they began firing star shells that were primarily used for illumination. On USS
Butler
(DD-636), Petty Officer Felix Podolak remembered that the firing was so hot “we had to hook up one-and-a-half-inch fire hoses to hydrants to spray water on our gun mount,” and even then, “the barrels were running red hot.”
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The German gunners fired back, mostly with their mobile 88 mm field guns, but the swift destroyers were difficult targets, even in the shallow and crowded waters off Omaha Beach. The Germans had already claimed one destroyer that morning when USS
Corry
(DD-463) hit a mine and virtually broke in half, going down in less than thirty minutes. The Germans were less successful in targeting the destroyers with gunfire. The skippers used their engines “in spurts,” ordering them alternately “ahead and astern, to throw off the enemy gunners.” There were some close calls. A German battery behind Fox Red Beach straddled the
Emmons
, and USS
Baldwin
(DD-624) was hit twice in rapid succession, the first shell striking her whaleboat on the starboard side and the second blowing an eight-by-twelve-inch hole in her main deck. But the
Emmons
escaped injury, and
Baldwin
responded with accurate counterbattery fire, silencing its tormentor after several salvos. No other destroyer was hit during this crucial and decisive ninety-minute period.
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Shortly before noon, the accuracy of the destroyer gunfire improved when the ships finally established contact with some of the fire control parties ashore. At 11:24, Army spotters directed the fire of the
Frankford
into a concentration of German troops behind the beach and therefore beyond the sightline of the destroyers. After two salvos, the spotters called a cease-fire because the soldiers had scattered. Occasionally it worked exactly as it was supposed to, as it did, for example, two days later, on June 8, when the
Ellyson
got target coordinates from a shore fire control party for a German artillery position. After one salvo, the spotters reported, “Up four hundred
yards”; after the next, “Up fifty yards”; and after the third, “Mission successful.” Of course, shore spotting had limits, too. An exchange recorded later that same day suggested why. Receiving a request for fire support, the gunnery officer on the USS
Laffey
(DD-724) asked for coordinates. The answer came back: “We’re lying on our stomachs in a ditch under enemy fire. Cannot furnish spots.” The
Laffey
opened fire nonetheless, and after several salvos, the shore spotter radioed back: “Whoever was shooting at us has stopped, so you must have done alright.”
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Given the dearth of working radios ashore and the complications of inter-service communication, it is not surprising that there were errors. Late that afternoon, several of the American destroyers received reports that the Germans were using the church steeples in both Colleville-sur-Mer and Viervillesur-Mer as observation posts. USS
Emmons
took on the task of taking down the steeple in Colleville, and after a few salvoes, it did, smashing it, as one sailor recalled, “just like you’d hit it with a big ax.” A few miles to the west, off Vierville, USS
Harding
took the church there under fire. From offshore the results looked spectacular. The
Harding
’s first salvo clipped off the cross at the peak, the second hit the steeple about ten feet from the top, and the third hit ten feet below that. From seaward it looked like the
Harding
was slicing off the steeple ten feet at a time, and Admiral Bryant, watching from the bridge of the
Texas
, thought it was “a beautiful sight.” The reality on the ground was much different. Not only did the shelling cause a lot of collateral damage, but, far worse, American troops had already captured the town, and the
Harding
’s shells killed and wounded a number of Americans. Army Captain Joseph Dawson of the 16th Infantry thought it was “totally disgraceful.”
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