Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (50 page)

Despite such errors, the cumulative effect of the close-in naval gunfire support was decisive. For the first time since they had landed, the men lying facedown behind the low rise of sand and shingle at the high tide mark were able to lift their heads and look around them for a way off the beach. As early as 10:36, lookouts on the
Frankford
noted that some Allied troops were beginning to advance, moving forward from that low hillock of sand toward the base of the cliffs. And an hour later, at 11:37, some of the German defenders began coming out of their positions with their hands up. While much of this was the result of incredible bravery and determination by the soldiers themselves, the destroyers played a
critical role. In his postwar memoir, Bradley acknowledged that “the Navy saved our hides.” Colonel Mason, who several hours earlier had tried to convince Hall to quit the bridge and go down and talk to Huebner on the
Ancon
, declared that “without that gunfire, we positively could not have crossed the beaches.”
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BUT CROSS THEY DID
. When every instinct was telling the soldiers to stay down and keep still, their officers insisted that they needed to get up and get moving. Among them was the assistant commander of the 29th Division, Brigadier General Norman “Dutch” Cota, who had landed with the second wave at seven-thirty. Cota worked his way along the line of men behind the seawall telling every officer he saw: “We’ve got to get these men off this Goddammed beach.” Another was Colonel George A. Taylor, commander of the 16th Infantry Regiment, who made the choice clear. “There are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach,” he told the men. “Those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.” Thanks to the destroyers, and emboldened by the zeal and passion of their officers, the soldiers began to move forward.
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The original plan called for them to advance up the several gullies, or draws, that cut narrow valleys through the cliff line. The Germans had anticipated that and heavily fortified the draws. To escape the killing ground of the beach, many of the solders now ran forward to the base of the cliff itself. There they were shielded from the German artillery, but they were hardly safe. German infantry crept to the lip of the bluffs, held their machine guns out over the edge, and fired blindly down onto the Americans below. Their aim was erratic, yet it was evident that the base of the cliff was only marginally less deadly than the beach itself. Resolving this tactical dilemma was complicated by the fact that many of the GIs crowding up to the base of the cliff had become separated from their commands, and the units were hopelessly intermingled. In some respects, the mass of men at the base of the cliff was less an organized military force than a collection of survivors: men who had, against the odds, somehow lived through the long passage to the beach, the struggle from the surf line to the hillock of beach sand at the high tide mark, and the move from there to the cliff face. There were sailors as well as soldiers among these survivors: a handful of NCDU
team members who had been cut off from their teams, and sailors who had been forced to abandon their vessels when they were wrecked on the beach. All of them recognized that they now depended on each other, and amid the chaos, they formed up into ersatz teams led by majors, captains, lieutenants, and sergeants. And then, in an act rivaling the Union Army’s ascent of Missionary Ridge in the Civil War, they began to climb the cliffs, working their way upward, hand over hand, using rifle fire and grenades against the startled defenders.
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In this, too, they received help from the destroyers offshore. Still patrolling the beachfront between Vierville and St. Laurent, Beer saw some GIs pinned down “behind a big house in the Dog Green area.” It was, in fact, a group of soldiers that had been collected by U.S. Army Major Sidney Bingham. The men had captured a large three-story stone house on the beach near the Les Moulins draw, but they could not advance beyond it. Beer could not see what was keeping them pinned down. Still, he directed the
Carmick
’s fire into the cliff face above them, and after a few salvos he saw the GIs charge forward and begin to ascend the bluffs. Beer then elevated the
Carmick
’s guns to the top of the bluffs, and he maintained a supporting fire ahead of them as the men scrambled up the cliff’s face.
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Among them was Robert Giguere, a seventeen-year-old seaman who had lied about his age in order to join the Navy and who had been stranded on the beach with his NCDU team since early that morning. Cut off from his shipmates, he had sought cover behind the low seawall along with everyone else who could still move. After enduring what seemed an eternity of machine gun and artillery fire, he heard an Army officer say, “Let’s … knock out some of these pill boxes. We might as well get killed inland [as] here on the beach.” The men responded and began to run forward. Giguere went with them. “At this point,” he recalled later, “I never thought I’d see my eighteenth birthday.”
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While Giguere and hundreds of others scrambled up the cliffs, others sought to fight their way up through the draws. Among them was Navy Ensign Karl Everitt. His LCT had wrecked on a beach obstacle during the landing, and he and his crew had been forced to abandon ship, joining the hundreds of others who took cover behind that low rise of sand and stones,
though Everitt had to roll several dead soldiers out of the way to find room. He saw some Army engineers attempting to screw several lengths of Bangalore torpedo tubes together in an effort to blow a hole through the thick coils of barbed wire that obstructed the Vierville draw. Rather than sit and watch, Everitt and his crewmen “started screwing those tubes together.” When they had fifty to sixty feet of it assembled, they tried sliding it forward, but it got entangled in the wire and they had to pull it back and start over. All the time they endured heavy machine-gun fire. Eventually they got the tubing in position and pressed the plunger, and the subsequent explosion folded the barbed wire “back right up against that cliff and [it] stayed there.” Everitt remembered what happened next: “Well, boy, those guys went out of there like a stampede…. They just come off that ground and they headed for that opening.” Everitt and his boat crew went with them, advancing all the way to the top of the ridge, where they met up with those who had climbed the face of the cliff. After that, having had enough of Army life for one day, Everitt and his men returned back down to the beach where they saw that the tide had gone out and left their LCT sitting high and dry impaled on a beach obstruction. They had to wait for the next high tide to get it off the beach.
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THE TIDE WAS CHANGING ON SHORE, TOO
. The fighting was still intense, but it was no longer one-sided. As Hall had foreseen, the influx of more and more Allied men and equipment, aided by the accurate destroyer fire, finally tipped the balance ashore. The seventeenth wave landed around noon, and even if the line of landing craft did not resemble the neat formation envisioned by the planners, the boats managed to discharge their men and vehicles. Meanwhile, soldiers from the 116th Regimental Combat Team (RCT) who had successfully assailed the bluffs west of Vierville found their way into the town from above. Other soldiers from the 115th RCT that Gerow had decided to commit early made their way to the top of the bluffs near St. Laurent, and men from the 16th RCT ascended the bluffs between Colleville and Le Grand Hameau. By one o’clock that afternoon they had captured Colleville itself. At about the same time, shellfire from the
Texas
took out the last German strongpoint in the Vierville draw, which
allowed seventeen tanks from the 743rd tank battalion to push their way up the gap and into Vierville itself. At one-thirty Gerow reported to Bradley that the men were off the beaches and advancing onto the high ground.
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An hour later, the first elements of Force B, carrying the rest of the 29th Division, arrived off Omaha Beach. In addition to a dozen LCI(L)s packed with infantry, it included HMS
Oceanway
, a former U.S. Navy Landing Ship, Dock (LSD) that had been turned over to the British under Lend-Lease only two months earlier. Hall sent her to Fox Green Beach near Colleville, and there she flooded her well deck and disgorged her twenty Mike boats, each preloaded with one M4 Sherman tank. By five o’clock the men and the tanks were ashore and backing up the move inland. The commander of the 29th Division, Major General Charles Gerhardt, also went ashore. Gerhardt was something of a showman who wore twin pearl-handled revolvers. En route to the beach in an LCT, he was annoyed when the boat’s commander, Ensign Curtis Hansen, turned away to look for a better landing site. Gerhardt exploded. “Get ashore!” he yelled. “I’ve got work I’ve got to do in there and run this invasion.” Hansen, however, had been briefed on exactly this issue, and he recited the prescribed statement: “General, I’m in charge of this small boat until we hit the beach, and then you are in charge.” Gerhardt was stymied, for he, too, knew the protocols. “You are right, Ensign,” he said, and he remained uncharacteristically silent until they landed some ten or fifteen minutes later.
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By then, General Huebner was also ashore. He found that the morning assault had separated many of his officers from their commands, and that many of his 1st Division units were intermingled. He therefore focused most of his energies on restoring order, and at midnight he reported to Hall that he had established a continuous front line “from Vierville through St. Laurent to about a mile south of Colleville.” (See Map,
page 292
.) Though well short of the official objective for D-Day, it was a significant accomplishment in light of all that had gone wrong.
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By 6:00 p.m. on June 6, while Omaha Beach remained a dangerous place, the momentum had clearly shifted. German long-range artillery continued to lob shells onto the beach, and fighting—some of it hand-to-hand—still raged on the high ground behind it, but it no longer seemed likely that the
Allies would be driven into the sea. Higgins boats and LCTs carrying men, vehicles, and equipment shuttled back and forth in a nearly continuous stream between the transports and LSTs offshore and the beach. Though the initial Neptune plan had assigned specific roles for these landing craft, most of them simply went up to whatever vessel was nearby, took on whatever cargo was available, and headed for whatever piece of beach was open. When one Higgins boat driver reported to an officer on an LCI to ask for orders, the officer said simply, “Just continue shuttling material ashore.”
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With the division commanders now on the beach, control of the ensuing operations transferred formally from the Navy to the Army. That did not mean the Navy had finished its work. As soon as the tide receded, the surviving members of the NCDU teams got busy again attacking the beach obstacles to clear more paths for subsequent waves of men and equipment. The loss of so much of their equipment compelled Hall to send an urgent request to Commander Service Forces back in England for “additional explosives and demolition equipment … by the quickest available means.” The quickest means proved to be Bulkeley’s PT boats. Speeding at forty knots, they completed the round trip across the Channel by nine the next morning. As the NCDU teams cleared the mines, the bulldozers of the Combat Engineer Brigades began shoving aside the wrecked Higgins boats, the disabled jeeps, and even the Allied dead. Seaman Second Class Jackson Hoffler, who at age fourteen was almost certainly the youngest warrior on Omaha Beach that day, was sure he would “never forget seeing vehicles driving over bodies.”
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Though Omaha Beach was now in Allied hands, it was evident to nearly everyone that the assault had not gone according to plan. As the historian Adrian Lewis bluntly put it, “The plan for the assault at Omaha Beach failed.” The list of disappointments was long. The preliminary air attack and naval bombardment had failed to knock out the German strongpoints; too few of the DD tanks had made it to the shore; the NCDU teams had insufficient time to clear the obstacles; most of the troops had come ashore in the wrong places; too many of the landing craft had been wrecked or disabled; and the advance inland, when it finally happened, had been largely a product of initiative and determination by brave and desperate men rather
than the neat and structured offensive detailed in the operational plan. And, of course, the losses had been heavy. The most commonly cited number of Allied killed, wounded, and missing for June 6, 1944, is around ten thousand, with 60 percent of them American. Nearly half of those casualties were incurred by the airborne troops behind the beaches, but nearly three thousand of them resulted from the fighting on Omaha Beach, which was greater than the losses on all four of the other invasion beaches combined. In spite of that, the Allies were ashore, and by nightfall it was evident that they would stay there. No small part of the credit for that belonged to the sea forces: the ships and men of the Royal Navy, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard. Gerow himself finally got ashore between seven and eight that evening, and his first message to Bradley, still on board the
Augusta
, was: “Thank God for the United States Navy.”
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