Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (17 page)

It was obvious that something was very wrong. 21 of the unit’s 51 tanks were destroyed on Omaha, and the neighbouring battalion fared even worse. Preston’s crew simply took up position just above the high-water mark, and began to fire at such German positions as they could identify. These were not very many, for the tank fired only about a third of its ammunition before dusk. The 743rd remained on the beach for the next 12 hours.

Some unhappy men ended up on Omaha who should never have been there at all under such circumstances. Sergeant Andy Hertz, the Boston-bred son of a Dutch Jewish father and British mother, had been building airfields in England for almost two years with the 922nd Aviation Engineer Regiment when, somewhat to their bewilderment, he and his unit were issued with carbines, mines, bazookas and combat equipment, and loaded onto invasion transports to build airstrips in France. Aboard his liberty ship offshore, Hertz was in the galley listening to radio reports of the fall of Rome when the engineers were piped on deck. They saw the burning shore before them. A landing craft came alongside. Its skipper asked if the ship could provide any coffee, and announced that he could take in 90 men. A Ranger commanding officer sharing the ship with them declined to send his men ashore at that moment. The major responsible for the engineers shouted that they would go. Lacking assault training, they found the most frightening experience of the morning to be the descent of the scrambling nets into the pitching craft. Then, as they pulled away from the side, they saw their major waving farewell from the upper deck. He had decided to leave Hertz and the others to explore Omaha alone that day, and they never saw him again. An hour or so later, they struggled through five feet of water to the beach.

Few men or vehicles seemed to be moving. Hertz met a very frightened young 18-year-old from the 29th Division who said that he was the only survivor of his squad. The man in front of Hertz, Sergeant Valducci, suddenly fell down, screaming: ‘I’m shot!’ A beachmaster ran to the group and demanded: ‘Who are you people?’ Engineers, they said. ‘Sounds good,’ he replied, ‘we’ve got
wire to clear here. You got bangalores?’ No, they said. They were aviation engineers. ‘Who the hell sent you in?’ They shrugged: ‘Some sonofabitch.’ And so they joined the clusters of stranded Americans on Omaha, lying behind such shelter as they could find through the hours that followed.
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Leading Aircraftsman Norman Phillips was one of a party of 158 British RAF personnel who were landed on Omaha: ‘We could see a shambles ahead of us on the beach – burning tanks, jeeps, abandoned vehicles, a terrific crossfire.’
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The captain of their LCT ordered them to offload anyway. The first vehicles found themselves driving into eight feet of water. The men struggled to the shore and formed a human chain to assist the non-swimmers. They landed on a sandspit crowded with wounded soldiers who lacked any medical attention. The British officers organized their men into salvage parties to rescue all the equipment that they could, but most had lost everything. Two RAF men were seized and taken prisoner by nervous Americans who could not identify their uniforms. By nightfall, the air force party had lost eight killed, 35 wounded, and 28 of their 35 vehicles. It was 33 days before they were issued with fresh clothing, 108 days before their lost arms and ammunition were replaced.

The reports that reached V Corps and General Bradley from Omaha that morning were not merely gloomy, but at times almost panic-stricken. Bradley’s personal aide and Admiral Kirk’s gunnery officer cruised close inshore aboard a PT boat and returned soaked and grim. Bradley considered halting all landings on the eastern beach and diverting the follow-up waves to Utah. A monstrous traffic jam had developed off the beach. By a serious flaw in the timetable, soft-skinned vehicles were beginning to arrive to offload in the middle of the battle. Among many naval crews who displayed exemplary courage, there were others whose lack of experience and determination magnified the confusion. The sailors manning a huge rhino raft loaded with vehicles simply abandoned it, 700 yards out, and the drivers and cargo drifted out of control until the rising tide brought them ashore. The Rangers had
developed an early scepticism about naval efficiency when the officer in charge of one of their landing craft rammed a breakwater before getting out of his English harbour, and the skipper of another spent the cross-Channel voyage prostrate with seasickness. Now, one group of Rangers found themselves left to bring their landing craft in to the beach unaided. Its crew simply took to their dinghy and deserted them. In contrast to these episodes, the sailors manning two LCTs with immense courage rammed the beach obstacles head-on, and remained in position using every gun to support the infantry in their plight.

Lieutenant-Colonel John Williamson, commanding the 2nd/18th Infantry of the 1st Division, led his men into their LCVPs soon after 8.00 a.m., more than an hour late. When some craft began to swamp as they circled waiting for word that the beach was clear, the crews of others sought to begin rescue operations. After some forceful urging from Williamson, the craft began their run-in. They approached the shore not in an orderly wave, line abreast, but in a column, a queue, jostling for position on the sands. ‘The beach was loaded with men, tanks, DUKWs,’ said Williamson. ‘I was surprised that nobody had moved off.’ Major Frank Colacicco, executive officer of the 3rd/18th, stood among his men on the deck of an LCI, watching the spectacle ashore in utter bewilderment: ‘It was like a theatre. We could see it all, we knew that something was knocking the tanks out, but we kept asking, “Why don’t they clear the beach? Why aren’t our people getting off?” ’ When at last their own turn came to approach the sands, Colacicco’s LCI struck an obstacle whose mine blew up. Some men were hurled into the water by the blast, others found themselves struggling in the surf moments later as the craft settled. At last someone on the beach got a lifeline out to them, and the soaking men dragged themselves ashore. The major was told that Brigadier Wyman, the assistant divisional commander, wanted to see him. He reached the command post after being knocked off his feet by a mortar blast. He was told to take over the objectives of the 1st/16th, and returned to his men lying below the sea wall to point out to them,
unanswerably: ‘We can’t stay here.’ Slowly they began to work up the hillside, crawling over the immobile figures of men of the 116th Infantry: ‘They were too green to know that the closer you are to the enemy, the better off you will be.’ Colacicco tore a strip off one man he saw firing apparently recklessly along the hillside: ‘Just settle down,’ said the major soothingly. ’That’s our men over there.’ ‘But sir, they have overcoats on,’ insisted the soldier. Indeed they were German riflemen.

Yet although the defenders possessed the capability to maul the American landing on Omaha seriously, to impede and to disorganize it, they lacked the power to halt it absolutely. Despite the near-total destruction of the first wave of invaders landing on the western flank below Vierville, despite the casualties and the terror inflicted upon thousands of green troops, a great many men survived to reach the sea wall alive – enough, finally, to swamp the vastly outnumbered German defenders. General Marcks’s LXXXIV Corps reserve, the 915th Regiment, had set off in pursuit of the mythical paratroop force of Allied dummies at 4.00 a.m. on 6 June. It was hours after the seaborne landing before the 915th could be reached by dispatch rider, regrouped, and brought back from the Carentan–Isigny area on foot and by commandeered vehicle. The defenders thus lacked any force capable of mounting a co-ordinated counter-attack either against the attackers of Omaha, or against the British threat to Bayeux, further east. At Omaha, the Americans found themselves facing Germans of the 352nd Division as well as the 716th – eight battalions instead of four. The defenders possessed the strength and determination to fight doggedly from fixed positions. But where the Americans, inch by inch, gained ground, they were able to keep it. The toeholds prised out of the heights above the beach that day by a few brave men of the Rangers, the 1st and 29th Divisions could never normally have been held against the quick local counter-attacks at which the German army excelled. But such movements did not develop. Like a trickling stream slipping between pebbles, a handful of courageous leaders and small groups of men found their way
around the German strongpoints covering the beach exits, and forced a path for the American army off Omaha beach. The Corps plan for the attack was a failure. But the men on the hillside, spurred by their own desperation, found their own means to gain the high ground.

The principal problem in almost every attack on every battlefield is to maintain momentum. Every instinct, especially among inexperienced soldiers, is to take cover under fire. Instinct is reinforced when the bodies of others who have failed to do so lie all around. It requires a considerable act of will to persuade limbs to act which have suddenly acquired an immobility of their own. Inexperienced troops find it notoriously difficult to assess the extent of resistance and risk. On some occasions this can be to their advantage – or rather, that of their commanders – because it leads them to perform acts that more seasoned soldiers would not be so foolhardy as to attempt. But on Omaha the 29th Division, in its first experience of combat, deprived in the first hours of many of its officers, dismayed by its losses and confused by its predicament, became dangerously paralysed. The veteran 1st Division, on its left, performed significantly better – indeed, most Americans later agreed that without ‘The Big Red One’ the battle would have been lost.

It was individuals, not divisions, who determined the outcome of the day. It is arguable that as early as mid-morning, when Bradley and Gerow were still receiving deeply gloomy reports from Omaha, the real situation was much more encouraging than the view of the beach from the ships led the commanders to believe. Barely two hours after H-Hour, when the formidable network of German wire and machine-guns was still blocking all movement up the five valleys offering vehicle access from the beach, small groups of Americans had already reached the high ground to threaten the German flanks. The survivors of the 2nd Rangers’ A and B Companies reached the sea wall at 7.45 a.m., and immediately began to work up the heights. Staff Sergeant William Courtney and Private First Class William Braher of A Company’s
1 Platoon were probably the first Americans to reach the top of the cliff, around 8.30 a.m. When the Rangers gained the summit, they were too few in number to achieve a decisive success, although they sent word to a company of the 116th Infantry below to follow them up, and one boat section did so. But in the next two hours, a succession of similar small-scale actions took place all along the Omaha front, driving vital wedges into the German defences. 23 men of E Company, 2/16th Infantry, under Lieutenant John Spalding gained the hill and began to attack the German strongpoint which covered the east side of the St Laurent exit from the rear. After two hours of dogged fighting within the network of pillboxes and communicating trenches, the Americans cornered an officer and 20 men and forced their surrender.

Brigadier-General Norman Cota and his 29th Division command group reached the beach at 7.30 a.m. with the 116th Regiment’s headquarters. The general began to move among the bewildered tangle of infantrymen, Rangers, naval beach maintenance parties and gunner forward observers. He saw one man who attempted to move up the hill shot down. The soldier lay in front of the American positions crying: ‘Medico, I’m hit!’ repeatedly for several minutes. Then he moaned ‘Mama’ and cried for a few moments before he died. Two of the headquarters group were killed within three feet of Cota when he established his first command post, while his signaller was hurled 20 feet up the bluff by blast. But the fiery, inexhaustible brigadier began pushing officers, urging men, seeking routes by which to break the bloody deadlock by the sea wall.

Mike Rehm of the 5th Rangers had been huddled beneath the shingle bank for two hours or more with a group of men when Cota appeared. In one of his legendary encounters of the day, the general demanded to know who they were. Rangers, he was told. ‘Then, godammit, if you’re Rangers get up and lead the way!’ exploded Cota.
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The men began to thrust four-foot lengths of bangalore torpedo beneath the wire ahead, locking them together until they could blow a gap. In front, the entire hillside was
wreathed in smoke from the blazing undergrowth. Coughing and choking, the Rangers realized that they could not run through it, but at last they pulled on their gas masks and groped forward. Some 35 men reached the metalled road at the top of the hill. Covered by 60 mm mortars firing at such short range that the tubes were almost vertical, they began to work slowly westwards. There were now Americans behind some of the most dangerous German positions covering the beach.

By 11.00 a.m., Vierville was in American hands. When Cota himself reached a house on the edge of the village, he found 70 men sheltering against the wall who shouted ‘Sniper! Sniper!’ as he approached. The brigadier impatiently ordered them to clear the way. They closed in on the German, who threw a stick grenade down the hill towards them before being killed seconds later. Cota began to move back down the draw towards the beach. He met one of his own staff officers, Major William Bretton, clutching a briefcase and looking exceedingly angry. ‘Dammit, I can’t get these people to move,’ complained Bretton. Cota called a young infantry captain and told him to get his men going off the beach. Hesitantly, they began to obey. Then Cota spotted an abandoned bulldozer loaded with TNT, desperately needed to blow obstacles down the beach. He shouted to the men lying around it for a volunteer to drive the explosives to the engineers. At last a red-headed soldier stood up and said, ‘I’ll do it,’ and climbed on the vehicle. Yard by yard, the beach was unsticking.
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At 1.30 p.m., Gerow signalled to Bradley: ‘Troops formerly pinned down on beaches . . . advancing up heights behind beaches.’