The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (19 page)

All along Dog Beach, others watched as Cota still moved from one group to another, now urging the Rangers to lead the way off the beach. Inspired by Cota, officers began to organize their men for an advance.

Cota had spotted a section of the sea wall with a low mound of earth five yards beyond it. He ordered a Ranger to place a Browning automatic rifle on the mound. He then crawled after the man and ordered him to provide covering fire. Next, Cota organized the blowing of an opening in a thick barbed wire fence that ran along the far side of a ten-foot-wide promenade road beyond the sea wall.

Smoke from a grass fire now partly obscured the beach. Cota seized the opportunity to move while the German gunners’ view was obscured.

“Rangers, lead the way!”

The first man to run through the opening was cut down by an MG-42. “Medic,” he yelled.

“Medic, I’m hit. Help me.”
²⁴

A few minutes later, he sobbed “Mama” over and over and then died.

Many of the men around Cota were again paralyzed by fear. Cota once more led by example, dashing through the opening. Troops followed him across the promenade, through the gap in the wire and into a field of marsh grass. Cota, his aide Shea, and several squads wormed their way along shallow trenches and finally reached the base of the Vierville bluffs.
²⁵

“A single file of troops, composed of rifle men of the 116th 1st Bn, and headquarters, Rangers, and some members of the 82nd Chemical Mortar Battalion (armed with carbines) then ascended the bluffs, diagonally and to the right,” Shea later wrote. “They reached the crest at a point about 100 yards to the west of a small, concrete foundation (evidently a summer house) which lay twenty-five yards below the crest of the bluff. A few anti-personnel mines were detonated during the ascent, but they were not in great number.”
²⁶

It was now about 9 A.M. Canham had set up the 29th’s first command post at the base of the bluffs. He tried but failed to make contact with the 1st Division on the eastern half of Omaha Beach. Suddenly, several rounds of very accurate two-inch mortar fire landed on the post. The mortars killed two men three feet from Cota and seriously wounded his radio operator, throwing him thirty feet up the bluff. Cota’s aide, Lieutenant Shea, was blown seventy-five feet below but only slightly hurt.

Cota carried on climbing, urging men on. Again, the advance stalled, this time just below the crest of the bluffs. Someone yelled out that they should take a look below. A lone American rifleman walked along the promenade road. “Before him marched five German prisoners who had been stripped of their weapons and who held their hands above their heads. Inasmuch as they were the first Germans the men had seen, they caused particular interest.”
²⁷

An MG-42 snarled. Two prisoners were cut down. The American dived towards the sea wall. Two other prisoners fell to their knees, as if begging the German machine gunner to spare them. “The next burst caught the first kneeling German full in the chest,” recalled Shea, “and as he crumpled the remaining two took to the cover of the sea wall with their captor.”
²⁸

Cota finally reached the top of the bluffs. Another machine gun was firing from a hedgerow three hundred yards inland across a level field. Men huddled out of sight below the crest of the bluffs. Cota asked who was in charge. No one replied. “In the face of the fire,” Shea reported, “[Cota] passed through the men, personally led them in a charge across the field instructing them to fire at the hedgerows as they advanced. . . . The machine gun fire stopped as soon as the troops started to move across the fields towards it.”
²⁹

Cota then led his men along the perimeter of the field, using the hedgerow as cover, until he reached a narrow lane 600 yards from Vierville sur Mer. As he advanced along the lane, Cota saw other survivors from the 116th’s 1st Battalion and Rangers who had also fought their way off the beach. There was minimal opposition as Cota and these men entered Vierville sur Mer and then headed for the crossroads where Roy Stevens was supposed to meet his brother Ray in the center of the town. At the crossroads, about noon, Cota reunited with Colonel Canham.

The remnants of the 1st Battalion would advance further west to assist Rangers assigned that morning to knocking out gun positions on cliff tops at Point du Hoc at the far end of Omaha Beach. It was also essential, before the Germans counterattacked, to open the D-1 draw so that vehicles and troops could move inland and establish a beachhead. Cota formed a patrol with three officers and two enlisted men and set off towards the D-1 draw.

The tide was turning in favor of the Americans at last. By now, other groups had also broken through the beach defenses and were fighting their way up the bluffs all along Dog Green and other sectors of Omaha. Hal Baumgarten joined eleven other men, most of them wounded. Now they were scrambling along a trench midway up the Vierville bluffs, stepping over dead Germans. One had his head blown off. Baumgarten wondered if it was the man he’d fired on earlier that morning.

A machine gun fired from a beach house nearby. Despite his wounds, Baumgarten was feeling “remarkably strong.”
³⁰
Adrenaline coursed through him. He spotted a German, took aim, and fired. It was only the second time he’d done so that day. A small redhead tossed a grenade and the machine gun fell silent. Baumgarten’s group was now down to eight men. All afternoon, Baumgarten would fight on with the remnants of Company A and B. By 5 P.M., his group would be down to seven men and have killed at least ten more Germans.

More and more men were getting off Dog Beach and moving inland. Captain Robert Walker of the 116th Infantry’s headquarters had swum ashore around 7:30 A.M. By 12:30 P.M., he was “about halfway to the top” of the bluffs. “I rested for awhile in a small gully,” he recalled. “After awhile, I heard the sound of someone groaning nearby and calling for help. It was about fifteen or twenty feet away. Cautiously I went over to investigate and saw it was a German soldier, gravely wounded in his groin. He had already been treated by a medical aid man. He had a bandage loosely fixed over the wound, sprinkled with sulfa powder. He was gasping,
‘Wasser
,
wasser’
—German for water.

“I assumed he had been given a sulfa pill which causes great thirst. In German I told the man I had no water with me and didn’t know where to get any. He then said there was a spring. He called it
‘ein born,’
about fifty feet away. I didn’t believe him but I made my way over to the area he indicated. Incredibly, there actually was a spring, a sort of water hole with apparently clear water in it. I filled my helmet with water and brought it to him. After drinking thirstily, he thanked me profusely. I left him some water in his canteen cup. Later on his groans became weaker and he soon died.”
³¹

Twelve miles out at sea, John Barnes, Roy Stevens, and other survivors from their landing craft boarded the
Empire Javelin
. Most were near naked beneath blankets. Some had even lost their dog tags. Their shock had given way to a deadening exhaustion. They ached for sleep but could not. The battle for Omaha was still raging.

The
Empire Javelin
was unnervingly quiet. Only a few hours ago, its decks had been crammed with anxious men. John Barnes salvaged his wallet from his drenched kit. He took out his invasion currency, laid out the notes on a bunk to dry, and then went on deck. Some time later, he returned to the bunk to lie down. The money was gone.

Several men wanted to re-arm and take the next landing craft back to the beach. They were told this was not possible. The surviving LCAs were not fit for further use on D-Day. Most were badly damaged and covered in gore and vomit. The flotilla had to return to England for essential repairs. Besides, the men were too exhausted to fight effectively. “We were to stay on board, go back to England, get re-armed and make our way back to the company,” recalled John Barnes. “Gearing had picked up a spare rifle and said he would hitch a ride on a passing U.S. craft. He ordered us to stay together and left Sergeant Stevens, our NCO leader, in charge. There was no doubt that Stevens would get us back since he was concerned about his brother, Ray.”
³²

Bedford boys Roy Stevens, Charles Fizer, Harold Wilkes, and Clyde Powers could hear a constant barrage, especially intense between midday and 1 P.M. when several American and British destroyers, now directed by shore observers, pounded the pillbox and trenches around the D-1 draw.

The explosions knocked several men in Cota’s patrol off their feet. “The concussion from the bursts of these guns seemed to make the pavement of the street in Vierville actually rise beneath our feet,” recalled Lieutenant Shea.

“I hope to hell they cut out that firing,” said one of Cota’s men.

The batteries of the
Texas
battleship fired four salvos of four rounds each. Fellow destroyer
McCook
then radioed shore that Germans were fleeing the pillbox at the base of the draw and other strong points.

As Cota and his patrol entered the draw from Vierville, the naval barrage stopped. Smoke cleared, revealing a road frosted with concrete dust and shrouded in bitter-tasting cordite fumes. The road led down to Dog Beach.

“That firing probably made them duck back into their holes,” warned Cota. “But keep a sharp eye on those cliffs to your right.”

They moved down the draw. “There were a few scattered rounds of small arms fired at the patrol, but a dozen rounds of carbine and pistol fire sufficed to bring five Germans down from the caverns in the east wall of the draw,” recalled Shea. “They were stripped of their weapons as they reached the road, and herded before the patrol as it proceeded to the mouth of the draw.”
³³

The Germans led the way through a minefield at the entrance of the draw and then Cota and his patrol walked out onto Omaha Beach.

Near the base of the draw, and at an aid station on Dog Beach, there were a cluster of Rangers and dozens of badly wounded and dog-tired Company A and B survivors. Among the wounded were Bedford boys Dickie Overstreet, Anthony Thurman, Lieutenant Ray Nance, and the 116 Yankee baseball player, Tony Marsico.

Staff Sergeant Anthony Thurman had been hit in the arm and the shoulder; his nerves were also shot to pieces. He would never fully recover from the psychological trauma caused by D-Day.
³⁴
Sergeant Mar-sico had been hit in the leg and shot through the arm by a rifle bullet as he crossed the sands. “I thought [the invasion] would be pretty hot but I didn’t know it was going to be like that,” recalled Marsico, who would soon be evacuated to a hospital in England along with his surviving comrades from Bedford. “I’m no hero. I know that. The heroes are the ones who didn’t make it.”
³⁵

There was one last obstacle blocking the road from the beach to Vierville—an antitank wall at the mouth of the draw. An engineer placed a TNT charge beside it and the wall was blown around 1:30 P.M. Then Rangers moved up the draw and started to mop up last pockets of German resistance along the bluffs.

At enormous cost, the 116th Infantry and Rangers had secured the D-1 draw. The challenge would now be to keep it. Wanting to check on progress at the other end of the 29th Division’s section of assigned beach, Cota walked off along the promenade road leading to the next village to the east, Les Moulins.
³⁶

Later that afternoon, after securing Vierville, men began to return to the beach for medical aid. Twenty-seven-year-old Private Warner “Buster” Hamlett of F Company managed to hobble down to the sands. “Thousands of bodies were lying there. You could walk on the bodies, as far as you could see along the beach, without touching the ground. Parts of bodies—heads, legs, and arms—floated in the sea. Medics were walking up and down, tagging the wounded. As I stepped gently between my American comrades, I realized what being in the first wave was all about.”
³⁷

Lieutenant Ray Nance lay at an aid station on the beach. A sergeant had carried him that morning on his shoulder several hundred yards along the sea wall. “Late that afternoon,” recalled Nance, “Second Lieutenant Gearing landed by himself. . . . He came over to me and I got him up on what I knew. I said: ‘Hey, I think you’re it—company commander.’ I never felt so sorry for a person when he left. He didn’t know what he was getting into.”
³⁸
Gearing was the only officer from Company A who had not been killed or wounded. Of the five officers in Nance’s berth on the
Empire Javelin
that morning, only Nance and Gearing were still alive.

At 7 P.M., Ray Nance spotted another familiar figure—General Ger-hardt, commander of the 29th Division. He looked as immaculate and confident as ever as he came ashore, his shiny twin revolvers at his waist. By nightfall, Gerhardt would have set up a command post in a quarry near the Vierville draw.

For Hal Baumgarten, the battle was not yet over. Towards evening, he had penetrated all the way to the top of the bluffs and was headed towards a village to the west of Vierville called Maissey le Grand. As Baumgarten crawled along a road he tripped a “castrator mine.” A bullet shot through his foot.

“When I turned [my] shoe over, blood poured out like water from a pitcher,” recalled Baumgarten. “Using my first aid kit, I powdered with sulfa and dressed my foot, which had a clean hole through it.”
³⁹
Suddenly, Baumgarten came under heavy shellfire. He tore off the dressing and crammed his foot back into his boot and jumped into the cover of a hedgerow. He stayed there with seven other GIs until darkness fell and then took off across the road to find fresh cover. The German shelling had gotten more accurate—Baumgarten suspected they’d been observed.