The World at War (68 page)

SAPPER MINOGUE

I
was the gunner of the tank and I had a forward view until such a time as I was asked to do a 360–degree traverse to blow the waterproofing around the turret ring. And in the forward view I saw that the three tanks in front of us were not doing too well. The first tank had stopped because its commander had been killed, the second tank had been a bit too close to him and had slewed slightly to the right and hit a clay patch on the beach and the tank behind him, they had a hit in the petrol tank, or rather on the side of the tank, which had set the thing on fire, and we saw the crew busily scrambling out. This did not do a great deal for our confidence.

COLONEL JAMES SINK

116th Regiment, US 29th Division, Omaha Beach

As we went in we were . . . just at the left were two LCIs [Landing Craft Infantry] – this is a military ship that carried about two hundred men who landed by a couple of ramps that dropped down over the bow of the ship on each side – and one of them carried our headquarters, the other half of my unit, which was to take over my mission if I failed. And as we were preparing to come in and beach, on our left we saw this tremendous explosion aboard the craft and everything went up in smoke. We found out later what had happened: the top side of the landing craft was loaded with flamethrowers and the Germans got a couple of rounds into this and set them off. Of course the pressure in these things went off like a firebomb, more or less like a bomb attack from an aeroplane, and it enveloped the ship in flames. Although we did see a lot of men jump off the ship to escape, quite a few were caught inside and burned up. The commander of my landing craft didn't say a word to me and just turned our craft around and headed back to sea. It took some persuasion on my part to get him to come back and land, and when he did he brought us back about three hundred yards to the east of where we were supposed to land.

PRIVATE ROBERT KOCH

116th Regiment, US 29th Division, Omaha Beach

In my particular ship the first man, who was a sergeant, raised up to see how far we had to go to reach land and was struck right in the forehead by a bullet and fell back dead. He was the first man that I had ever in my life seen dead in any combat. We were about three hundred feet off the beach when our ship got hit so we had to swim in, and the water was approximately twelve feet in depth so when you went off you were over your head. When I arrived on the beach, believe it or not the only thing I had was myself – my rifle I'd dropped in the water and I lay there and thought to myself, What am I going to do here, am I going to wrestle or fist-fight or what? But the other boys had come along and some of them, my buddies, had been shot and were laying near me and of course I took their rifles and their belts and moved along.

SAPPER MINOGUE

Chaos? Well, one landing craft had been hit in the engine room and the five tanks on it spent the whole day facing out to sea until the tide turned and they could come in. And chaos, if you like, was this whole business of Le Hamel, which we'd been told was held by a German platoon, and when it finally fell about four o'clock in the afternoon there was so many men came out of it that it must have been the biggest platoon that the German Army ever mustered.

PRIVATE LEVIN

I was with my CO and saw that fellow
Robert Capa, the internationally known photographer who took the picture that appeared on the front of
Life
of a man caught in an obstacle. Now we started to go after him but as we started out we caught some small-arms fire and went back in, and we figured that he was probably better off where he was, there was no sense getting people killed.
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CAPTAIN FINKE

We had a great deal of difficulty getting the men to move. There was great deal of enemy fire and they would take cover behind some of these obstacles that were there to catch assault craft. They were about the size of a ten- or twelve-foot telephone pole with a teller mine on the top of it. The whole area was just full of these obstacles. Any port in a storm. People would just try to take cover behind one of these poles. Well, it didn't provide any cover so you just had to force them to move no matter how you did it. It had so happened, I had sprained my ankle in the marshalling area and had to go ashore carrying a cane instead of a rifle. I used it to very good effect to just whack people until they moved. And it was not much fun, obviously.

PRIVATE KOCH

We finally did make it to the bottom of the cliffs where we had more safety, because the Germans couldn't fire their machine guns straight down and they couldn't also fire their rifles down because they had to expose themselves over the cliffs, which would give us a chance to get them. Now we remained in that position for – well, I would say it was a lifetime but it was about four to five hours – and then one of the other companies of, I think it was of the 115th Regiment, that had come in after us, they had fortunately come in at a better position and came around, came up on the cliffs and they'd taken over. And they greeted us and told us to come on up and we were very thankful to see them. In our original company that went in at approximately 213 men, eight hours after we were on the beach there was only 38 of us that were fit for continued duty, and we lost most of them from the water-line to the bottom of the cliff.

SAPPER MINOGUE

When we reached the first corner there was a dead German there and he was just like something from a film, because he was young, he was huddled up and his helmet had fallen off, and he was very, very blond. As we turned this corner I was told to clear the waterproofing off the machine gun and I began to fire down this deserted road. At the very moment that I began to fire, probably about one hundred and fifty yards ahead, three of our own infantrymen burst though a hedge at the side of the road and suddenly one of them fell as though he'd been hit and the other two dragged him back. I've often wondered in the whole of the intervening twenty-eight years whether in fact I was responsible for any injury or death that poor bloke might have suffered.

CAPTAIN WOZENSKI

I think the greatest unsung hero of World War Two was
Sergeant Streczyk, one of my platoon sergeants. To the best of my knowledge he was the first one off the beach and it was the path that he took that I picked up. The rest of our battalion followed and then later on I think almost the whole Corps went up that path. As I told this character Cornelius Ryan,
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I'm climbing the bluff and I see Streczyk coming down because he's happy to see me and he's got a grin on his face. And I say, 'My God!' as he puts his foot on a teller mine right in front of my nose. I'm climbing up the cliff and he puts his foot on a teller mine. He says, 'Don't let it worry you, it didn't go off when I stepped on it going up.' We got up to the top of the cliff and we found just one of our weapons that would fire. I landed with one hundred and eighty men and eight officers, counting myself, and I had a head count and I counted thirteen men, one other officer and myself. And one weapon, one M-l rifle, would fire. So we put that man on guard and the rest of us sat down and cleaned our weapons, first echelon maintenance right on top of the bluff. Shortly thereafter I ran into John Finke, I think he had come up and gone off to my left toward his goal, and somebody had winged him through the helmet. He had blood streaming down all over the side of his helmet and I remember my telling him to get his ass back to the beach.

LIEUTENANT NANCE

You could see your friends, people you'd served with for years, floating face down or face up. It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, planes overhead – and snipers in the cliffs, if you can call that beautiful.

COLONEL SINK

I don't think I was frightened – I was scared, and I think when you're scared you really are more alert. It's like you're playing a game with somebody – you're going through the woods, you've got a gun and he's got a gun – who's going to shoot first? 1 guess it's more like a duel – you know you're going to spin round and pull the trigger first.

SAPPER MINOGUE

We were aware that we had been very, very lucky indeed that for us it had been a kind of glorified exercise and that none of our fears had fortunately materialised. But we also realised something else: that we would never, no matter what we were called upon to do, be quite as afraid again. It was the whole business of the invasion, we'd been preparing for it for months and months and each of us had been building up little secret fears that we might not survive it.

MAJOR GENERAL COLLINS

In order to save
casualties after we had the experience of heavy fighting through the bocage [thick hedgerow] country it was decided to precede the attack by a tremendous bombardment and this would take place in front of my Corps. I was directed by General Bradley to prepare the plans for the attack, which would break out the bocage country and get out into the open a bit. The bombardment started on 25th July with some three thousand planes dropping bombs just in advance of our troops. In the initial planning we had asked that the fighters and bombers come in parallel to our lines so that they would be sure not to have bombs fall short on our troops. Unfortunately they came in at right angles and we had many shorts and took some casualties in our own troops. The weather was not too good so the attack was called off after only perhaps an hour, and was rescheduled for the next day, but the same thing occurred then. We took about six hundred casualties, including one of our senior Army Commanders who was there as an observer.
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SERGEANT GARIEPY

We were bombed quite often by mistake. We had a saying in the Army that when the British bombed the Axis took cover when the Germans bombed the Allies took cover. Well, when our cousin Americans bombed, everybody took cover.

BRIGADIER BELCHEM

Hitler refused permission to his generals to withdraw, when the position was impossible for them, behind the Seine and the Loire, which a professional would have done. On the contrary, he made them remain and fight it out in Normandy and indeed made the Germans counter-attack the enveloping movement of the Americans. This was frustrated firstly by the Americans on the ground, and secondly, of course, you cannot successfully launch a major offensive operation, particularly an armoured operation, without at least local air superiority – which the Germans didn't have.

MAJOR GENERAL COLLINS

After we made the breakthrough west of Saint-Lô, we headed south, parallel to Patton and then we had to defend to the left, because it was a natural thing that the Germans would try to cut off Patton's line of communications at Avranches. So we anticipated that a major counterattack would be launched at Avranches. The First Army's job was to prevent that breakthrough and my corps, which was on the right flank, was to turn to the west and the real battle took place at Mortain, where we held against the concentrated
German attack for several days. The troops of Patton were now spreading out towards Brest and through France, and part of the First Army was then to seize the south end of the pocket. The Germans had only one way to get out and that was towards Paris and if we could close the open mouth of this bag, by the British and Canadians coming down from the north with the Americans coming up from the south, then we could pretty nearly end the German ability to continue the war in France. Unfortunately for a variety of reasons the attack coming down from the north was slow and laborious. Had they been able to move faster we might have trapped more Germans in the Falaise pocket. Very little of their equipment got out but quite a number of Germans were able to escape towards the Seine river and this was too bad. I think that Britain had been in the war for much longer than we had and had taken very heavy casualties, and the Americans were fresh and they had practically no casualties. So while we were anxious to drive forward and were not too concerned about the casualties as long as we could get our objective, it was natural that the British and Canadian forces did it in a more orderly, pacing way.

BRIGADIER BELCHEM

There were very great practical difficulties in closing the
Falaise gap quickly and it was difficult for one side, the British–Canadian–Polish, to appreciate the point of view of the other side, the Americans. We were coming down from the north, from the congested, bombed and difficult areas of the Caen sector, and the Germans facing us on the north side of the corridor they were trying to keep open for their escape were in areas where they had been fighting against us for three months or more. The Americans were coming up to meet us from the south, more open country and against much less prepared and organised German resistance.

CHAPTER 27
BATTLE OF THE PACIFIC 1944–45

Following the loss of four fleet carriers at Midway in June 1942 the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) did not sortie in force for two years, by which time the gross industrial disparity between Japan and the USA had made the outcome of the war a foregone conclusion. The Japanese Naval Air Arm was ground down at Guadalcanal and annihilated in the battle of the Philippine Sea (the 'Marianas Turkey Shoot'), when the IJN also lost another three carriers. The remaining carriers were used as decoys and sunk at Leyte in October 1944. The Philippine Sea battle came about because the IJN had to try to prevent the Americans from seizing Saipan and Tinian, the southern Mariana Islands, which brought the Japanese mainland within range of the USAAF's new B-29 bombers. Political considerations, plus ferocious inter-service rivalry and a desire to restore American imperial prestige, led to a second offensive being mounted in General Douglas MacArthur's south-west Pacific area to recover the Philippines. The two most savage small-island battles, at Peleliu in September 1944 and the northern Mariana island of Iwo Jima in February 1945, were fought to cover MacArthur's flank and to gain a base for P-51 fighters to escort the B-29s respectively. Hindsight suggests that both, as well as MacArthur's reconquest of the Philippines, were strategically irrelevant and that Admiral Chester Nimitz's central Pacific drive, his submarines and the USAAF, would have won the war without them. Starting at Leyte, Japanese pilots began to employ the 'body-crash' technique on a large scale, taking the name kamikaze (Divine Wind). For the remainder of the war about 2,800 kamikaze sorties sank or irreparably damaged more than 70 Allied ships and
damaged, about 330 others, killing and wounding nearly 10,000 Allied personnel, the majority of them in the 82–day battle for Okinawa in April–June 1945. This was to be the last island invasion prior to the assault on the Japanese mainland and some 130,000 Japanese soldiers and about half as many Okinawan civilians died, against 13,000 dead, 36,000 wounded and nearly 25,000 battle-stress casualties among the American forces. The suicidal ferocity of the resistance on Okinawa was a crucial factor in the decision to use the atom bomb in September.