Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (18 page)

The German strongpoints were being knocked out either by superbly vigorous gunfire from the destroyers steaming as close as 800 yards offshore, or by determined action from Rangers or infantry. Hein Severloh’s battery had long since been reduced to firing single rounds in place of salvoes, for several weeks earlier half its ammunition reserve had been moved further inland as an intended precautionary measure against a direct hit. Now the gunners had no means of bringing shells forward and the only
truck driver who attempted to do so was blown up on the journey by an Allied aircraft attack. By noon, Severloh himself had fired 12,000 rounds from his machine-gun, and was reduced to shooting tracer. This was helpful to his aim, for the gun’s sights had been shot off by a stray bullet, but deadly in revealing his position to American spotters. WN 59 and 61 – the neighbouring ‘resistance nests’ – had fallen silent. WN 62 had no field of fire on its west side, where the invaders were already working up to the rear. When their battery had fired all its ammunition, the gunners blew up their pieces and retreated southwards on their horsedrawn limbers. Severloh and the men in the strongpoint decided that enough was enough. They ran crouching from the entrance and began to work their way up the hill towards the rear, and safety. Only Severloh and one signaller escaped alive.

All that afternoon, Brigadier Cota moved relentlessly up and down the hillside, urging on the men clambering in sluggish files through the minefields and over the bodies of the dead. There were still perilously few heavy weapons on the higher ground to support the infantry now beginning to fight through the first hedges and fields of the
bocage
. When he found a group of Rangers claiming to be pinned down beyond Vierville, Cota himself walked ahead of them across the open ground to demonstrate that a man could move and survive. Many soldiers who attempted to set this sort of example on 6 June and in the weeks that followed were killed instantly. But Cota lived and the Rangers moved forward. Although persistent shellfire was still falling on the beach behind them, most of the Germans defending the hillside were dead or captured, and their gunnery OPs had been destroyed, removing the batteries’ vital eyes. Medical corpsmen were moving among the wounded, looking out for those who had died so that they might give their blankets to men who were still living, but shivering. One of Cota’s staff marvelled at the spectacle of a group of engineers sitting on the sand eating their K rations, apparently oblivious of the dead and wounded all around them. A dog, which had evidently been the pet of one of the German strongpoints, fell
upon men of the 1st Division moving up the bluff with impressive enthusiasm, and had to be driven off with carbine fire. At 4.30 p.m., a staff officer of the 29th Division noted in his diary: ‘Prayed for the fourth time today, asking God – “Why do these things have to be visited upon men?”’ Brigadier Cota and his aide saw a soldier who appeared to be frozen with terror, praying on his knees in the scrub above the beach. But when they reached him, they saw that he was dead.
¹⁰

On the high ground, Lieutenant-Colonel Williamson and the 2nd/18th had advanced to within a mile of their designated D-Day objectives. Like every American soldier above Omaha that day, he and his men were cursing the hedges of the
bocage
, which provided such perfect cover for snipers and were already inflicting interminable delays upon advancing units. Men sought cover whenever firing sounded nearby. Crossing a gap, the young soldier in front of Williamson was shot. The colonel put a Browning automatic rifle on top of the hedge and raked the area with fire. They moved onwards a little way without further casualties, then took up positions for the night just short of Colville. The Omaha beachhead had been secured. The Germans lacked the power and mobility to reverse the verdict of the afternoon. By nightfall, the Americans controlled a perimeter up to a mile deep beyond Omaha, while the 4th Division on Utah had linked up with General Maxwell Taylor and his men of the 82nd Airborne Division west of the causeways from the beach. Gerow of V Corps had not planned to establish his headquarters ashore until the following day. But Bradley, conscious of the urgent need to get a grip on the situation from the beach, told him to get his corps staff offloaded immediately. All the plans for a rapid supply build-up were to be sacrificed to the need to get more men onto the ground. 90 amphibious DUKWs, preloaded with ammunition, provided the vital minimum supply to sustain the forces ashore overnight. Some landing-craft crews, utterly exhausted, dropped their anchors when darkness fell. Naval officers in launches hastened among them, urging the crews back into motion. That night Montgomery discussed with Dempsey the
possibility of landing all further troops planned for Omaha on the British beaches. The suggestion was never pursued, but in view of the immensely dangerous gulf that such a change of plan would have exposed in the middle of the Allied line, it is a measure of the alarm surrounding the Omaha situation that it was ever discussed.

While the Utah landing had gone as nearly in accordance with planning as any commander could have expected, on Omaha the failures and errors of judgement by the staff had only been redeemed by the men on the sand. Many officers, including Brigadier Cota, believed that the American landings would have proved far easier had they been made in darkness, a possibility rejected by the navy and air force, who insisted upon the need for daylight to make best use of their bombardment power. Had elite infantry such as the Rangers led the way ashore before dawn, it is indeed likely that they would have been able to get off the beach and work in among the German positions with or without the bombardment. The events of D-Day emphasized the limited ability of high explosives to destroy strong defensive positions. But the follow-up waves and armour would have suffered immense problems attempting to get ashore under heavy fire before dawn. The timing of the landing was probably sound, although the troops could have profited immensely from continuing support fire until the moment they reached the beach, and from better gunnery forward observation thereafter. American naval reports spoke of the frustration of ships cruising silently offshore, unable to fire because of lack of identified targets.
¹¹

The Americans refused to employ British-designed specialized armour – tanks throwing flame and explosive charges, and flail mineclearers. These would certainly have made a significant impact on Omaha. But they were not a magic formula for success. Given the formidable weight of German firepower concentrated against the five critical beach exits, it is likely that much of the specialized armour would have been knocked out on the beach in the same fashion as so many gun Shermans, merely contributing
to the logjam of wreckage that did so much to hamper movement of vehicles and landing craft.

Chester Wilmot and others have seized upon the example of Omaha to demonstrate the supposed shortcomings of the American soldier.
¹²
In the weeks that followed, some American commanders, including Bradley, were to be seriously worried by the performance of some infantry units. On D-Day, there proved to be sufficient outstanding individual American soldiers and enough elite units such as the Rangers and Airborne to gain the day. Casualties on each of the Allied beaches, including Omaha, were almost exactly in proportion to the weight of unsuppressed enemy fire that the invaders met. The Americans suffered 4,649 casualties among their seaborne landing force to put ashore 55,000 men on D-Day. If the American line at midnight on 6 June was still tenuous, and fell some distance short of its planned objectives, V and VII Corps had achieved their vital strategic purposes merely by establishing themselves ashore.

It was on the British front on D-Day, where so much rested upon fast and ruthless progress inland from the beaches, that far more dramatic strategic hopes were at stake.

The British beaches

At 7.25 a.m., an hour after the Americans began landing on Omaha, the minesweeping flail tanks of the 22nd Dragoon Guards touched Sword beach at the eastern end of the Allied line, precisely on schedule. Lieutenant Charles Munday in
Leander I
drove ashore into the mortar and machine-gun fire with the hatch open as usual because of his haunting fear of fire. Some of the sappers disembarking with them were hit immediately. Corporal Charles Baldwin watched the same instant fate befall the engineers who
led his flail of the Westminster Dragoons: ‘They were flung about as German machine-gun fire hit them, clutching various parts of their bodies, jolting like rag dolls, then sinking out of sight into the water. I often wondered if any of those unfortunate men survived the landing. Even slightly wounded, the weight of their equipment dragged them under.’
¹

Mundy’s column of five Shermans clattered forward out of the landing craft and took up echelon formation to begin flailing, thrashing the sand with their great probosces of chains, creeping forward astonishingly unscathed to the metalled road, where they switched off the equipment and began engaging the German defences with their 75 mm guns. Mundy could hear screams from defensive positions above the beach as a Crocodile flamethrower puffed its terrible jet of fire towards them. 34 of the 40 Sherman DD amphibious tanks launched against Sword also arrived as planned, ahead of the infantry, cleared the beach successfully and became heavily engaged in the dunes beyond. A few minutes later, the 20 landing craft carrying the first wave of the 1st South Lancashires and 2nd East Yorkshires dropped their ramps and launched the lead companies, followed 20 minutes later by the second wave. These point battalions suffered less severely crossing the beach than those which followed. The East Yorkshires immediately began moving off towards Ouistreham, with men of 4 and 10 Commandos. 41 Commando, which took heavy casualties in their landing, headed for Lion-sur-Mer. By 9.00 a.m. the South Lancashires were between one and one and a half miles inland, at Hermanville. Vehicles and supporting units were pouring ashore, clogging the beaches. From the outset, the Sword landing was a remarkable success. Lieutenant Arthur Heal, commanding the sapper platoon attached to the 1st Suffolks, was still congratulating himself on completing his first trip in a landing craft without feeling seasick when the order came, ‘Ramp down! All out!’ A few moments later, having passed through the infantry on the beach and regrouped for the battalion’s advance to its objectives inland,
Heal was enjoying a moment of anticlimax and relief. There had been powerful rumours within the unit before D-Day that they would pay for the honour of leading the assault by accepting withering losses.

The British landing plan for each brigade front called for four LCTs carrying four DD tanks apiece to put these ashore at H-5 minutes, followed at H-Hour by four LCTs carrying the specialized armour – flails, Crocodiles, Petards and the like – with sapper groups to begin work on the obstacles. Behind them at H+7 came eight assault landing craft bearing the two leading infantry companies; at H+20 another eight LCAs followed with two more infantry companies, and at H+25 came two LCAs with the men of the beach group. At H+35 bulldozers and more specialized armour rolled ashore; at H+60 nine LCTs with self-propelled guns; at H+90 10 LCTs with a full squadron of tanks. The tenth wave, behind all these, carried more gunners and 21 amphibious DUKWs loaded with stores and ammunition. COSSAC had predicted the loss of 10 per cent of the landing craft, with a further 20 per cent damaged. In the event, the losses were less severe, but it was not remarkable that, with a landing plan of such complexity, in many places the schedule collapsed in the first half-hour and successive waves reached the shore helplessly entangled with each other – creating a great jumble of men, vehicles, landing craft and wreckage on the waterline.

Even on Sword, where the losses were slight in relation to the scale of the assault, some men paid a speedy price for the success of the 3rd Division. Two LCTs ran off course and rammed two DD tanks, which sank with merciless immediacy. The seizure of the La Brèche strongpoint covering the beach took three hours, during which troops coming ashore had to struggle through fierce fire. Some men reaching the beach in Queen White sector were touched to see a lone French girl struggling in the shallows to help wounded men out of the water. Shell and mortar fire from inland continued to harass the beach for most of 6 June and the days
which followed it. The South Lancashires, who bore the brunt of the La Brèche battle, lost 11 officers and 96 other ranks on D-Day; the East Yorkshires about the same.

Private Len Ainslie was an anti-tank gunner of the King’s Regiment, which was to provide local defence for the beach area. A regular soldier who had been in the army since 1938, if Ainslie had had his way he would have landed by glider, for he had asked for a transfer to airborne forces. But his colonel refused to forward the request because Ainslie was a battalion bugler. Now, 100 yards offshore, his landing craft was struck amidships on the starboard side by a shell. Ainslie was appalled by the trail of devastation immediately in front of him. A big cook’s head vanished, the company commander’s batman lost his legs. A jumble of other broken bodies drifted amid the rush of water pouring through the side. A naval officer called abruptly: ‘Come on, all out!’ Men began to struggle over the side of the sinking hulk. Ainslie tried for a moment to help a young soldier, who remarked flatly as he lay, ‘I can’t do anything now, can I?’ Then the officer shouted to Ainslie: ‘Leave him.’ Somebody ashore hurled them a line. The survivors swam and stumbled through the dead and the wounded in the water to the beach, where they saw the battalion’s commanding officer killed a few minutes later. They were all soaking wet, their battledress and boots and equipment stiff with salt for days. But Ainslie and most of his comrades felt less a sense of shock than elation at their own achievement in survival, in having made it.