The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (14 page)

The four-hundred-ton
LCI 85,
grounding ashore on the seam between Easy Red and Fox Green, had begun dispensing men down the left ramp when enemy 47mm and 88mm shells blew through the front hold, killing fifteen and wounding forty-seven. The Coast Guard crew backed off and steamed west several hundred yards only to face scorching fire upon putting in again. More than two dozen shells ripped into the ship, igniting troop compartments and leaving the decks slick with blood. White bandages from a shot-up medical company fluttered down through the smoke. On the bridge, the skipper reported, “we could hear the screams of the men through the voice tube.” Listing, burning, bleeding,
LCI 85
steamed for the horizon, where the wounded and the dead were extracted before she capsized and sank.

By 8:30
A.M.
the Omaha assault had stalled. The rising tide quickly reclaimed the thin strip of liberated beach, drowning those immobilized by wounds or fear. With no room to land more vehicles, a Navy beachmaster halted further unloading on much of the shoreline. “Face downwards, as far as eyes could see in either direction,” a 16th Infantry surgeon later wrote, “were the huddled bodies of men living, wounded, and dead, as tightly packed together as layers of cigars in a box.”

Two large boats burned furiously in the shallows of Dog White.
LCI 91,
carrying two hundred soldiers, had caught a shell in her fuel tanks, engulfing the well deck in flames. At least two dozen men were incinerated as others leaped into the sea, including one bright torch who dove in with even the soles of his boots blazing. Moments later,
LCI 92,
seeking cover in her sister’s smoke, struck a mine on the port bow. The explosion blew two soldiers from a hatch like champagne corks and trapped more than forty others belowdecks. “A sheet of flame shot up thirty feet in the air through the number one hold directly forward of the conning tower,” a yeoman reported. “Terror seized me.” German gunners then found the range to finish off the boat. A survivor dog-paddled to the beach not as an infantry officer ready for combat, as he later acknowledged, but as the “helpless unarmed survivor of a shipwreck.”

Only where escarpment turned to cliff, four miles west of Omaha, did the early-morning assault show promise. Three companies from the 2nd Ranger Battalion scaled the headland at Pointe du Hoc, first climbing freehand despite a rain of grenades, then using grapnels and braided ropes fired from mortar tubes. Comrades gave covering fire from ladders loaned by the London fire department and carried in DUKWs. As windswept as Troy, the promontory had been reduced to what one officer called “ripped-open dirt” by 250 shells from
Texas
’s 14-inch barrels. Rangers hauled themselves over the lip of the cliff, then used thermite grenades to wreck five shore guns that had been removed from their casemates and secreted in an apple orchard. The triumph was short-lived: they soon found themselves trapped by rallying Germans who spent the next thirty-six hours trying to sweep them from the scarp to the rocks below.

Back on Hell’s Beach, several thousand shivering soldiers also found defilade where they could and waited for a counterattack from the bluffs to bowl them back into the sea. “They’ll come swarming down on us,” murmured Don Whitehead. A lieutenant, who watched sodden bodies advance on the creeping tide, later wrote, “After a couple of looks back, we decided we couldn’t look back anymore.” Among those huddled on the beach was Captain Joseph T. Dawson, a lanky, dark-eyed veteran of Company G in the 16th Infantry. An hour earlier, Dawson had leaped from his landing craft onto Easy Red just as an artillery shell struck the boat, exterminating the thirty-three men behind him. “The limitations of life come into sharp relief,” he would write his family in Texas. “No one is indispensable in this world.”

*   *   *

From the gray deck of the command ship U.S.S.
Augusta
none of this was clear. A brown miasma of dust and smoke draped the French coast to the south, mysterious and impenetrable except by the cherry-red battleship shells soaring toward inland targets. A cramped First Army war room had been built on the cruiser’s afterdeck, ten feet by twenty, with a tarpaulin door, a Michelin map of France fastened to a sheet-metal wall, and a clock whose glass face had been taped against concussion. Other maps displayed the suspected location of enemy units, marked in red, and the range of German shore guns, delineated with concentric circles. Signalmen wearing headphones listened for radio messages, which they pounded out on a bank of typewriters. From Omaha only incoherent fragments had been heard, of sinkings, swampings, heavy fire. One dispatch picked up by another ship nearby advised, “We are being butchered like a bunch of hogs.”

At a plotting table in the center of the war room sat a tall, bespectacled man in a helmet, Mae West, and three-star field jacket. Again he asked—“What’s going on?”—and again got little more than an apologetic shrug. On several occasions as a young officer, Omar Bradley had studied Gallipoli, the disastrous British effort to capture Constantinople in 1915, and more recently he had scrutinized reports from Anzio. The preeminent lesson from both amphibious attacks, he concluded, was “to get ground quickly.” Was that happening at Omaha? Another shrug. He had expected the two assault regiments to be a mile inland by 8:30
A.M.
, but now he was unsure whether they had even reached France. Bradley had begun contemplating his course if the troops failed to get off the strand. He felt not only alarmed but also a bit ridiculous: this morning the army commander sported an immense bandage on his nose to cover a boil that had been lanced in the ship’s dispensary. Photographers were forbidden to take his picture.

After successfully commanding a corps in Africa and Sicily, Bradley had benefitted from hagiographic press coverage, including a recent
Time
cover story that called him “Lincolnesque … a plain, homely, steady man with brains and character.” Ernie Pyle wrote that “he spoke so gently a person couldn’t hear him very far,” while Liebling described “the high cranium, bare on top except for a lattice of gray hairs; the heavy, almost undershot jaw; and the deeply emplaced presbytic eyes, peering out from under the dark brows with an expression of omnivorous but benevolent curiosity.” That he still wore a cap with “Lieut. Col. O. N. Bradley” inked in the lining was considered emblematic of his humility; in fact, lieutenant colonel was his permanent rank.

Few could resist the biography. Son of a schoolteaching Missouri farmer who made $40 a month, married one of his pupils, and died when Omar was thirteen, Bradley had played football on an undefeated Army team that earned unlikely headlines, such as “West Point Finds Notre Dame Easy.” He also befriended a classmate who was now his boss and greatest admirer: “
Ice-
in-hower,” as Bradley pronounced the name in his sodbuster twang. As a lieutenant, he had been sent to Montana to keep the copper mines open with fixed bayonets against labor agitators; later he taught mathematics at West Point while moonlighting as a construction worker, stringing cable for the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson. He skipped the rank of colonel and was the first of fifty-nine men in the Military Academy class of 1915 to win a general’s stars. A teetotaler until the age of thirty-three, Bradley rarely drank; he had added the pint of whiskey and two flasks of brandy issued when he boarded
Augusta
to his unopened allotment from Sicily. Vain about his marksmanship—“If there’s a bird anywhere in shootin’ distance, I won’t miss it,” he once told a reporter—he had also nursed a sense of divine anointment ever since, in Tunisia, he drove his jeep over a mine that failed to explode. “I think I had some guidance from God,” he later said. “I felt that I must be destined to play an important part in the war.… I was saved by a miracle.”

Perhaps. But a few wondered if he was out of his depth, if he had been promoted beyond his natural level of competence, if some part of him remained “Lieut. Col. O. N. Bradley.” Patton, who had been his commander in the Mediterranean and would be his subordinate in France, had rated Bradley “superior” in all categories of generalship in September 1943, while privately calling him “a man of great mediocrity.” In his diary Patton added, with typical ambivalence: “Has a strong jaw, talks profoundly and says little. I consider him among our better generals.” The Omaha plan had been largely Bradley’s design, including the limited fire support from the Navy, and he had dismissed predictions of stiff losses as “tommyrot.”

Now he was not so sure. Messages from the beachhead remained fragmentary, including: “Obstacles mined, progress slow.” An aide dispatched by PT boat returned drenched and discouraged an hour later to report that troops were pinned down; a naval officer came back with a more vivid assessment: “My God, this is carnage!” Told that Admiral Moon was jittery over ship losses, Bradley advised Collins, his VII Corps commander, “We’ve got to get the buildup ashore even if it means paving the whole damned Channel bottom with ships.” Another 25,000 troops and 4,000 vehicles were scheduled to land at Omaha on the second tide. Should those waves be diverted to Utah or to the British beaches? Would that consign those now ashore to annihilation?

The man described in his high school yearbook as “calculative” pushed through the canvas war-room door and climbed to
Augusta
’s bridge, squinting at the opaque shore and mulling his odds.

*   *   *

Not for some hours would Bradley learn that by late morning his prospects on Omaha had brightened considerably, beginning at beach Dog White. There Brigadier General Norman Cota, known as Dutch and the son of a French-Canadian railroad telegrapher who emigrated to New England, had reached the five-foot timber seawall half a mile east of the beach exit leading to Vierville. Soldiers who could outcrawl the tide lay clustered like barnacles on the banked littoral, hugging wooden groins that jutted from the seawall.

We must improvise, carry on, not lose our heads,
Cota had told officers from the 116th Infantry as they sailed for Normandy. Now he improvised. Chewing an unlit cigar, jut-jawed with pale eyes and a hooked nose, Cota scrabbled west along the groins. Pistol in hand, he sang tuneless, ad-libbed lyrics under his breath. Encountering a cluster of troops, he demanded, “What outfit is this? Goddamn it, if you’re Rangers get up and lead the way.… I know you won’t let me down.… We’ve got to get these men off this goddamned beach.” A bangalore torpedo threaded through a double apron of barbed wire blew a gap across the beach road beyond the seawall. Machine-gun fire cut down the first GI into the breach—“Medico, I’m hit,” he cried, then sobbed for his mother until he died—but others, including Cota, scampered across the blacktop and through the burning marsh grass beyond.

Up the bluff they climbed, single file, marking mines with white engineer tape, cigarettes, and scraps from a ration box. Smoke hid them from German marksmen but made them weep until they strapped on gas masks. Mortar rounds killed a trio of soldiers next to Cota and wounded his radioman; knocked flat but unscratched, the general regained his feet and followed the snaking column toward the hillcrest, past captured Germans spread-eagled on the ground. Then over the lip of the ridge they ran, past stunted pines and through uncut wheat as Cota yelled, “Now let’s see what you’re made of!” GIs hauling a captured MG-42 machine gun with ammunition belts draped around their necks poured fire into enemy trenches and at the broken ranks pelting inland.

By ten
A.M.
tiny Vierville had fallen but for snipers. Outside a cobbler’s shop dead horses lay in their traces, still harnessed to a Wehrmacht supply wagon. Terrified civilians peeked from their window casements onto a road clogged with rubble. Another rifle company scuffing into the village found Cota twirling his pistol on his finger. “Where the hell have you been, boys?” he asked.

Elsewhere along Omaha, in what one witness called “a final stubborn reserve of human courage,” more desperate men found additional seams up the escarpment. “I walked slowly,” a 29th Division soldier recalled, “dragging my unwilling soul with me.” Halfway up the slope, a soldier missing a lower leg sat smoking a cigarette and fiddling with the tourniquet tied at his knee. “Watch it,” he warned. “There are some personnel mines here.” Captain Joe Dawson’s G Company used GI corpses as stepping stones through a minefield. “Fire everywhere it seems,” a major scribbled on an envelope used as a diary. “Prayed several times.” When a German feigned surrender and threw a grenade from his raised hand, disemboweling a Ranger lieutenant, the dead officer’s enraged men not only killed the killer but each man reportedly “shot the corpse six or eight times” as they filed past.

A dozen destroyers—some so close to the beach that their keels scraped bottom—plied the inshore stations to fire onto targets marked by Army tracer and tank rounds. One soldier watching shells arc across the bluff reported that “a man standing there felt as if he could reach up and pick them out of the air.” When a German artillery observer was spotted in the eleventh-century Colleville church tower, U.S.S.
Emmons
took a dozen rounds to find the range, then with the thirteenth knocked the tower into the nave and adjacent graveyard below. A similar call for fire against the church of St.-Laurent shattered the steeple with the first shell. After one shuddering broadside from
Texas,
an RAF pilot spotting for the battleship cried from his Spitfire cockpit, “Oh, simply champion!”

By noon the enemy line had been broken by half a dozen penetrations “coagulating haphazardly,” as the official Army history later noted. Two fresh regiments, the 115th Infantry and the 18th Infantry, swarmed over Easy Red before the ebb tide despite the loss of many landing craft to mines and misadventure. Later the 26th Infantry also was ordered to shore, putting the entire infantry complement of the 1st Division back in France for the first time since 1918. By midafternoon, some five thousand infantrymen had scaled the bluff, finally free of plunging fire although still tormented by fires flanking and grazing, direct and indirect. Scraps of news reached the fleet, including a message dispatched from a colonel in a DUKW: “Men believed ours on skyline.… Things look better.” But only after one
P.M.
did Omar Bradley, pacing on
Augusta’
s flag bridge, learn in a message from V Corps that the day was saved, if not won: “Troops formerly pinned down on beaches Easy Red, Easy Green, Fox Red advancing up heights behind beaches.”