The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (25 page)

“Still on the whole we have very much to thank God for this day.” One soldier who did not forget to thank God was Lt. Richard Winters, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne. At 0001 on June 6, he had been in a C-47 headed to Normandy. He had prayed the whole way over, prayed to live through the day, prayed that he wouldn’t fail.

He didn’t fail. He won the DSC that morning.

At 2400 on June 6, before bedding down at Ste.-Marie-du-Mont, Winters (as he later wrote in his diary) “did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and ask for help on D plus one.” And he made a promise to himself: if he lived through the war, he was going to find an isolated farm somewhere and spend the remainder of his life in peace and quiet.  In 1951 he got the farm, in south-central Pennsylvania, where he lives today.  “When can their glory fade?” Tennyson asked about the Light Brigade, and so ask I about the men of D-Day.

O the wild charge they made!

All the world wondered.

Honor the charge they made!

General Eisenhower, who started it all with his “OK, let’s go” order, gets the last word. In 1964, on D-Day plus twenty years, he was interviewed on Omaha Beach by Walter Cronkite.

Looking out at the Channel, Eisenhower said, “You see these people out here swimming and sailing their little pleasure boats and taking advantage of the nice weather and the lovely beach, Walter, and it is almost unreal to look at it today and remember what it was.

“But it’s a wonderful thing to remember what those fellows twenty years ago were fighting for and sacrificing for, what they did to preserve our way of life. Not to conquer any territory, not for any ambitions of our own. But to make sure that Hitler could not destroy freedom in the world.  “I think it’s just overwhelming. To think of the lives that were given for that principle, paying a terrible price on this beach alone, on that one day, 2,000 casualties. But they did it so that the world could be free. It just shows what free men will do rather than be slaves.”

11 -    Hedgerows

SOME 90,000 GIS ENTERED FRANCE on June 6, coming by air or by sea. More than two million would follow. Most of those who landed on D-Day had been in the army for two or even three years. There were some teenagers among them, but the average age was more like twenty-two or twenty-three among the enlisted men, in the mid-twenties or older for the junior officers. The divisions that entered France after D-Day, from June until September, were similar in age and time in the army. But those who came in as replacements, or in new divisions after September, had been overwhelmingly high school or college students when America got into the war. They had been drafted or enlisted voluntarily in late 1942, 1943, and 1944. From June 7 to September they came in over Omaha and Utah Beaches; from September to the spring of 1945 they came in at Cherbourg and Le Havre. Whenever they entered the Continent, they came as liberators, not conquerors. Only a tiny percentage of them wanted to be there, but only a small percentage failed to do their duty.

None of them, not even the D-Day veterans, had been trained for what they were about to encounter. For all its thoroughness, intelligence-gathering capacity, and astonishing achievements in logistics, the army had failed to tell its men about Norman hedgerows. They were going to have to find out for themselves, and then figure out a way to launch a successful attack in hedgerow country.  First light came to Ste.-Mère-Eglise around 0510. Twenty-four hours earlier it had been just another Norman village, with more than a millennium behind it. By nightfall of June 6 it was a name known around the world, the village where the invasion began and now headquarters for the 82nd Airborne Division.  At dawn on June 7, Lt. Waverly Wray, executive officer in Company D, 505th PIR, who had jumped into the night sky over Normandy twenty-eight hours earlier, was on the northwestern outskirts of the village. He peered intently into the lifting gloom. What he couldn’t see, he could sense. From the sounds of the movement of personnel and vehicles to the north of Ste.-Mère-Eglise, he could feel and figure that the major German counterattack, the one the Germans counted on to drive the Americans into the sea and the one the paratroopers had been expecting, was coming at Ste.-Mère-Eglise.

It was indeed. Six thousand German soldiers were on the move, with infantry, artillery, tanks, and self-propelled guns-more than a match for the six hundred or so lightly armed paratroopers in Ste.-Mère-Eglise. A German breakthrough to the beaches seemed imminent. And Lieutenant Wray was at the point of attack.  Wray was a big man, 250 pounds with “legs like tree trunks.” The standard-issue army parachute wasn’t large enough for his weight and he dropped too fast on his jumps, but the men said hell, with his legs he didn’t need a chute. He was from Batesville, Mississippi, and was an avid woodsman, skilled with rifles and shotguns. He claimed he had never missed a shot in his life. A veteran of the Sicily and Italy campaigns, Wray was-in the words of Col. Ben Vandervoort, commanding the 505th-“as experienced and skilled as an infantry soldier can get and still be alive.”

Wray had Deep South religious convictions. A Baptist, each month he sent half his pay home to help build a new church. He never swore. His exclamation when exasperated was, “John Brown!” meaning abolitionist John Brown of Harpers Ferry.  He didn’t drink, smoke, or chase girls. Some troopers called him “The Deacon,” but in an admiring rather than critical way. Vandervoort had something of a father-son relationship with Wray, always calling him by his first name, Waverly.

On June 7, shortly after dawn, Wray reported to Vandervoort-whose leg, broken in the jump, was now in a cast-on the movements he had spotted, the things he had sensed, and where he expected the Germans to attack and in what strength.  Vandervoort took all this in, then ordered Wray to return to the company and have it attack the German flank before the Germans could get their attack started.

“He said ‘Yes Sir,’ “ Vandervoort later wrote, “saluted, about-faced, and moved out like a parade ground Sergeant Major.”

Back in the company area, Wray passed on the order. As the company prepared to attack, he took up his M-1, grabbed a half-dozen grenades, and strode out, his Colt .45 on his hip and a silver-plated .38 revolver stuck in his jump boot. He was going to do a one-man reconnaissance to formulate a plan of attack.  Wray was going out into the unknown. He had spent half a year preparing for this moment but he was not trained for it. In one of the greatest intelligence failures of all time, neither G-2 (intelligence) at U.S. First Army, nor SHAEF G-2, nor any division S-2 had ever thought to tell the men who were going to fight the battle that the dominant physical feature of the battlefield was the maze of hedgerows that covered the western half of Normandy.  One hundred years before Lieutenant Wray came to Normandy, Honorede Balzac had described the hedges: “The peasants from time immemorial, have raised a bank of earth about each field, forming a flat-topped ridge, two meters in height, with beeches, oaks, and chestnut trees growing upon the summit. The ridge or mound, planted in this wise, is called a hedge; and as the long branches of the trees which grow upon it almost always project across the road, they make a great arbor overhead. The roads themselves, shut in by clay banks in this melancholy way, are not unlike the moats of fortresses.”

How could the various G-2s have missed such an obvious feature, especially as aerial reconnaissance clearly revealed the hedges? Because the photo interpreters, looking only straight down at them, thought that they were like English hedges, the kind the fox hunters jump over, and they had missed the sunken nature of the roads entirely. “We had been neither informed of them or trained to overcome them,” was Capt. John Colby’s brief comment. The GIs would have to learn by doing, as Wray was doing on the morning of June 7.  Wray and his fellow paratroopers, like the men from the 1st and 29th Divisions at Omaha and the 4th Division at Utah, and all the support groups, had been magnificently trained to launch an amphibious assault. By nightfall of June 6, they had done the real thing successfully, thanks to their training, courage, and dash. But beginning at dawn, June 7, they were fighting in a terrain completely unexpected and unfamiliar to them.

The Germans, meanwhile, had been going through specialized training for fighting in hedgerows. “Coming within thirty meters of the enemy was what we meant by close combat,” Pvt. Adolf Rogosch of the 353rd Division recalled. “We trained hard, throwing hand grenades, getting to know the ground. The lines of hedges crisscrossing one another played tricks on your eyes. We trained to fight as individuals; we knew when the attack came we’d probably be cut off from one another. We let them come forward and cross the hedge, then we blew them apart.  That was our tactic, to wait until they crossed over the hedge and then shoot.” The Germans also pre-sited mortars and artillery on the single gaps that provided the only entrances into the fields. Behind the hedgerows, they dug rifle pits and tunneled openings for machinegun positions in each corner.  Wray moved up sunken lanes, crossed an orchard, pushed his way through hedgerows, crawled through a ditch. Along the way he noted concentrations of Germans in fields and lanes. A man without his woodsman’s sense of direction would have gotten lost. He reached a point near the N-13, the main highway coming into Ste.-Mère-Eglise from Cherbourg.

The N-13 was the axis of the German attacks. Wray, “moving like the deer stalker he was” (Vandervoort’s words), got to a place where he could hear guttural voices on the other side of a hedgerow. They sounded like officers talking about map coordinates. Wray rose up, burst through the obstacle, swung his M-1 to a ready position, and barked in his strong command voice,”Hände hoch!” to the eight German officers gathered around a radio.

Seven instinctively raised their hands. The eighth tried to pull a pistol from his holster; Wray shot him instantly between the eyes. Two Germans in a slit trench one hundred meters to Wray’s rear fired bursts from their Schmeisser machine pistols at him. Bullets cut through his jacket; one cut off half of his right ear.

Wray dropped to his knee and began shooting the other seven officers, one at a time as they attempted to run away. When he had used up his clip, Wray jumped into a ditch, put another clip into his M-1, and dropped the German soldiers with the Schmeissers with one shot each.

Wray made his way back to the company area to report on what he had seen. At the command post he came in with blood down his jacket, a big chunk of his ear gone, holes in his clothing. “Who’s got more grenades?” he demanded. He wanted more grenades.

Then he started leading. He put a 60mm mortar crew on the German flank and directed fire into the lanes and hedgerows most densely packed with the enemy.  Next he sent D Company into an attack down one of the lanes. The Germans broke and ran. By mid-morning Ste.-Mère-Eglise was secure, and the potential for a German breakthrough to the beaches was much diminished.  The next day Vandervoort, Wray, and Sgt. John Rabig went to the spot to examine the German officers Wray had shot. Unforgettably, their bodies were sprinkled with pink and white apple blossom petals from an adjacent orchard. It turned out that they were the commanding officer and his staff of the 1st Battalion, 158th Grenadier Infantry Regiment. The maps showed that it was leading the way for the counterattack. The German confusion and subsequent retreat were in part due to having been rendered leaderless by Wray.

Vandervoort later recalled that when he saw the blood on Wray’s jacket and the missing half-ear, he had remarked, “They’ve been getting kind of close to you, haven’t they Waverly?”

With just a trace of a grin, Wray had replied, “Not as close as I’ve been getting to them, sir.”

At the scene of the action Vandervoort noted that every one of the dead Germans, including the two Schmeisser-armed Grenadiers more than a hundred meters away, had been killed with a single shot in the head. Wray insisted on burying the bodies. He said he had killed them, and they deserved a decent burial, and it was his responsibility.

Later that day Sergeant Rabig commented to Vandervoort, “Colonel, aren’t you glad Waverly’s on our side?”

The next day Rabig wasn’t so sure. He and Wray were crouched behind a hedgerow.  American artillery was falling into the next field. “I could hear these Germans screaming as they were getting hit. Lieutenant Wray said, ‘John, I wish that artillery would stop so we can go in after them.’ “Jesus! I thought, the artillery is doing good enough.” Before the battle was joined, Hitler had been sure his young men would outfight the young Americans. He was certain that the spoiled sons of democracy couldn’t stand up to the solid sons of dictatorship. If he had seen Lieutenant Wray in action in the early morning of D-Day plus one, he might have had some doubts.  Of course, Wray was special. You don’t get more than one Wray to a division, or even to an army. Vandervoort compared Wray to a sergeant in the 82nd Division in World War I, also a Southern boy, named Alvin York. Yet if the qualities Wray possessed were unique, others could aspire to them without hoping or expecting to match his spectacular performance. Indeed, they would have to if the United States was going to win the war. Victory depended on the junior officers and NCOs on the front lines. That is the spine of this book.  Among other elite German outfits in Normandy, there were paratroopers. They were a different proposition altogether from the Polish or Russian troops. The 3rdFallschirmjäger Division came into battle in Normandy on June 10, arriving by truck after night drives from Brittany. It was a full-strength division, 15,976 men in its ranks, mostly young German volunteers. It was new to combat but it had been organized and trained by a veteran paratroop battalion from the Italian campaign. Training had been rigorous and emphasized initiative and improvisation. The equipment was outstanding.

Indeed, theFallschirmjäger were perhaps the best-armed infantrymen in the world in 1944. The 3rd FJ had 930 light machine guns, eleven times as many as its chief opponent, the U.S. 29th Division. Rifle companies in the FJ had twenty MG 42s and forty-three submachine guns; rifle companies in the 29th had two machine guns and nine BARs. At the squad level, the GIs had a single BAR; the German parachute squad had two MG 42s and three submachine guns. The Germans had three times as many mortars as the Americans, and heavier ones. So in any encounter between equal numbers of Americans andFallschirmjäger , the Germans had from six to twenty times as much firepower.