"And Stonie was starting to swim for the front of the boat, and I said, "b.u.g.g.e.r it, I"ve got to do that too," so I swam to the front and the obstacle was wired onto two adjacent tetrahedrons and the major had cutting pliers and he said, "I"ll cut the wires," and I said, "OK, I"ll take out the detonators." "So I got astride the tetrahedron, wrapped my legs around it, and started to unscrew the detonators. Stonie shouted to get a dozen men off the craft and for the others to go to the stern to help lift the prow off the obstacle. So a dozen soldiers dove in and we all got our shoulders to the prow and pushed." It was about 0800. The leading LCAs carrying a.s.sault teams were dropping their ramps. Canadians were making their way on foot through the obstacles up onto the beach.
The Germans commenced firing. Snipers and mortar crews were aiming at the landing craft as machine guns concentrated on the first wave of infantry. Bullets were creating miniature geysers around Honan.
He, Major Stone, and the men managed to free the LCA. Its ramp went down and the infantry made toward sh.o.r.e as Honan moved to the next obstacle to remove the detonator on its mine. "My mates 85 were attacking the pillboxes; that was their business and I was doing my business. I was a sitting duck, I didn"t have anything to work with except my bare hands." The rising tide covered the obstacles faster than Honan could unscrew the detonators. Honan remarked, "I could do my job only by wrapping my legs around the obstacles to keep from being floated away, and I could only use one hand."
At about 0815 he decided, "b.u.g.g.e.r this lark, I"m going ash.o.r.e." He swam for the sh.o.r.e. There he saw a headless corpse. The man had apparently been wounded in the water and then run over by an LCA. The propeller had cut his head off. He was clutching in his hand the knife with a diamond-like gem inserted into the leather wrapped around the handle that Honan had noticed during the night. When Honan reached the seawall, a couple of the chaps hauled him up and over.
One of them pulled out a flask of whiskey and offered Honan a drink.
"No thanks," Honan said.
The soldier took a slug himself and asked, "Why not? You"re not an "effin teetotaler are you?"
"I"m not," Honan replied, "but I"m afraid that stuff will make me feel brave or some b.l.o.o.d.y thing like that."
Honan moved into the village, where he took shelter until the German machine-gun fire was suppressed.
"I had done my bit," he explained. "I was watching the others get on with it." Until the tide receded, he could do no more demolition of obstacles.
Soon the guns fell silent and the people began coming out into the street, waving for the liberators, throwing bouquets of roses. The village priest appeared.
"Monsieur le cure," Honan said in his best high-school French, "I hope that you are pleased that we have arrived."
"Yes," the priest replied, "but I will be better pleased when you are gone again," as he pointed sadly to the hole in the top of his seventeenth-century church.
The barber came out and asked Honan if he would like a cognac. No, Honan replied, "but I could do with a shave." The barber was happy to comply, "so I went in and sat in the chair in my wringing-wet battle dress, the water squelching in my shoes, and he gave me a shave." Refreshed and rested, Honan returned to the beach to go back to work. "I was in time to see the DD tanks coming ash.o.r.e. Two of them came out of the water, I had never seen nor heard of them before. So this was like sea monsters for me coming out of the deep. Those two tanks pulled up their skirts and ducked around the village with the other girls."
The Canadian infantry moved across the seawall and into the street fighting in the villages, or against pillboxes, with a fury that had to be seen to be believed. One who saw it happen was Private Henry. His company of the Royal Winnipegs was scheduled to land at 0800, but it was late, so he was an observer for the initial action. His comment was to the point: "It took a great deal of heroics and casualties to silence the concrete emplacements and the various machine-gun nests."
Sgt. Sigie Johnson saw one of the bravest acts possible in war. A pioneer platoon was held up by barbed wire. It was supposed to use a bangalore torpedo to blow a gap, but the torpedo failed to explode. A soldier, unknown to Johnson, threw himself over the wire so that others could cross on his back. Johnson saw others crawl through barbed wire and minefields to get close enough to the 86 embrasures of pillboxes to toss in grenades. He concluded his interview with these words: "Very few publications ever get the truth of what our Winnipeg infantry faced and did."
Sword Beach ran from Lion-sur-Mer to Ouistreham at the mouth of the Oran Ca.n.a.l.* In most areas there were vacation homes and tourist establishments just inland from the paved promenade that ran behind the seawall. There were the usual beach obstacles and emplacements in the sand dunes, with mortar crews and medium and heavy artillery pieces inland. Primarily, however, the Germans intended to defend Sword Beach with the 75mm guns of the Merville battery and the 155mm guns at Le Havre.
The eight-kilometer stretch from the left flank at Juno (St.-Aubin) and the right flank of Sword (Lion-sur-Mer) was too shallow and rocky to permit an a.s.sault. Ironically, at Ouistreham there was a monument to the successful repulse of a British landing attempted on July 12, 1792. But Lt. Col. T. B. H.
Otway"s 6th Airborne Division men had taken and destroyed the Merville battery, and the big guns at Le Havre proved to be ineffective against the beach for two reasons. First, the British laid down smoke screens to prevent the Germans" ranging. Second, the Le Havre battery spent the morning in a duel with HMSWarspite (which it never hit), a big mistake on the Germans" part as the targets on the beach were much more lucrative. Nevertheless, the 88mms on the first rise, a couple of kilometers inland, were able to put a steady fire on the beach to supplement the mortars and the machine-gun fire coming from the windows of the seaside villas and from pillboxes scattered among the dunes. In addition, there were ant.i.tank ditches and mines to impede progress inland, as well as ma.s.sive concrete walls blocking the streets. These defenses would cause considerable casualties and delay the a.s.sault.
The infantry a.s.sault teams consisted of companies from the South Lancashire Regiment (Peter sector, on the right), the Suffolk Regiment (Queen sector, in the middle), and the East Yorkshire Regiment (Roger sector, on the left), supported by DD tanks. Their job was to open exits through which the immediate follow-up wave, consisting of troops of commandos and more tanks, could pa.s.s inland to their objectives. Meanwhile, UDT units and engineers would deal with the obstacles. Other regiments from the British 3rd Division scheduled to land later in the morning included the Lincolnshire, the King"s Own Scottish Borderers, the Royal Ulster Rifles, the Royal Warwickshire, the Royal Norfolk, and the King"s Shropshire Light Infantry. H-Hour was fixed for 0725. On the run-in to the beach, Brigadier Lord Lovat, CO of the commando brigade, had his piper, Bill Millin, playing Highland reels on the fo"c"sle on his LCI (landing craft, infantry). Maj. C. K. King of the 2nd Battalion, the East Yorkshire Regiment, riding in an LCA, read to his men the lines from Shakespeare"sHenry V: "On, on, you n.o.ble English! whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof. . . . Be copy now to men of grosser blood and teach them how to war!
The game"s afoot: Follow your spirit." Lovat was with Comdr. Rupert Curtis, commander of the 200th Flotilla (LCIs). As the LCIs were coming in, Curtis recalled, "a lumbering LCT pa.s.sed close, having discharged her tanks. Lord Lovat asked me to hail her and through my megaphone I spoke to a sailor on her quarterdeck. "How did it go?" He grinned cheerfully, raised his fingers in the familiar V-for-Victory sign, and said with relish, "It was a piece of cake." This was encouraging, but I had reason to doubt his optimistic report because the enemy was obviously recovering from the shock of the initial bombardment and hitting back."
Going in, Curtis raised the flag that meant "a.s.sume arrowhead formation," and each craft fanned out to port or starboard, forming a V that presented less of a target for the Germans. To his left, on the beach, Curtis could see an LCT on fire and stranded. "Judging from the wounded at the edge of the waves the German mortar fire was laid accurately on the water"s edge. "Now was the moment. I increased engine revolutions to full ahead and thrust in hard between the stakes. As we grounded I kept the engines moving at half ahead to hold the craft in position on the beach and ordered "Out ramps." The commandos proceeded to land quite calmly. Every minute detail of that scene seemed to take on a microscopic intensity, and stamped in my memory is the sight of Shimi Lovat"s tall, immaculate figure striding through the water, rifle in hand, and his men moving with him up the beach to the skirl of Bill 87 Millin"s bagpipes."
Amid all the carnage, exploding sh.e.l.ls, smoke, and noise on Sword Beach, some of the chaps with Pvt.
Harold Pickersgill claimed that they saw a most remarkable sight, an absolutely stunningly beautiful eighteen-year-old French girl who was wearing a Red Cross armband and who had ridden her bicycle down to the beaches to help with the wounded.
Pickersgill himself met a French girl inland later that day; she had high school English, he had high school French; they took one look at each other and fell in love; they were married at the end of the war and are still together today, living in the little village of Matheiu, midway between the Channel and Caen. But he never believed the story of the Red Cross girl on the beach. "Oh, you"re just hallucinating," he protested to his buddies. "That just can"t be, the Germans wouldn"t have allowed civilians to come through their lines and we didn"t want any civilians messing about. It just didn"t happen." But in 1964, when he was working as a shipping agent in Ouistreham for a British steamship line, Pickersgill met John Thornton, who introduced him to his wife, Jacqueline. Her maiden name was Noel; she had met Thornton on D plus four; they fell in love and married after the war; he too worked as a shipping agent in Ouistreham. It was Jacqueline who had been on the beach, and the story was true. Pickersgill arranged an interview for me with Jacqueline for this book. "Well," she said, "I was on the beach for a silly reason. My twin sister had been killed in an air raid a fortnight before in Caen, and she had given me a bathing costume for my birthday, and I had left it on the beach, because we were allowed about once a week to remove the fences so we could pa.s.s to go swimming, and I had left the costume in a small hut on the beach, and I just wanted to go and pick it up. I didn"t want anybody to take it.
"So I got on my bicycle and rode to the beach."
I asked, "Didn"t the Germans try to stop you?"
"No, my Red Cross armband evidently made them think it was OK." "There was quite a bit of activity,"
she went on in a grand understatement, "and I saw a few dead bodies. And of course once I got to the beach I couldn"t go back, the English wouldn"t let me. They were whistling at me, you know. But mostly they were surprised to see me. I mean, it was a ridiculous thing to do. So I stayed on the beach to help with the wounded. I didn"t go back to the house until two days after. There was a lot to do." She changed bandages, helped haul wounded and dead out of the water, and otherwise made herself useful.
"I remember one thing horrible which made me realize how stupid I was. I was on top of the dune and there was a trunk, completely bare, no head on it. I never knew if it was a German or an Englishman. Just burned completely." When asked what her most vivid lingering memory of D-Day was, she replied, "The sea with all the boats on it. All the boats and planes. It was something which you just can"t imagine if you have not seen it. It was boats, boats, boats and more boats, boats everywhere. If I had been a German, I would have looked at this, put my weapon down, and said, "That"s it. Finished." " The British had put 29,000 men ash.o.r.e at Sword. They had taken 630 casualties, inflicted far more, and had many prisoners in cages. Lovett"s Commandos had linked up with Howard"s Ox and Bucks. At no point had the British reached their far-too-optimistic D-Day objectives-they were still five kilometers short of the outskirts of Caen-but they had an enormous follow-up force waiting in the transport area in the Channel to come in as reinforcements on D plus one. The 21st Panzer Division had lost its best opportunity to hurl them into the sea, and the bulk of the German armor in France was still in place in the pas-de-Calais area, waiting for the real invasion. Toward dusk Commander Curtis had his LCI make a run along the coast. "We set off on a westerly course parallel to the sh.o.r.e," he later reported, "and we now had a grandstand view of the invasion beaches for which many would have paid thousands. Past Luc-sur-Mer, St.-Aubin, Bernieres, and Courseulles in the Canadian sector, past La Riviere lighthouse and Le Hamel and so to Arromanches. It was all an unforgettable sight. Through the smoke and haze I could see craft after craft which had been driven onto the beach with relentless determination in order to give the troops as dry a 88 landing as possible. Many of these craft were now helplessly stranded on obstacles and I could not help feeling a sense of pride at the spirit which their officers and crews had shown. "We anch.o.r.ed off Arromanches and stood by for air attack that night. Already parts of the prefabricated Mulberry harbors were under tow from England to be placed in position off Arromanches and St.-Laurent. It was clear that the battle for the foot-hold in the British and Canadian sectors had gone well enough."
10 - The End of the Day
GENERAL EISENHOWER had been scheduled to give the graduation address at Kelly Field in Texas on December 12, 1941, but, as noted, he had been ordered to report to the War Department and left by train for Washington that morning. He had prepared his speech, but never got to deliver it. His first and second drafts are at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas. The speech stands the test of time, and is especially appropriate when thinking of the junior officers on D-Day. The exemplary manner in which they had seized their opportunity, their dash, oldness, initiative, teamwork, and tactical skills were outstanding beyond praise. These were exactly the qualities the army had hoped for-and spent two years training its civilians-turned-soldiers to achieve.
Here is what Eisenhower intended to say: You are ready, now, to take your places as efficient lieutenants in the Army of the United States and what we need-now-is efficient lieutenants. The lieutenant is the commissioned officer closest to the enlisted man. The lieutenant is the only officer charged with direct training of the individual fighting man, all other officers are charged, normally, with training junior officers. On the lieutenant falls the burden of producing the small fighting units that, in the main, make up the army, no matter how large. It is the lieutenant"s privilege to live close to his men, to be their example in conduct, in courage, and in devotion to duty. He is in position to learn them intimately, to help them when in trouble, often to keep them out of trouble. No matter how young he may be nor how old and hard boiled his men he must become their counsellor, their leader, their friend, their old-man. This opportunity-that of becoming a real leader of fighting men-is one that you are yet to master. It is the part of soldiering that challenges the best that"s in the officer, and it"s the one part in which he must not fail! To gain the respect, the esteem, the affection, the readiness to follow into danger, the unswerving and undying loyalty of the American enlisted man.
That is the privilege and the opportunity of the lieutenant, and it is his high and almost divine duty. It is the challenge to his talents, his patriotism, his very soul!
In an earlier draft of this speech, Eisenhower had spoken to a broader theme: In military dictatorships the required unity of effort is always insured by the authority resting in one man"s hands. Every individual must conform to the dictator"s orders, the alternative is the firing squad. So, from the beginning, the necessary mechanical coordination is automatic. In democracy this result is achieved more slowly. The overwhelming majority of its citizens must first come to realize that a common danger threatens, that collective and individual self-preservation demands the submission of self-interest to the nation"s welfare. Because this realization and this unification come about so slowly, often only after disaster and loss of battles have rudely awakened a population, democracy is frequently condemned by 89 unthinking critics as the least efficient form of government. Such criticism deals with the obvious factors only, it fails to throw into the balance the moral fibre, the staying qualities of a population. A Democracy resorts to war only when the vast majority of its people become convinced that there is no other way out.
The crisis they have entered is of their own choosing, and in the long, cruel ordeal of war this difference is likely to become decisive. The unification and coordination achieved in this way is lasting. The people work together because they have a common belief in the justice of their cause and a common readiness to sacrifice for attainment of national success. It was in appreciation of the great strength arising from this truth that Woodrow Wilson said "The highest form of efficiency is the spontaneous cooperation of a free people."
How right Wilson was the Allies demonstrated on D-Day. The Germans" tactical and strategic mistakes were serious, but their political blunders were the greatest of all. Their occupation policies in Poland and Russia precluded any enthusiasm whatsoever by theirOst battalions for their cause-even though nearly every one of the conscriptedOst troops hated the communists. Although German behavior in France was immeasurably better than in Poland and Russia, even in France the Germans failed to generate enthusiasm for their cause, and thus the Germans were unable to profit from the great potential of conquered France.
What should have been an a.s.set for Germany, the young men of France, became an a.s.set for the Allies, either as saboteurs in the factories or as members of the Resistance. What Hitler regarded as the greatest German a.s.sets-the leadership principle in the Third Reich, the unquestioning obedience expected of Wehrmacht personnel from field marshal down to private-all worked against the Germans on D-Day.
The truth is that despite individual acts of great bravery and the fanaticism of some Wehrmacht troops, the performance of the Wehrmacht"s high command, middle-ranking officers, and junior officers was just pathetic. The cause is simply put: They were afraid to take the initiative. They allowed themselves to be paralyzed by stupid orders coming from far away that bore no relation to the situation on the battlefield.
Tank commanders who knew where the enemy was and how and when he should be attacked sat in their headquarters through the day, waiting for the high command in Berchtesgaden to tell them what to do. In adjusting and reacting to unexpected situations, the contrast between men like Generals Roosevelt and Cota, Colonels Canham and Otway, Major Howard, Captain Dawson, Lieutenants Spaulding and Winters, and their German counterparts could not have been greater. The men fighting for democracy were able to make quick, on-site decisions and act on them; the men fighting for the totalitarian regime were not. Except for a captain here, a lieutenant there, not one German officer reacted appropriately to the challenge of D-Day. As for the Allies, Pvt. Carl Weast of the rangers has an answer to the question of how they did it. In his oral history he related a story about his company commander, Capt. George Whittington.
"He was a h.e.l.l of a man," Weast said. "He led people. I recall the time a week or so after D-Day when we shot a cow and cut off some beef and were cooking it over a fire on sticks. Captain Whittington came up and threw a German boot next to the fire and said, "I"ll bet some son of a b.i.t.c.h misses that." We looked at the boot. The German"s leg was still inside of it. I"ll bet by G.o.d he did miss it."
That same day Weast heard the executive officer of the 5th Ranger Battalion, Maj. Richard Sullivan, criticizing Captain Whittington for unnecessarily exposing himself.
"Whittington said to Sully, "You saw it happen back on that G.o.dd.a.m.n beach. Now you tell me how the h.e.l.l you lead men from behind." " Weast"s introduction to combat came on D-Day. He fought with the rangers through the next eleven months. He concluded that the Allied high command had been right to insist that "there be practically no experienced troops in the initial waves that hit that beach, because an experienced infantryman is a terrified infantryman, and they wanted guys like me who were more amazed than they were frozen with fear, because the longer you fight a war the more you figure your number"s coming up tomorrow, and it really gets to be G.o.d-awful." Weast made a final point: "In war, the best rank is either private or colonel or better, but those ranks in between, hey, those people have got to be 90 leaders." At Omaha Beach they were.
At the end of the day Lt. John Reville of F Company, 5th Ranger Battalion, was on top of the bluff at Omaha. As the light faded he called his runner, Pvt. Rex Low, pointed out to the six thousand vessels in the Channel, and said, "Rex, take a look at this. You"ll never see a sight like this again in your life." Pvt.
Robert Zafft, a twenty-year-old infantryman in the 115th Regiment, 29th Division, Omaha Beach, put his feelings and experience this way: "I made it up the hill, I made it all the way to where the Germans had stopped us for the night, and I guess I made it up the hill of manhood." Pvt. Felix Branham was a member of K Company, 116th Infantry, the regiment that took the heaviest casualties of all the Allied regiments on D-Day. "I have gone through lots of tragedies since D-Day," he concluded his oral history.
"But to me, D-Day will live with me till the day I die, and I"ll take it to heaven with me. It was the longest, most miserable, horrible day that I or anyone else ever went through.
"I would not take a million dollars for my experiences, but I surely wouldn"t want to go through that again for a million dollars." Sgt. John Ellery, 16th Regiment, 1st Division, Easy Red sector of Omaha, recalled: "The first night in France I spent in a ditch beside a hedgerow wrapped in a damp shelter-half and thoroughly exhausted. But I felt elated. It had been the greatest experience of my life. I was ten feet tall. No matter what happened, I had made it off the beach and reached the high ground. I was king of the hill, at least in my own mind, for a moment. My contribution to the heroic tradition of the United States Army might have been the smallest achievement in the history of courage, but at least, for a time, I had walked in the company of very brave men."
Adm. Bertram Ramsay ended his June 6 diary with this entry: "We have still to establish ourselves on land. The navy has done its part well. News continued satisfactory throughout the day from E.T.F.
[Eastern Task Force, the British beaches] and good progress was made. Very little news was rec[eived]
from W.T.F. [Western Task Forces, the American beaches] & anxiety exists as to the position on sh.o.r.e.
"Still on the whole we have very much to thank G.o.d for this day." One soldier who did not forget to thank G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 91 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.-Mere-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.-Mere-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.-Mere-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.-Mere-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 92 said h.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sault. 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 93 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.-Mere-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,"Hande 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.-Mere-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 94 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 3rdFallschirmjager 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, theFallschirmjager 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 andFallschirmjager , the Germans had from six to twenty times as much firepower.
And these German soldiers were ready to fight. A battalion commander in the 29th remarked to an unbelieving counterpart from another regiment, "Those Germans are the best soldiers I ever saw. They"re smart and they don"t know what the word "fear" means. They come in and they keep coming until they get their job done or you kill "em."
These were the men who had to be rooted out of the hedgerows. One by one. There were, on average, fourteen hedgerows to the kilometer in Normandy. The enervating, costly process of gearing up for an attack, making the attack, carrying the attack home, mopping up after the attack, took half a day or more. And at the end of the action there was the next hedgerow, fifty to a hundred meters or so away.
All through the Cotentin Peninsula, from June 7 on, GIs labored at the task. They heaved and pushed and punched and died doing it, for two hedgerows a day.
No terrain in the world was better suited for defensive action with the weapons of the fourth decade of the twentieth century than the Norman hedgerows, and only the lava and coral, caves and tunnels of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were as favorable.
The Norman hedgerows dated back to Roman times. They were mounds of earth to keep cattle in and to mark boundaries. Typically there was only one entry into the small field enclosed by the hedgerows, which were irregular in length as well as height and set at odd angles. On the sunken roads the brush often met overhead, giving the GIs a feeling of being trapped in a leafy tunnel. Wherever they looked the view was blocked by walls of vegetation. Undertaking an offensive in the hedgerows was risky, costly, time-consuming, fraught with frustration. It was like fighting in a maze. Platoons found themselves completely lost a few minutes after launching an attack. Squads got separated. Just as often, two platoons from the same company could occupy adjacent fields for hours before discovering each other"s presence. The small fields limited deployment possibilities; seldom during the first week of battle did a 95 unit as large as a company go into an attack intact. Where the Americans got lost, the Germans were at home. The 352nd Division had been in Normandy for months, training for this battle. Further, the Germans were geniuses at utilizing the fortification possibilities of the hedgerows. In the early days of the battle, many GIs were killed or wounded because they dashed through the opening into a field, just the kind of aggressive tactics they had been taught, only to be cut down by pre-sited machinegun fire or mortars (mortars caused three-quarters of American casualties in Normandy). American army tactical manuals stressed the need for tank-infantry cooperation. But in Normandy, the tankers didn"t want to get down on the sunken roads because of insufficient room to traverse the turret and insufficient visibility to use the long-range firepower of the cannon and machine guns. But staying on the main roads proved impossible; the Germans held the high ground inland and had their 88mm cannon sited to provide long fields of fire along highways. So into the lanes the tanks perforce went. But there they were restricted; they wanted to get out into the fields. But they couldn"t. When they appeared at the gap leading into a field, presited mortar fire, plus panzerfausts (handheld ant.i.tank weapons), disabled them. Often, in fact, it caused them to "brew up," or start burning-the tankers were discovering that their tanks had a distressing propensity for catching fire.
So tankers tried going over or through the embankments, but the hedgerows were proving to be almost impa.s.sable obstacles to the American M4 Sherman tank. Countless attempts were made to break through or climb over, but the Sherman wasn"t powerful enough to break through the cement-like base, and when it climbed up the embankment, at the apex it exposed its unarmored belly to German panzerfausts. Further, coordination between tankers and infantry was almost impossible under battle conditions, as they had no easy or reliable way to communicate with one another.
Lt. Sidney Salomon of the 2nd Ranger Battalion, one of the D-Day heroes, found that out on June 7. He was leading the remnants of his battalion, which had come ash.o.r.e on the right flank at Omaha and been involved in a day-long firefight on D-Day, westward along the coastal road that led to Pointe-du-Hoc.
Three companies of the 2nd Rangers had taken the German emplacement there, and destroyed the coastal guns, but they were under severe attack and had taken severe casualties. Salomon was in a hurry to get to them. But his column, marching in combat formation, began taking well-placed artillery sh.e.l.ls.
To his right, Salomon could see a Norman church, its steeple the only high point around. He was certain the Germans had an observer spotting for their artillery in that steeple. Behind Salomon a Sherman tank chugged up, the only American tank to be seen. It was b.u.t.toned up. Salomon wanted it to elevate its 75mm cannon and blast that steeple, but he couldn"t get the crew"s attention, not even when he knocked on the side of the tank with the b.u.t.t of his carbine. "So I ultimately stood in the middle of the road directly in front of the tank, waving my arms and pointing in the direction of the church. That produced results.