D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (58 page)

Eades looked at his watch. It was 0800. "All of a sudden I was real hungry. My thoughts drifted back to a bar and grill in El Paso, when I was in the old horse cavalry down there. The California Bar & Grill. They served a tremendous big taco for $. 10 and an ice cold Falstaff beer for $.10. I could imagine myself sitting there at the bar with a beer and a taco for $.20 and here I was with maybe $200 in my pocket and I couldn't even buy a beer and taco."

When the LCT grounded on a sandbar (after three unsuccessful tries) and dropped the ramp, the skipper was "running madly around the boat shouting, 'Get them damn things off my boat! Get those damn things off my boat!' My lieutenant had his arm up; when he dropped his arm forward, I kicked the driver in the back of the head and off we went. I heard a kind of 'glub glub blub blub' sound. The water was deeper than our air intake and we were immediately flooded."

Eades thought about "all the stuff we had just lost. The Navy boys had given us fifty pounds of sugar, thirty pounds of coffee, fifty cartons of cigarettes, and we had lost all this stuff—and our gun."

Eades made it to shore and up to the shingle, where he asked himself, "Just what in the hell am I doing here when I could be back in Ft. Bliss, Texas." He was old Army, with an arm full of hash marks, an experienced goldbrick who knew how to avoid the tough assignments and garner the soft ones. To his consternation, he ended up spending D-Day as a rifleman on Omaha Beach, about the worst predicament an old soldier could find himself in. He organized "a kind of a provisional platoon" of infantry, engineers, and artillerymen, and up the bluff he led them.
⁸

Because so many vehicles went glub glub, many specialists found themselves ending up as ordinary infantry. Capt. R. J. Lindo was a liaison officer for the Navy. He landed at 0730, with two men to carry his radio. His job was to direct naval gunfire in support of the 18th Regiment. But "my worst fears and my best training were for naught as we lost our radios coming in from the LCT to the beach. So there I was, helpless to assist in any way. I became instead a part of the infantry attack."
⁹

Sgt. William Otlowski, a veteran of North Africa and Sicily, came in on a DUKW. He was in command of an M-7, which was far too heavy for the DUKWs to carry in anything but calm water. His DUKW was slammed up and down by a wave as it backed off its LST ramp. The rudder hit the ramp and got bent.

"So we're going around in little tight circles and we can't straighten out, so the coxswain, a Navy boy, he decided to shut off the motor, which was a mistake, because that shut off the pumps and the DUKW started to fill with water and of course we sank."

Otlowski yelled at his crew to keep together, hold hands, stay in a circle. A passing LCVP, returning to its mother ship for another load, picked them up. They transferred to a Rhino ferry.

The Rhino hit a sandbar. A lieutenant tied a rope to a jeep and told the driver to take off to test the water depth. The jeep promptly sank.

"Hey, men," the lieutenant called out, "grab the rope and pull up the jeep." Just then an 88 burst on one side of the Rhino, then another on the far side.

Otlowski yelled to the lieutenant, "Those are 88s, and the third one's going to hit right in the middle, get your men off this f—ing boat!'

"He said, 'Sergeant, stay where you are!'

"I said, 'To hell with you, Lieutenant, if you want to die, go ahead. Okay, men let's go!' " Otlowski and his crew jumped ship and swam to shore.

"I looked back, the third 88 had hit smack in the middle of that damn barge and every consecutive shot was right on target."

Otlowski picked up a rifle, ammunition belt, and helmet "and scooted up across the beach to the seawall." He saw a young soldier walking behind it, with a big roll of communication wire on his back. A lieutenant spotted the soldier and called out, "Oh, boy, do we need that. Sit down right here. Give me that wire."

The soldier replied, "I can't, Lieutenant. What will I do with this?" In his right hand he was carrying his left arm. Otlowski helped get the wire off his back, gave him some morphine, and yelled for a medic.
¹⁰

Charles Sullivan was a Seabee on a Rhino. He helped bring in three loads on D-Day. Most of the vehicles were destroyed before they could fire a shot, but he concluded, "In twenty-eight years of service, three wars, fourteen overseas tours of duty, thousands of faces, only Normandy and D-Day remain vivid, as if it happened only yesterday. What we did was important and worthwhile, and how many ever get to say that about a day in their lives."
¹¹

Sullivan's comment brings to mind Eisenhower's remark to Walter Cronkite that no one likes to get shot at, but on D-Day more people wanted to get in on it than wanted to get out.

A tremendous tonnage of tanks, half-tracks, M-7s, jeeps, trucks, and other vehicles had attempted to come into Omaha between 0630 and 0830. Many had sunk, others were destroyed, and the few survivors were caught on an ever-shrinking beach with no place to go. The vehicles were more of a problem than they were an offensive weapon.

Beside and between the tanks, half-tracks, M-7s, and the rest, the Higgins boats were coming in, carrying the 116th and 16th regiments. With them were demolition teams composed of Seabees and Army engineers (five of each in a team). There were sixteen teams, each assigned to a distinct sector of the beach with the job of blowing a gap some fifty meters wide. Not one landed on target.

A Seabee described his experience: "As we dropped our ramp, an 88mm came tearing in, killing almost half our men right there, the officer being the first one. We all thought him the best

officer the Navy ever had. . . . From then on things got hazy to me. I remember the chief starting to take over, but then another shell hit and that did it. I thought my body torn apart."

Bleeding heavily from shrapnel in his left leg and arm, the Seabee looked around and saw no one alive. Fire on the Higgins boat was about to set off the demolition charges. "So I went overboard and headed for the beach." He reached the obstacles, looked back, and saw the craft blow up.

"That got me. Not caring whether I lived or not, I started to run through the fire up the beach." He made the seawall, later picked up a rifle, and spent the day with the 116th as an infantryman.
¹²

Other demolition teams had better luck. They got off their craft more or less intact and went to work, ignoring the fire around them. They were better off than the infantry; the GIs who landed at the wrong place and whose officers were wounded or killed before they made the seawall did not know what to do next. Not even heavy gunfire puts such a strain on a soldier's morale as not knowing what to do and having no one around to tell him. The demolition teams, however, could see immediately what to do. Even if they were at the wrong place, there were obstacles in front of them. They started blowing them.

Comdr. Joseph Gibbons was the CO of the demolition teams at Omaha. He strode up and down the beach, giving help where it was required, supervising the operation. The first two of his men he met told him the whole of the rest of their team had been killed. They had no explosives with them. Gibbons told them to get behind the seawall until he found a job for them. Then he found a team that had landed successfully and was already fastening its charges to the obstacles. The men moved methodically from one obstacle to another, fixing the charges to them.
¹³

Pvt. Devon Larson of the engineers made it ashore. He was alone but he had his explosives with him so he went to work anyway. "Lying on the beach, I saw only two steel obstacles in front of me. Both with Teller mines atop of them. I wrapped a composition C pack around the base, piled about a foot of sand on my side so that the explosion would be away from me, pulled a fuse lighter from my helmet, yelled 'Fire in the hole!' and pulled the fuse. I heard several more shouts of 'Fire in the hole!' to my left. I rolled to the right. The explosion rolled me a little farther, but my two steel posts were gone. No more obstacles were in front of me or on either side, so I headed for the seawall."
¹⁴

•      •

Altogether, the demolition teams were able to blow five or six partial gaps instead of the sixteen that had been planned, and the gaps that did exist were not properly marked by flags. As the tide rose, this situation caused immense problems for the coxswains bringing in the follow-up waves of infantry and vehicles.

Seaman Exum Pike was on patrol craft 565. The job was to guide LCIs and other craft into the beach. But with landmarks obscured by smoke and haze and with no clear path through the obstacles, PC 565 could not accomplish its mission. It became, in effect, a gunboat, firing its machine guns at the bluff, from which Pike could see "a rain of fire that appeared to be falling from the clouds." Pike remembered seeing a DUKW hit an obstacle and set off the mine. "I saw the bodies of two crewmen blown several hundred feet into the air and they were twisting around like tops up there, it was like watching a slow-motion Ferris wheel."

Then PC 565 took a hit. Six men were wounded. "Blood was gushing down the gunwales of that boat like a river." Recalling the scene forty-five years later, Pike commented, "I have often told my two sons I have no fear of hell because I have already been there."
¹⁵

Ens. Don Irwin was the skipper of LCT 614. His crew consisted of another ensign, the executive officer, and twelve Navy enlisted men. His cargo consisted of sixty-five GIs, two bulldozers, and four jeeps with ammunition-carrying trailers. He was scheduled to go in at 0730.

"As we headed toward the beach," Irwin recalled, "the most ear-splitting, deafening, horrendous sound I have ever heard or ever will took place." The
Texas
was firing over the top of LCT 614. Irwin looked back "and it seemed as if the Texas's giant 14-inch guns were pointed right at us." Of course they were not; they were aiming at the bluff. "You'll never know how tremendously huge a battleship is," Irwin commented, "until you look up at one from fairly close by from an LCT."

Irwin was headed toward Easy Red. So far no Americans had landed on that section of the beach. To Irwin, it seemed "tranquil." He allowed himself to think that the briefing officer had been right when he said, "There won't be anything left to bother you guys when you hit the beach. We're throwing everything at the Germans but the kitchen sink, and we'll throw that in, too."

But as Irwin ran LCT 614 onto a sandbar and dropped the ramp, "all hell tore loose. We came under intense fire, mainly rifle

and machine gun." When the first two men from the craft went down in water over their heads, Irwin realized the water was still too deep, so he used his rear anchor and winch to retract. He spent the next hour trying to find a gap in the obstacles where he could put his cargo ashore. Finally he dropped the ramp again; the bulldozers made it to the shore "only to be blasted by German gunners with phosphorus shells which started them burning."

The GIs were trying to get off, but when the first two got shot as they jumped off the ramp, the others refused to leave. Irwin had orders to disembark them. The orders stressed that to fail to do so could result in a court martial. He had been told that, if necessary, he should see to the execution of the order to disembark at gunpoint.

"But I could in no way force human beings to step off that ramp to almost certain wounding or death. The shellfire had grown even more intense. Pandemonium everywhere, with lots of smoke and explosions. Bodies in the water.

"The men in my crew, who were still at their battle stations and who had been standing erect on our way to the beach, were now flattened out against the craft as if they were a part of it. A couple of them were yelling, 'Skipper, let's get out of here!'

"After an hour of trying to get my load of troops and vehicles off, believe me I was ready."
¹⁶

It was now 0830. Men and vehicles, almost none of them operating, were jammed up on the beach. Not a single vehicle and not more than a few platoons of men had made it up the bluff. At this point, the commander of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion made a decision: suspend all landing of vehicles and withdraw those craft on the beach.

Ensign Irwin got the order to retract over his radio. He was told that the beach was too hot and that he should go out into the Channel, anchor, and await further orders. It was the most welcome order he ever received, but the one that he had the most difficulty in executing. As he began to retract, his LCT suddenly stopped. It was hung up on an obstacle. It could have been panic time, but Irwin kept his head. He eased forward, then back again and floated free. His crew began taking in the anchor cable. But just when the anchor should have been in sight, it stuck.

"Try as we might we couldn't free that anchor. I gave the

command 'All engines ahead, full!' This did cause the anchor to move, and soon coming to the surface was a Higgins boat that had been sunk with our anchor hooked into it."

Irwin turned his LCT, gave it a couple of shakes, and freed the anchor. He got out to deep water and dropped the anchor.*

The 0830 general order to retract craft on the beach and postpone the landing of others until gaps in the obstacles had been blown added to the confusion. With nowhere to go, over fifty incoming LCTs and LCIs began to turn in circles.

For most of the skippers and crews, this was the first invasion. They were amateurs at war, even the old merchant mariners commanding the LSTs. The crews were as young as they were inexperienced.