D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (43 page)

There was one final bombardment from the sea. It came from Sherman tanks aboard LCTs approaching the shoreline. Under the circumstances—rough water, smoke and haze, extreme excitement—it was wildly inaccurate. But that those Shermans were close enough to the beach to fire was itself a near miracle, made possible by the courage and common sense of one man, Lieutenant Rockwell, who had just made what was perhaps the single most important command decision of any junior officer on D-Day.

The LCTs approaching Omaha were supposed to launch their DD tanks five kilometers offshore. They had split into two groups. The eight LCTs to the left of Rockwell's flotilla launched as planned, and all but three of the thirty-two tanks sank. The swells were too high, the tanks too low, the skirts insufficient. There was a certain gallantry involved, as tank after tank drove across the lowered ramp and into the water despite seeing the tank in front go down.

There was also a certain stubbornness and blind stupidity involved. The tank commanders could see the tank in front of them get hit by a wave, the canvas collapse, the tank disappear—but they had been given the order to launch, so launch they did. The skippers of the LCTs watched helplessly, rendered immobile by fright, unwilling to take charge. It was a pitiful sight.

Only the skipper of LCT 600, Ens. H. P. Sullivan, was

brave enough to take command. When he saw the first tank in his group of four sink he ordered the crew to pull up the ramp and then drove on into shore. Those three tanks were the only ones from his flotilla of LCTs to make it; they provided suppressing fire at Easy Green.*

Lieutenant Rockwell, off Dog White and Dog Green, made his own decision. He got on a tank radio, despite orders not to use the radio, to call Captain Elder of the 743rd Tank Battalion in a nearby LCT. Rockwell was prepared to argue, as he assumed Elder would want to follow orders. (With regard to using the radio, Rockwell later said, "At this stage of the game I was willing to take a chance, because it was necessary to get on with the invasion, is what it amounted to.")

To Rockwell's relief, Elder agreed with him. "I don't think we can make it," he said. "Can you take us right in?"

That was exactly what Rockwell wanted to hear. Using flags and Morse code, he ordered the seven other skippers of his LCT flotilla to keep their ramps up and drive into the beach. As they approached, the eager tank crews opened fire against the bluff, shooting over the bow.
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Rockwell's flotilla went in line abreast. On LCT 607, the skipper failed to act. Ens. Sam Grundfast, second in command (who had been a Boy Scout and could read the Morse code faster than his signalman), put it bluntly: "He froze. So the signalman looked at me, I looked at him, and I then took over the command of the boat. I gave the signal that we were obeying the order to go ashore."

As LCT 607 drove in, it hit a mine. "It literally blew us sky high. The skipper was killed. All the men were killed except two and myself. The four tanks were lost and all of the Navy personnel. I wound up in a hospital for several months, requiring extensive surgery."
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Seaman Martin Waarvick was on Rockwell's boat, LCT 535. "I was at my post in the forward port locker room near the bow, warming up the small Briggs & Stratton engine that we used to lower the ramp."
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Timing was now critical. If that ramp dropped too soon, the water would be too deep; if it dropped too late, the

* In an after-action report dated September 22, 1944, Rear Adm. John L. Hall, commanding Assault Force "O," commented: "Because of the vulnerability of its flotation equipment and the general unseaworthiness of the entire vehicle the DD tank is not a practicable weapon for use in assault landings on open beaches." Copy in EC. Hall's conclusion was sound, but it was three months late.

tanks would not be able to do the job and the 116th Infantry would not have the help of the tanks at the moment the infantry most needed it.

The noise was deafening. The battleships and cruisers were shooting over the LCTs from behind. On each side of the lane reserved for the landing craft, the destroyers were banging away. Aircraft engines droned overhead. As Rockwell got close, the LCT(R)s let loose. On his LCT, the tank crews started up their engines.

Speaking was impossible, thinking nearly so. Further, the smoke obscured Rockwell's landmarks. But a shift of wind rolled back the smoke for a moment and Rockwell saw he was being set to the east by the tide. He changed course to starboard and increased speed; the other skippers saw this move and did the same. At the moment the naval barrage lifted, Rockwell's little group was exactly opposite Dog White and Dog Green, the tanks firing furiously.

This was the moment Rockwell had been preparing for over the past two years. This was the reason LCTs existed. But to Rockwell's amazement, what he had anticipated was not happening. He had always assumed the enemy would be firing at his LCT as it came in, but so far no German gun had done so.

At 0629 Rockwell gave the signal to Waarvick, who dropped the ramp. LCT 535 was the first ship of the first wave to launch equipment in the Omaha area. Waarvick remembered that the tanks "started out down the ramp, clanking and grinding. They sure made a racket on that steel deck." They were in about three feet of water.

The first tank lurched forward, dipped its nose to the slope, crawled ahead through the breakers to the sand fifty yards away, the water washing over its back and pouring off again. It began firing—and at that instant, so did the Germans. An 88mm gun was enfilading the beach from an emplacement to the right. Rockwell watched as 88 shells hit three of the landing craft on his right in quick succession. He expected the next shell to hit his LCT, which was lying still and broadside to the gun—a can't-miss target—when the last of his tanks went into the water. As it cleared the ramp, Waarvick raised it. The German gunners turned their fire from the LCTs onto the tanks.

And then, Rockwell recalled, "We pulled that famous naval maneuver, known through naval history as getting the hell out of there." He used his anchor to retract; he had dropped it going in, it had a separate engine to winch off, and it worked.
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As Rockwell backed off, the tanks he had been responsible

enough and courageous enough to put on the beach were blasting away with their 75mm cannon and .50-caliber machine guns. As LCT 535 retracted, Higgins boats carrying the 116th Regiment began moving in. It was 0630 at Omaha beach, H-Hour.

At
Widerstandsnest
62 above the Colleville draw, Pvt. Franz Gockel had just been through the most shocking hour of his life. At 0400 he had been ordered to take his firing position behind his machine gun, but at first "nothing moved. Was it another false alarm? The minutes slowly tocked by. Was it going to be real this time? We stood at our weapons and shivered in the thin summer uniforms. The cook prepared hot red wine. An NCO appeared and checked our readiness, saying 'When they come, don't shoot too soon.' "

At first light the bombers were overhead and an incredible number of ships began to appear on the horizon. Small craft, small ships, big ships, all apparently coming right at WN 62. "An endless fleet. Heavy warships cruised along as if passing for review." Gockel tried to concentrate on his machine gun, checking it again and again, "to take my mind away from impending events."

The naval guns opened fire. "Salvo after salvo fell into our positions. Debris and clouds of smoke enveloped us. The earth shook. Eyes and ears were filled with dust. Sand ground between teeth. There was no hope for help."

The bombardment increased in its fury. "The morning dawn over the approaching landing fleet showed for us our approaching doom." Gockel was amazed that the Allies were coming at low tide. During an inspection in May, Rommel had assured the lieutenant in command of WN 62 that the Allies would come at high tide.

Gockel was even more amazed when the naval bombardment lifted and he discovered no one in his platoon had been killed, only a few wounded. "We crouched small and helpless behind our weapons. I prayed for survival."

Then, "the sea came alive. Assault boats and landing craft were rapidly approaching the beach. A comrade stumbled out of the smoke and dust into my position and screamed, 'Franz, watch out! They're coming!' "

The 75mm cannon at WN 62 fired on one of the American tanks. The tank fired back. The shell exploded inside the casemate and put the German gun out of commission.
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It was 0630 at Omaha Beach.

15

"WELL START THE WAR FROM RIGHT HERE"

The 4th Division at Utah Beach

The plan was for DD tanks to land first, at 0630, immediately after the naval warships lifted their fire and the LCT(R)s launched their 1,000 rockets. There were thirty-two of the swimming tanks at Utah, carried in eight LCTs. In their wake would come the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, in twenty Higgins boats, each carrying a thirty-man assault team. Ten of the craft would touch down on Tare Green Beach opposite the strong point at Les-Dunes-de-Varreville, the others to the south at Uncle Red Beach.

The second wave of thirty-two Higgins boats carrying the 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry, plus combat engineers and naval demolition teams, was scheduled to land five minutes later. The third wave was timed for H plus fifteen minutes; it included eight LCTs with some bulldozer tanks as well as regular Shermans. Two minutes later the fourth wave, mainly consisting of detachments of the 237th and 299th Engineer Combat Battalions (ECBs), would hit the beach.

None of this worked out. Some craft landed late, others early, all of them a kilometer or so south of the intended target. But thanks to some quick thinking and decision making by the high command on the beach, and thanks to the initiative and drive of the GIs, what could have been mass confusion or even utter chaos turned into a successful, low-cost landing.

Tides, wind, waves, and too much smoke were partly responsible for upsetting the schedule and landing in the wrong place, but the main cause was the loss to mines of three of the four control craft. When the LCCs went down it threw everything into confusion. The LCTs skippers were circling, looking for direction. One of them hit a mine and blew sky high. In a matter of seconds the LCT and its four tanks sank.

At this point Lts. Howard Vander Beek and Sims Gauthier on LCC 60 took charge. They conferred and decided to make up for the time lost by leading the LCTs to within three kilometers of the beach before launching the tanks (which were supposed to launch at five kilometers), giving them a shorter and quicker run to the shore. Using his bullhorn, Vander Beek circled around the LCTs as he shouted out orders to follow him. He went straight for the beach—the wrong one, about half a kilometer south of where the tanks were supposed to land. When the LCTs dropped their ramps and the tanks swam off, they looked to Vander Beek like "odd-shaped sea monsters with their huge, doughnut-like skirts for flotation wallowing through the heavy waves and struggling to keep in formation."
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The Higgins boats carrying the first wave of assault teams were supposed to linger behind the swimming tanks, but the tanks were so slow that the coxswains drove their craft right past them. Thus it was that E Company of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry, 4th Division, was the first Allied company to hit the beach in the invasion. The tidal current, running from north to south, had carried their craft farther left so they came in a kilometer south of where they should have been.

General Roosevelt was in the first boat to hit the shore. Maj. Gen. Barton had initially refused Roosevelt's request to go in with the 8th Infantry, but Roosevelt had argued that having a general land in the first wave would boost morale for the troops. "They'll figure that if a general is going in, it can't be that rough." Roosevelt had also made a personal appeal, saying, "I would love to do this." Barton had reluctantly agreed.

Luck was with Company E. The German fixed fortifications at the intended landing site at exit 3 were far more formidable than those where the landing actually happened, at exit 2 opposite La Madeleine, thanks to the Marauder pounding the battery there had taken. The German troops in the area were from the 919th Regiment of the 709th Division. They had been badly battered by the

combined air and sea bombardment and were not firing their weapons. There was only some small-arms fire from riflemen in trenches in the sand dune just behind the four-foot concrete seawall.

In those trenches were the Germans driven from their fixed positions by the bombardment. Their leader was Lieutenant Jahnke. He looked out to sea and was amazed. "Here was a truly lunatic sight," he recalled. "I wondered if I were hallucinating as a result of the bombardment." What he saw was a DD tank. "Amphibious tanks! This must be the Allies' secret weapon." He decided to bring his own secret weapon into action, only to discover that his Goliaths would not function—the bombardment had destroyed the radio controls.

"It looks as though God and the world have forsaken us," Jahnke said to the runner by his side. "What's happened to our airmen?"
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At that instant, Sgt. Malvin Pike of E Company was coming in on a Higgins boat. He had a scare: "My position was in the right rear of the boat and I could hear the bullets splitting the air over our heads and I looked back and all I could see was two hands on the wheel and a hand on each .50-caliber machine gun, which the Navy guys were firing. I said to my platoon leader, Lieutenant Rebar-check, 'These guys aren't even looking where they are going or shooting.' About that time the coxswain stood up and looked at the beach and then ducked back down. The machine gunners were doing the same and we just prayed they would get us on the beach."