D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (62 page)

Forty-five years later, James Knight, an Army engineer on a demolition team who landed at 0630 at Fox Red, wrote a letter to the crew of the
Frankford,
published in the
U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings.
Knight said that he had been pinned down until, "at about 1000 or 1030, a destroyer loomed out of the sea . . . headed straight toward me. Even though she wasn't listing or smoking, my first thought was that she had either struck a mine or taken a torpedo and was damaged badly enough that she was being beached."

But the destroyer began to turn right. Before she was parallel to the beach she was blazing away with all her guns. Shells landed just a few feet over Knight's head. He watched her proceed westward along the beach, firing constantly. He expected to see her pull out to sea at any moment "when suddenly I realized she was backing up and her guns had yet to pause. She backed up almost to where she had started, went dead in the water for the second time . . . and again headed toward the other end of the beach, with all guns still blazing."

Over the years since D-Day, Knight tried to find out the name of the destroyer, but neither Ryan nor Morison nor any other author mentioned the incident (although Morison did say that
Frankford
went in closest that morning). Then Knight saw a notice of a reunion for the
Frankford
in the
VFW Magazine.
He attended the reunion, in 1989. There he confirmed that the destroyer that had so impressed and helped him was the
Frankford.

In his letter to the crew, Knight wrote, "Regardless of the time of arrival, nearly every living person on Omaha was pinned down from the time he reached the dune line until after you made your 'cruise.' Not long after you swung out to sea, there was movement on the beach, which eventually enabled the infantry to advance up the slope onto the flat land and beyond."
²³

The chief of staff of the 1st Division, Col. S. B. Mason, wrote Rear Adm. J. L. Hall on July 8, 1944, after an inspection of the German defenses at Omaha. Those defenses should have been impregnable, Mason wrote, and indeed the Germans had hurled back everything the Army had thrown at them. "But there was one

element of the attack they could not parry. ... I am now firmly convinced that our supporting naval fire got us in; that without that gunfire we positively could not have crossed the beaches."
²⁴

When Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow went ashore at 1900 hours on D-Day, to establish his V Corps headquarters on the beach, his first message back to General Bradley on
Augusta
was: "Thank God for the United States Navy!"
²⁵

The Navy was part of a team. Indispensable, obviously, especially the destroyers, but still just a part. Much hard fighting remained before the bluff and high ground could be secured even after
Frankford
and the others had expended virtually all their ammunition and withdrawn. What the Navy had done was to give the men on Omaha a fighting chance. It was up to the infantry to exploit it. The first task was to open those exits and relieve the traffic jam on the beach. To do that, the infantry had to get to the top and come down on the German defenders from the rear.

The outstanding job the Navy did of destroying German pillboxes on the bluff was matched by the outstanding job the Navy did of caring for the wounded. Medical care began on the beach, with men dragging the wounded out of the water to keep them from drowning in the rising tide. Chief Yeoman Garwood Bacon of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion was on an LCI that hit a mine at 0810 on Dog Green. Many were wounded; the craft was burning. With the other members of his team, Bacon got a rubber raft into the water; he got aboard while they pitched onto it a radio set and medical packs plus their weapons and ammunition. As machine-gun and rifle fire whined past their ears, they pushed the raft through the obstacles to shallow water, then unloaded the contents on the sand.

"Hey, Bacon," Seaman Johnakin called out, "do you think that we can make it out to the ship again? Some of those wounded guys will never make it ashore."

"I'll give it a try if you will," Bacon replied.

They tossed their packs, tommy guns, and helmets onto the beach, grabbed the raft, and began crawling backward out into deeper water, again dodging obstacles and trying to avoid bullets as they picked up wounded men from the water. "In a matter of a few minutes some fifteen wounded or nonswimmers were crammed into it or hanging on the outside of the raft, and with the help of free hands and feet flailing the water we all managed to reach shore once more where several able-bodied men helped to take the

wounded to the protection of the seawall and administer first aid wherever possible."
²⁶
An Army Signal Corps photographer took a snapshot of the scene; it became one of the best-known photos of Omaha Beach.

Bacon grabbed a carbine (someone had already picked up his tommy gun) and made his way to the shingle seawall. He saw a group of fifty or so men, "all prostrate on the sand or rocks. Thinking they were lying there held down by gunfire, I threw myself down between two soldiers and buried my face in the sand. Suddenly I realized there was no rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun whining overhead so I lifted my head cautiously and looked around. The sickening sight that met my eyes froze me on the spot. One of the men I had dropped between was headless, the other was blown half apart. Every last one of them was dead." He could render no first aid to dead men, so he set off in search of his party.
²⁷

German snipers would shoot at the Army medics (universally praised by the veterans of D-Day as the bravest of the brave) as they tried to tend wounded men on the beach who could not be moved. Wounded men who could be dragged to the seawall were treated by the medics as best they could, which wasn't much more than applying tourniquets, giving wounds a quick cleaning, applying sulfa and/or the new wonder drug penicillin (the U.S. pharmaceutical industry had produced a record-breaking 100 million units of penicillin the previous month
²⁸
), giving a shot of morphine, and waiting for an opportunity to take the man by litter down to a landing craft that was going back to the mother ship for another load.

Seaman O'Neill and a beach engineer carried a stretcher to O'Neill's LCT. When they set the litter down, O'Neill saw that one side of the wounded man's face was gone. "His eyeball and teeth and jawbone were plainly visible. It looked like one of those medical drawings or a model. I asked him how he was doing. He said he felt OK."

O'Neill continued to bear the stretcher until his LCT was jammed with wounded. An Army medic and the cook on the LCT took over. The medic had some blood plasma, but his supply was soon exhausted. As the LCT moved out toward the transport area, where the wounded could be transferred to a hospital ship, O'Neill heard the medic say, "This man's going to need some plasma or else he isn't going to make it."

"There isn't any more," the cook said, tears in his eyes.

They were still an hour and a half away from the hospital ship. When they finally got there, the ship was ready for them, with booms rigged to load litters. The LCT tied up alongside; hospital corpsmen came off the ship and aboard the LCT with medical supplies of all types. One by one, the wounded were lifted by litter to the ship.
²⁹

Time was the great danger to the wounded. Pain could be endured or handled—a combination of shock and morphine helped (when a medic or a GI administered a shot of morphine he would tag the man so that another soldier coming along later would not give a second shot)—but loss of blood could not. But if the flow could be stopped and the man put into a doctor's hands on a hospital ship, the chances of survival were good.

The crews on the landing craft did their best to get the wounded to treatment. Sgt. Stanley Borkowski of the 5th ESB was running a DUKW back and forth from a Liberty ship to the beach, carrying cargo. On the return trips he brought wounded to the hospital ship, which was anchored about two miles out. "I do not wish to comment about the wounded soldiers," Borkowski said in his oral history, his voice choking with the thought of what he had seen. "I was glad to get them to the hospital. My prayers are always with them."*
⁰

The LCI on which correspondent A. J. Liebling of the
New Yorker
was riding picked up some wounded men from Omaha Beach to take out to a hospital ship. Three of them had to be sent up in wire baskets, "vertically, like Indian papooses. A couple of Negroes on the upper deck dropped a line which our men made fast to the top of one basket after another. Then the man would be jerked up in the air by the Negroes as if he were going to heaven.

"A Coast Guardsman reached up for the bottom of one basket so that he could steady it on its way up. At least a quart of blood ran down on him, covering his tin hat, his upturned face, and his blue overalls. ... A couple of minutes after the last litter had been hoisted aboard, an officer leaned over the rail and shouted down, 'Medical officer in charge says two of these men are dead. He says you should take them back to the beach and bury them.' A sailor on deck said, 'The son of a bitch ought to see that beach.' " The skipper of the LCI refused the absurd order.
³¹

Seaman Ferris Burke was a sixteen-year-old on LST 285, which served as a hospital ship. "The doctors were outstanding,"

he recalled. "Just unbelievable. They worked for hours, amputating arms and legs, removing shrapnel, patching bullet wounds, and trying to calm down some men who were completely out of their minds."

Burke had an awful experience for a sixteen-year-old (or anyone else for that matter). He remembered Dr. Slattery asking him to go down to the shipfitter's shop and get half a dozen pieces of angle iron, two feet long. Burke did. When he returned with the metal Dr. Slattery told him to tape the arms and legs he had amputated to the metal and throw them overboard. Later, when Burke told the shipfitter what he had used the angle iron for, the shipfitter was "a bit upset because he had given me very good metal. He said if he had known what the doctor wanted the metal for he would have given me some scrap from around the shop instead of the good stuff."
³²

There were many heartbreaking scenes. Pharmacist Mate Frank Feduik recalled administering morphine to a GI on the deck of an LST. He was lying on a stretcher. "He suddenly raised his body and let out an awful yell. He had realized that his right leg was missing. I pushed him back down and I remember him saying, 'What am I gonna do? My leg, I'm a farmer.' "
³³

War creates many strange juxtapositions, perhaps none stranger than this: men who are doing their utmost to kill other men can transform in a split second into lifesavers. Soldiers who encounter a wounded man (often an enemy) become tender, caring angels of mercy. The urge to kill and the urge to save sometimes run together simultaneously.

Captain Palmer on
Harding
was prowling just off the beach, blazing away with every gun on his ship. Palmer was described by Lieutenant Gentry as a man full of "autistic energy and nervous tension." The medical officer on
Harding
was a Dr. McKenzie. At 1024 McKenzie had persuaded Palmer to cease firing long enough to launch the ship's boat so that he could go ashore to render medical aid to wounded men on a Higgins boat that had been hit. Upon completion of that duty, although under intense rifle and machine-gun fire, McKenzie had the ship's boat take him to a DUKW holding some wounded so that he could tend to them. Then he returned to
Harding.

On board, McKenzie faced an emergency. Ens. Robert Reetz had acute appendicitis. Only an immediate operation could

save his life. McKenzie asked Palmer to cease fire so that he could operate. Palmer reluctantly agreed. After a half hour or so, Palmer sent Lieutenant Gentry down to the wardroom that had been converted to an operating room to see what was holding things up. McKenzie told Gentry he had given Reetz "enough anesthesia for two people but still couldn't get him quieted down enough to operate." Ens. William Carter was there, along with three others trying to hold Reetz down. (Carter remembered that "Dr. McKenzie had promised for months to let me assist in an operation; this was the first major one and he called for me to assist.") The overhead light was out; Carter held a lantern with one hand and Reetz with the other. It took another forty-five minutes for the anesthesia to do its work, "with the captain calling down every five minutes for a progress report," as Gentry put it. Finally, after one and a half hours, the operation was successfully completed. Captain Palmer let go a "Thank God" and ordered all guns to commence firing.
³⁴

The medics were not the only men on the beach whose job was not to destroy but to preserve. The Army Signal Corps and the Coast Guard sent photographers ashore to record the battle. These were the men on the beach who carried only cameras and black-and-white film. They went in with the first waves.*

Perhaps the bravest and certainly the best known that day was Robert Capa of
Life
magazine, who went into Omaha with Company E in the second wave. His craft mislanded at Easy Red. Capa was last off. He paused on the ramp to take a photograph. The coxswain "mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear." Capa got behind an obstacle and shot a roll of film. He dashed forward to gain the protection of a burned-out tank in waist-deep water. He wanted to get to the seawall "but I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards." He stayed behind the tank, repeating a sentence he had learned in the Spanish Civil War (where he had taken one of the best-known photographs of combat in the Twentieth Century, of a soldier just as he got hit in the chest):
"Es una cosa muy seria. Es una cosa muy seria."
("This is a very serious business.")