D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (93 page)

The
Kriegsmarine
was no better. Its submarines and cruisers were either in their pens or out in the North Atlantic, hunting merchant shipping. Except for one minor action by three E-boats, the
Kriegsmarine
made not a single attack on the greatest armada ever gathered.

The V-ls, on which Hitler had placed such high hopes and to which he had devoted so much of Germany's technological and

* A Wehrmacht joke had it that if the plane in the sky was silver it was American, if it was blue it was British, if it was invisible it was ours.

construction capacity, were not ready. When they were, a week after D-Day, he launched them against the wrong target.

The German's 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 their
Ost
battalions for their cause—even though nearly every one of the conscripted
Ost
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 asset for Germany, the young men of France, became an asset for the Allies, either as saboteurs in the factories or as members of the Resistance.

What Hitler regarded as the greatest German assets—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.

The contrast between men like Generals Roosevelt and Cota, Colonels Canham and Otway, Major Howard, Captain Daw-son, Lieutenants Spaulding and Winters, in adjusting and reacting to unexpected situations, 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 Colonel Heydte and a captain here, a lieutenant there, not one German officer reacted appropriately to the challenge of D-Day.

As darkness came on, the Allied troops ashore dug in, while the Allied air forces returned to England and the Allied armada prepared for the possibility of a Luftwaffe night attack. It came at 2300 and it typified the Luftwaffe's total ineffectiveness.

Josh Honan remembered and described it: "Suddenly everything started banging and we all went to see what it was, and it was a German reconnaissance plane. He wasn't all that high and he wasn't going all that fast. And he did a complete circle over the bay and every ship had every gun going and you never saw such a wall of tracer and flak and colored lights going up in your life and the German quite calmly flew all around over the bay, made another circle, and went home."
¹
*

Pvt. John Slaughter of the 116th Regiment, U.S. 29th Division, also described the scene: "After dark an enemy ME-109 fighter plane flew over the entire Allied fleet, from right to left and just above the barrage balloons. Every ship in the English Channel opened fire on that single airplane, illuminating the sky with millions of tracer bullets. The heroic Luftwaffe pilot defied all of them—not even taking evasive action. I wondered how he ever got through that curtain of fire."
²

All along the invasion front, men dug in. Capt. John Raaen of the 5th Ranger Battalion was outside Vierville, off Omaha Beach. "By now it was getting dark and it was necessary to organize ourselves for nighttime counterattacks and infiltration from the Germans," he said in his oral history. "Headquarters Company was in a small farmyard, located to the south of the road. At this point I learned my next mistake—I had not brought an entrenching tool.

"A French farmyard is more like brick than it is like dirt. For centuries animals have been pounding it down. The sun has been baking it. There was just no way that I could dig a hole to protect myself. The enlisted men had their entrenching tools and a couple of them offered to dig me a hole but I said, 'No. You go take care of yourselves. Dig your own holes and after you are safe and secure then you can give me your shovel and I will dig me a hole.'

"It was cold as the darkness came on us. I mean really cold. There was a haystack in the farmyard." Raaen decided to lie down in it. "I'm just a city boy. I learned a little bit about haystacks in French barnyards that night because it wasn't a haystack, it was a manure pile. I hardly had lain down in the warmth of that manure pile when I was covered with every kind of bug you could think of.

* Honan went on: "Now that convinced me of the absolute futility of antiaircraft fire. There was one plane and he flew quite a regular course at a medium altitude with about 20,000 guns firing at him and he did a second circle and went away home."

I came out of that thing slapping and swinging and pinching, doing all I could to rid me of all those vermin and biting bugs.

"I went to the farmhouse. Inside an old French woman was putting fagots on a fire. It was a very tiny fire." Lieutenant Van Riper, a platoon leader in Raaen's company, was there. "Van Riper and I spent the rest of the night warming our hands over that little tiny fire of fagots alongside that little old French woman. It was sort of an ignominious ending to a rather exciting day."

Pvt. Harry Parley, 116th Regiment, 29th Division, said in his oral history that "the last hours of June 6 are quite vivid in my memory. As darkness came, we found ourselves in a hedgerow-enclosed field. Dirty, hungry, and dog tired, with no idea as to where we were, we decided to dig in for the night. We could hear the far off sound of artillery and see the path of tracer fire arcing in the distance.

"As we spread out around the field, I found myself paired off with my sergeant. We started to dig a foxhole, but the ground was rock hard and we were both totally exhausted by the time the hole was about three inches deep. Finally, standing there in the dark, aware that it was useless to continue, my sergeant said, 'Fuck it, Parley. Let's just get down and get some rest.' And so, D-Day came to an end with both of us sitting back to back in the shallow trench throughout the night."
⁴

At Pegasus Bridge, the Ox and Bucks handed over to the Warwickshire Regiment. John Howard led his men through the dark toward Ranville. Jack Bailey found it hard to leave. "You see," he explained, "we had been there a full day and night. We rather felt that this was our bit of territory."
⁵

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 6,000 vessels in the Channel, and said, "Rex, take a look at this. You'll never see a sight like this again in your life."
⁶

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."
⁷

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 dol-lars."
⁸

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."
⁹

Admiral 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. [the American beaches] & anxiety exists as to the position on shore.

"Still on the whole we have very much to thank God for this day."
¹⁰

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 His 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.
¹¹

"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."
¹²