Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (12 page)

As our landing craft was putting in towards shore, we were all attacked at one time or another, in my case mostly by random firing. Some others, though were targeted and plenty of crafts were shelled. We passed men trying to tread water with all their gear, most of them failing to stay above water. I knew they wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long and I was praying that somebody would stop to pick them up. Our skipper said he couldn’t because he was ordered not to. I could only hope that if he were ordered not to pick them up, someone else had orders to rescue them. I prayed they’d be picked up and put onto our beach since from all the noise and explosions going on, I knew we’d need all the help we could get. We saw the gates and posts with mines tied to them as we came closer to the shore and we prayed even harder that the frogmen who came in before us did their job so we wouldn’t be blown out of the water before we even got a chance to fight.

Hey, guess what? In case this is news to you, we got a general who landed with us. Yep. Our Division Commander is General Theodore Roosevelt and he was already on the beach waving his gosh darn cane at everyone when I landed. I found out we landed way off course which is probably why I heard him say something like, “we’re going to start the war from here.” I guess we were supposed to run up the beach further north but ended up running up the beach over to the south. As we’re running, we attacked the enemy batteries and observation posts. I really thought we must have woken those Kraut sons of guns up because I was expecting much worse than we got. Don’t get me wrong, big brother. It was plenty bad and I saw some guys buy the farm that shouldn’t have. I kept thinking that if just one of those bullets or shells had my name on it, I wouldn’t be writing to you anymore. I’d never see mom and pop again, Frank, and I’d miss seeing your ugly puss too.

But anyway, my mission was putting those pillboxes out of commission. As we were running towards those terrifying emplacements, we looked for the landmarks we were supposed to see while we moved off the beaches. Not a gosh darn one was there Frank, because that storm knocked us off course. We had to blindly run towards those Nazi jerks in their hidden bunkers before they got another one of us. We were supposed to find and silence whatever we could. I almost tripped over one pillbox it was so well hidden. Me and another guy took care of it though with a couple of well placed grenades. I also got a couple of those creeps who were stupid enough to try to run. A couple of the other guys took some German prisoners. Glad they were out of commission. As we were running and firing, there was Jerry fire coming from all directions but some guys finally got to their batteries and a couple of flame throwers got them out, all right! I saw concrete bunkers, pillboxes, anti-tank guns and rocket launching tubes and about a thousand machine gun nests on the way off the beach. Why they weren’t better manned is a mystery to me, but it kept a whole bunch of us from getting killed, that’s a sure bet.

Hey, remember Michael from Everglade Street? I met him when we were embarking but found out he didn’t make it off the beach. Poor bastard. Was he still going with Lynn? Bet she’s bawling her eyes out now.

I got exactly 12 more seconds to write this cuz we’re moving out again. I’m just glad I made it this far Frankie. When I landed, there was so much confusion and shooting, so much smoke and erupting sand and so much noise and so many dead soldiers, I thought I was going to crack. I was plenty scared Frank, but I made it. Keep praying for me Brother.

Harold

As the day progressed, General Eisenhower devoured every single report of news from the front. I know he planned to the best he and our staff were humanly able to plan but war is hell and nothing goes according to plans. I saw him pen a short statement which was to be read in the event the landings failed and the Allieds were, in fact, forced back to the sea. It said,
“Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy, did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.”
Thank God he did not have to read that! Because, as the reports began trickling in, it seemed the landings, all except for “Bloody Omaha”, had gone better than expected. And of all the reports I saw, one of the best concerned the Canadians who were within three miles of their objective which was to take and hold the city of Caen.

The proud Canadians who were to land on Juno along with the British troops who landed on Sword Beach had the task of capturing Caen. The plan was for the Canuck infantry to march along with their tanks and capture the town. Since precious few tanks made it ashore as planned, some of the men started walking to Caen, a mere 10 miles inland. A couple of other Brit units made it there in time to offer some support and we learned that they succeeded in knocking out more than a dozen Kraut tanks, but without heavy artillery support, I don’t know how they were planning to capture, let alone hold, the city. Personally, I thought that there were still too many avenues available to the goddamn Krauts to reinforce their defending troops. But this ended up being a moot point since Caen was not taken on the first day though they came damn close. I cannot begin to express how happy I am, hell we all were, about the Canadians on Juno. I’m guessing they had a huge score to settle after Dieppe where the Germans routed them in August of ‘42.

Remember Dieppe? The Canucks were ordered to land their troops on the shore of that French port city to wrest control of it from the heavily fortified Germans protecting the port. I know everyone’s heart broke when so many of the Canadian troops were either killed or taken prisoner while coming to shore. I remember hearing that one battalion from Toronto had just about 550 soldiers who attempted the raid but more than 225 of them were killed and only about 30 escaped. The rest became prisoners. The rest of the Canadian battalions at Dieppe didn’t fare much better. I remember hearing that one unit lost 97% of its men. Exact figures have varied in the last two years of just how many casualties the Canadians suffered in that mayhem but I think a conservative estimate is that of the approximately 5,000 Canadians who set off to conquer Dieppe, only about 2,100 got home to talk about it. There are still about 1,900 POWs and the rest got killed, poor Bastards. So that’s why I think all of Canada was holding its national breath for success on DDay, to make sure they didn’t suffer another disaster during their landing at Juno Beach. And these guys are all volunteers! They don’t have to draft a single soldier. When word came that not only did the Canadians not suffer any sort of a defeat but they kicked the shit out of the Germans they encountered, that collective breath had to have changed into a national sigh of relief and pride. So with that huge success and the fact that the air drops had far fewer casualties than predicted, we were all so goddamn relieved it was like we could breathe again. We also got word that our guys on Utah met up, as scheduled, with the guys of the 82
^nd
Airborne. You win some, you lose some but this one was not rained out.

June 8, 1944

Hi Frankie,

I just wrote to you yesterday but it seems like a month ago. I wanted to tell you that I now know what “Infantry” means. It means marching your kiester off in the worst conditions possible. When we left our landing beach, we got our new orders to move to the town of Sainte Mere Eglise, wherever the heck that is. Alls I know is that its north and west of the beach and on dry ground. No wait… There was NO dry ground! We were getting attacked left and right and although there were planes dropping bombs to cover our march, the ground was nothing but a swamp if it wasn’t a river. Try marching in that crap! Your boots suck to the ground and I was exhausted not only from that exertion but from the move itself which was pure HELL. I thought we were trained but NO ONE expected what we encountered! Those Krauts were hiding in fields fenced off with trees and every time we left the cover of those trees, we were raked with machine gun fire from the fields surrounded by those gosh darn trees. The Krauts hid themselves pretty darn good let me tell you. We lost a lot of guys Frank and it makes me so mad. I got a couple of my own and it felt good. Each one of them that goes down means a better chance for our guys to stay up.

We were told we are to link up at Ste. Mere Eglise with the paratroops who are supposed to be holding the town and we’re on our way now to a little town named Poop Ville or something like that. Why don’t they get it over with and just call it Shit City? It’s the first town right off of the road we took off the beach. It had to be cleared of a bunch of Krauts but I guess whoever got here before us did a pretty darn good job. When I got here, all I saw were Kraut prisoners and orange recognition panels so the good guys don’t drop bombs on us. I heard that it was like taking a page out of a playbook. If only all the towns are taken like this one was.

After this, we’re heading to the Cotton Peninsula or however you pronounce it. It’s torture, that’s all I know. I’ll write soon and it wouldn’t kill you to try to get a letter to me too, you know? I love you Brother.

Harold

Another win for the good guys. And over to the east, another positive report involved the troops on British Gold Beach who were to capture Arromanches which they did that night. They were then under orders to move on to capture Bayeux where they were to build an artificial harbor which we desperately need until a natural port city can be taken. Our earliest reports from the morning of DDay showed that they too ran into difficulty, much of it caused by the current which diverted them from their assigned landing spots. Luckily for them, the prior naval and air bombardments were reasonably successful and we learned that two huge gun batteries had been silenced. Gold Beach had achieved its objectives and that was a huge relief to us, knowing we now had delivery port capabilities. It’s near here that PLUTO lines are to be installed so that we can bring fuel directly to France “under the Ocean.”

As we did over Gold, we did over the other beaches. We flew over 12,000 air runs on DDay, all looking for objects of opportunity. These runs succeeded in impeding at least some German reserve movement because of destroyed bridges and railroad tracks. We continued to knock out blockhouses and radar stations and just generally wreaked as much havoc on the enemy as we could bring to bear. And here’s the best part. For all the glories of the goddamn Jerry Luftwaffe, we didn’t get a single report that even one of our planes had to engage an enemy aircraft. There were some runs over Calais and I am sure we have Fortitude to thank for that. If we own the sky, half of our battle is already won. We’ll scare the everlovin’ shit out of the Krauts on the ground. If they want to move at all, they’ll have to do it either in groups of one or they can try moving columns of whatever they have left at night, unless of course our night bombers find their sorry German asses.

We also watched Sword Beach by Caen since that was going to be a critical objective. The 6
^th
British Airborne was to prevent any and all counterattacks to the beach as well as to neutralize a large German gun battery at Merville. The plan called for one British Parachute Battalion to wait just outside the perimeter of the gun battery while three gliders landed, causing enough confusion among the German defenders that the waiting men could get into the battery and silence it. For three separate reasons the three gliders never made it to the rendezvous point so Lt. Colonel Otway ordered his men to go without the diversion. We were apprised of the operation only later but it seems the men ran across a live mine field causing the loss of many lives and those who made it found themselves reduced to fighting in hand to hand combat with the Kraut bastards in the battery. We were told that Otway’s men forced those sons of bitches to surrender and of Otway’s 150 original men, just about half were able to make it back with their prisoners. The guns were destroyed though, and I have to think that saved the lives of many other sons and husbands. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be in God’s shoes to have to decide who lives and who doesn’t.

Those British Paratroopers were then to proceed to the bridges near Caen to take them out so that the Germans could not use them to bring in reinforcements. Other gliders had dropped the 2
^nd
Battalion of British paratroopers by the two bridges. One was over the Caen canal and one was over the Orne River. Both these bridges were critically needed so that the incoming troops could establish bridgeheads for future operations. The Brits ran across the Canal Bridge and while suffering the first casualties of the Normandy Beach invasions, they captured that bridge intact. That was the bridge they named Pegasus. A second bridge was also taken and we later received reports that neither bridge had even been rigged with dynamite so the Krauts could blow them up rather than let them fall into our welcoming hands. The paratroopers held the bridges they captured until relieved by the British infantry who landed on Sword. Bridges across other rivers and other canals had to be blown by our engineers to prevent the Jerries from bringing up any support. It was reported these objectives were also met. Good job, Lads.

Less than four hours after the invasion began, when we were fairly certain that the landings themselves had at least a shot at being successful, Ike asked me to draft a short news bulletin to be read over the radio, presumably because he had other things to attend to. It was hard to come up with something simple and sweet when I knew this landing was history making and carried so much hope and inspiration with it. Still I wrote the following, almost all of which SHAEF allowed to be broadcast: “Under the command of General Eisenhower, Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces, began landing my brother Harold with other Allied armies, this morning, on the northern coast of France.” Other than the Harold part, they read it just like I wrote it.

By end of DDay, we calculated that about 170,000 fighting soldiers were in France and more would be coming every day. We held, albeit gingerly, about 25 miles of beachfront property, less than 10 miles at its deepest. It was true that only two beach heads achieved their initial objectives when the Canadians from Juno met up with the British from Gold and the Americans from Utah met up with the paratroopers in Ste. Mere Eglise. This was not as much as Monty expected. Nevertheless, I’d never seen a more relieved headquarters and the sense of subdued euphoria was so thick, you could have cut it with a knife. We did it. But between the coastal conquests in France and the conquest of Germany 400 miles away lay a great many more battles. But we had plans for almost all of them.