The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (15 page)

Roy Stevens’s boat was number five of the seven. His brother Ray’s was number two. Roy looked around, trying to spot his brother. He was desperate by now to wish him good luck, slap him on the back, buoy his spirits, tell him they’d be back in Bedford soon working their farm together. Roy knew that now, more than ever, Ray needed all the encouragement he could get.

Nearby in the darkness, Roy saw an obviously distressed Jack Powers, the powerfully built, normally unflappable ex-Ranger whose brother Clyde was in Roy’s boat team. Roy was surprised by Jack’s behavior. Jangling nerves had gotten the better of him: “He was just carrying on, all nervous. Things were very tense. Everybody was ready to go, ready to do something at last.”
²²
Stevens looked around. It seemed that the men fell into two groups. Those who had already decided they were “going to die,” and those who hoped “to make it through.”
²³

Roy suddenly stumbled into his twin, Ray. All the other Bedford boys were shaking hands, wishing each other luck.

Ray stuck out his hand for Roy to shake.

Roy refused it.

“I’ll shake your hand in Vierville sur Mer,” he said, “up at the crossroads above the beach, later this morning sometime.”

Ray bowed his head and held out his hand again.

“I’m not gonna make it.”
²⁴

Of course he would. Roy still refused to shake Ray’s hand. He’d do it later . . . after they’d crossed Omaha Beach.

Since Company A would land on Omaha Beach first, its men were first to leave the ship. Their British-made landing craft hung above the choppy water, at the same level as the deck. They did not have to climb down nets and ropes as later waves of troops would do. On command, the men formed up in their boat teams and simply walked across a narrow metal gangplank, a yard in length, and then clambered into the boats that would deliver them to the most heavily defended beach in history.

Twenty-year-old Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and Roy Stevens stepped into their craft, LCA 911. “Gearing was just a kid with a buzz cut but you never realized it,” recalled John Barnes, a fellow member of their boat crew. “He had been to a military academy in Virginia and was the kind who just took charge, was sympathetic to all the men, a very good officer.”
²⁵
The kind of officer thirty older men would follow, possibly to their deaths. “[Gearing] didn’t stand back and tell you what to do,” recalled Roy Stevens. “He did it. He was a leader.”
²⁶

Roy directed the boat team to its positions. His buddy, Clyde Powers, took a position on one of the three rows of benches for the men to sit down. Powers’s uncle, Sergeant Harold Wilkes, lumbered aboard, his assault jacket crammed with a quarter pound of TNT, K rations, and a medical kit containing morphine. John Barnes went to the back of the boat and took his seat beside the flamethrower, a normally cheerful and slightly built young man from Tennessee named Russell Pickett. “Guys were hollering back and forth at each other once the boats were hanging out there,” Barnes remembered. “The men just stepped over the
Empire
Javelin
’s rail into their boats. I think Roy Stevens shouted out to his brother. Everybody had buddies in different boats.”
²⁷

Sub-Lieutenant Green stood in LCA 910, giving orders to his coxswain. Captain Fellers stood a few feet to his left side. As more men boarded, Green was struck by how they struggled to even stand upright in the swaying boat, their packs stuffed with over sixty pounds of kit. “They had far too much weight. I don’t know why the first wave did not go in light. We had worked before with British commandos, and they would not have gone in so heavily weighed down.”
²⁸

A gale was blowing. At 4:30 A.M., winches began to lower the craft into the water. Suddenly, boat number 911 hit Green’s astern.
²⁹
There didn’t appear to be any damage. It was difficult in the swells to unhook the craft from the mother ship. “We didn’t want to get bashed against the ship’s side or capsize,” recalled Green. “It was straightforward in calm conditions but not in the dark in a gale.”
³⁰

A landing craft carrying a group of the 116th Infantry’s senior officers would later get stuck for thirty minutes just below the
Javelin
’s sewage outlet. “During this half-hour,” recalled one of the officers, “the bowels of the ship’s company made the most of an opportunity that Englishmen have sought since 1776. Yells from the boat were unavailing. Streams, colored everything from canary yellow to sienna brown and olive green, continued to flush into the command group, decorating every man aboard. We cursed, we cried, and we laughed, but it kept coming. When we started for shore, we were all covered with shit.”
³¹

As Company A’s landing craft formed up, Jimmy Green’s coxswain in LCA 910 suddenly heard a beep through his voice pipe. The stoker down below had bad news. They were taking on water—the earlier collision had damaged the boat after all. Green scrambled along the deck to have a look. Water gushed into LCA 910’s engine room through a small hole. Green alone had Company A’s course and other vital landing instructions. He decided to continue, confident that his signalman could keep them afloat, using a hand pump, long enough to make the beach and get back.

John Barnes stood a few feet from Roy Stevens in LCA 911. “Once we were in the water and away, we all waved at the men in other boats, and they waved back. We were confident that we would get across that beach.”
³²
From the
Empire Javelin
’s deck, the seas had looked cold and choppy. Now, as Roy Stevens hunched down in 911, the slapping waves felt violent and ominous: “I never saw water that bad. [The seas] were just rolling and rolling, and there were white caps way out where we were, [12 miles] from the coast. It was really, really rough.”
³³

Other Bedford boys began to wonder whether they would get to France, let alone across Omaha Beach.

T
HE 116TH’S 1ST BATTALION
headed for the beach in waves of LCAs. In each LCA, a British coxswain steered the craft from a cockpit that had light armor-plating. Sub-Lieutenant Jimmy Green stood right besides his coxswain in LCA 910.
¹
“The coxswain was connected by a voice pipe to the stoke hold, where a stoker operated two powerful petrol engines. The stoker had to be small and extremely agile to get into the hold through a small hole on the aft deck. There were two other crew members—one forward and one aft—to unhook the boat from the main ship, and the other to lower the landing-craft doors and work the boat’s anchor.”

Green had been ordered to keep radio silence until he landed Captain Fellers and his boat team. As his flotilla formed up, he checked his watch. H-Hour for Company A was 6:36 A.M.; he had just over two hours to get to Omaha Beach.

The direct route to the beach was approximately twelve miles but Green had to steer a “diagonal course,” making the total journey close to twenty miles. The LCAs could move at about 10 knots in good conditions but now the seas were, if anything, rougher than when Eisenhower had postponed the invasion. Nevertheless, Green was confident he would get Company A to Omaha on time.

Green gave the order for Company A’s six boats to approach the beach in two columns of three craft. Whenever he looked over his shoulder, he could see Fellers and his men sitting in tense, glum silence. “They were just boys, pleasant, fresh-faced country boys. They looked like nice lads on a trip around the bay. The rest of [the British seamen in] our flotilla also thought they were a nice bunch. But not assault troops in the sense that they were heavily laden with 60 pounds of equipment.”
²

The two columns of three boats ploughed ahead. Green kept his eyes fixed on a landing-craft control boat guiding him towards France. So long as Company A’s craft followed the control boat, it would stay on the right course. Green had taken a tour of the boat and been impressed by its state of the art navigational devices, including one of the first radar sets: “a magnificent piece of equipment that even showed the contours of land.”

Five miles from France, the Control boat broke away, signaling: “You’re on the right course. There it is.” Company A was on its own. Green checked his course as the flotilla plowed forward, bucking in the swells, men now puking into paper bags and even their helmets.

Suddenly, Green came upon a group of LCTs [Landing Craft Tanks] carrying tanks destined for Omaha Beach. In the heavy seas, they were making very slow progress.

“What are they doing here?” asked Green.

“They’re supposed to go in ahead of us,” replied Fellers.

“But they won’t get there in time for six thirty,” said Green. “I think we might have to go ahead of them. Is that all right?”

“Yes. We must get there on time.”
³

The tanks were supposed to lead the first wave up the beach and were essential to destroying resistance and providing Company A with cover: The men could cluster behind them as they advanced and fired on German positions. Without the tanks, Company A would have only craters blown in the beach from air and naval bombardment for protection.

In the far distance, Green spotted what looked like land. A few minutes later, Omaha Beach started to take form. In the murky light, the tidal waters off the beach looked as unforgiving as those out in the channel. Company A still cruised forward in two columns of three. It occurred to Green that the legendary British Admiral, Horatio Nelson, had employed the same formation at the battle of Trafalgar in 1805, the greatest naval engagement of the Napoleonic Wars.

Eleven miles out at sea, a troopship carrying the second wave from the 29th, USS
Charles Carroll
, pitched and rolled in heavy swells. Colonel Charles Canham and Brigadier General Norman Cota struggled down a cargo net slung over the boat’s side and boarded LCVP 71 (landing craft, vehicles and personnel). They were scheduled to land at 7.30 A.M. on Dog White, several hundred yards to the east of the Vierville sur Mer draw.
⁴

Three miles from the beach, Company A heard a massive explosion. The men looked to their right, westward. The battleship
Texas
was firing at Omaha; when the ship’s enormous fourteen-inch guns erupted, shock waves threatened to swamp the boats. By now, severely seasick men, including John Schenk, barely had the strength to bail with their helmets. Some had collapsed with exhaustion.

Just after 6 A.M., Lieutenant Ray Nance peered through a narrow slot at the bow of his LCA. A pall of smoke hung like a storm cloud over the beach, obscuring many of the bluffs. Nance closed the slot, keeping his head down. A few feet from Nance, John Clifton struggled to repair his radio set. The antenna had broken off in heavy seas. Should he abandon it? Nance told him to bring it along and they would repair it later on the beach. Without radios, there was little chance of setting up Company A’s first command post. Clifton shouldered the broken set. Medic Cecil Breeden, broadfaced, five-foot-ten-inches, 180 pounds, sat nearby. A red cross was emblazoned on an arm-band and a canvas shoulder bag that was crammed with medical supplies.
⁵

In LCA 911, Roy Stevens watched a volley of rockets flash overhead. “Take a good look!” a man shouted. “This is something you will tell your grandchildren!”

“Sure, if we live,” thought John Barnes.
⁶

“There was a lovely firework display,” recalled Jimmy Green. “The rockets went up in the air and then down in the sea about a mile off the shore, nowhere near the coast. They killed a few fish but that was about it. I was furious. They’d come all that way just to misfire. Doing, doing, doing! Bang, bang, bang! It woke those Germans up who didn’t know we were already coming, but that was it.”
⁷

The question as to whether or not the planned naval bombardment with rockets and shells was woefully inadequate remains highly controversial to this day. Many after-action navy reports confirmed that the bombing did have an effect. Guns had been identified all along Omaha and in some sections were destroyed. But in the most heavily defended areas most Germans had survived.

Out at sea, a British coxswain gunned LCA 911’s engines.

“We’re on our way in,” someone said.

Stevens said a prayer. Most of the men beside him were so seasick they did not seem to care if they lived or died. Mortars and artillery fire began to drop into the seas. In Stevens’s boat were fellow Bedford boys Harold Wilkes, Charles Fizer, and Clyde Powers.

“We’re sinking!”
⁸

Water gushed into LCA 911. Stevens whipped off his helmet and began to bail frantically. John Barnes glimpsed the spire of Vierville sur Mer’s church. Then the front of 911 disappeared beneath the waves. Barnes felt the craft fall away below. He squeezed the CO-2 tubes in his life belt but as he did so the belt flew away. The buckle had broken. He turned and grabbed a man nearby and managed to keep himself from going under by climbing on the man’s back.
⁹

At the head of the flotilla, Jimmy Green heard a man shout for help and turned around just in time to see LCA 911 go under. His orders were not to stop and pick up men from the water. In any case, his boat did not have space for the men from 911. “I’ll be back,” Green shouted.
¹⁰

Roy Stevens could barely swim and was soon struggling to keep his head above water, weighed down by sixty pounds of kit as well as his assault jacket, sodden and crammed with ammunition, which now fit so well he couldn’t get rid of it. Stevens gulped sea water between desperate breaths and then grabbed hold of a Bangalore torpedo. Somehow, he managed to stay afloat.

Clyde Powers was a good swimmer, having spent many summer days as a boy plunging into swimming holes and on the shores of Bedford County Lake, a few miles from Bedford: “It was quite a bunch of the thirty that couldn’t swim. I would say it was eight or nine who couldn’t swim [despite having tried to learn in England].”
¹¹
Those who could swim, like Powers and his uncle Harold Wilkes, did their best to prop up those who couldn’t. Every man wore an inflatable Mae West but their assault jackets and packs were so heavy when soaked that even men who could swim had to kick hard simply to keep their heads above water.

“I’m drowning!”
¹²
one of the men suddenly shouted. Stevens turned and saw his boat team’s radio operator, Private James Padley. A wave slapped Stevens in the face. He wiped salt water from his eyes. Padley was gone.

Aboard LCA 910, men could now see vague outlines of defensive installations and other landmarks. Jimmy Green spotted some “nasty looking pillboxes along the coast.” One looked particularly lethal, positioned on the beach at the bottom of the D-1 Vierville draw. “If there’s anybody in there,” Green thought, “we’ve had it.”

Green turned to Fellers.

“This is where we’re going to land, is that OK?”

“Yes. Land me this side [west] of the draw and the others on the other side.”
¹³

Green gave the command to approach at full speed. He still couldn’t see any Germans but everybody knew they were now ready and waiting in some strength because mortars started to splash around them with much greater frequency.

Suddenly, off to Green’s left, an LCA was hit by an antitank rifle bullet which ripped through just above the water line, tearing off Frank Draper’s upper arm as he sat in the middle of the craft. “I was later told that the other men tried to get Frank to lay down he was bleeding so bad,” recalled Draper’s sister, Verona. “But he wouldn’t do it. He kept trying to stand.”
¹⁴
Finally, Draper fell to the floor awash with vomit and dirty sea water and began to lose consciousness.

Jimmy Green looked at the pillbox looming at the mouth of the D-1 draw. He checked his watch. It was 6:25 A.M. He then saw something moving along the top of Omaha Beach. “It looked to me like a steam train going along say from Vierville to Cherbourg—along the coast. I thought: ‘That’s strange—in the middle of all this lot, they’re still running a train!’”

There was a loud bang in Green’s right ear. He turned to see an LCG (landing craft gun) with 4.7-inch guns. It suddenly let rip with a barrage that hit the pillbox at the base of the D-1 draw and appeared to damage it significantly. “If there’s somebody in there,” thought Green, “they’ve had it.”
¹⁵

The LCG fired again and then disappeared as fast as it had arrived. After the ear-splitting naval barrage and the rocket display, it was suddenly eerily quiet. There were the steady plops of mortars landing in the water and the odd antitank round but little else. It seemed they were still out of range of rifle and machine-gun fire.
¹⁶

Several hundred yards behind Green, out at sea, 911’s boat team were struggling to keep from drowning. “Our heads bobbed up above the surface of the water,” John Barnes recalled. “We could still see some other boats moving on to the shore.”
¹⁷
Barnes grabbed for anything that might help him stay alive—an M-1 carbine wrapped in a flotation belt, and then a flamethrower that was floating around with two belts wrapped around it. The water was freezing, numbing his hands and feet.

Barnes hugged the flamethrower for dear life. He heard the shouts of other men. Then Lieutenant Gearing was at his side, a fierce look of determination on his face. He grabbed Barnes by his assault jacket, whipped out a bayonet, and cut the straps to Barnes’s pack. Others swam over and helped free Barnes of over sixty pounds of deadly ballast. Barnes kicked his legs and found that he was now able to keep his head above water.

There was a head count. Just one man was missing—Padley, the radio operator. He’d gone down with a forty-pound SCR 300 radio strapped to his back. Roy Stevens still clutched at his Bangalore torpedo. At the crest of waves he could see Omaha Beach and the remaining five landing craft carrying Company A. They were closing on the beach.

In LCA 910, Jimmy Green scanned the fast approaching sands. He had expected to see craters blown all along the beach—the result of the bombing that was planned to precede the landing. But there were none, and the bluffs above looked unharmed.

Three hundred twenty-nine Liberator bombers had indeed dropped 13,000 bombs between 05:55 and 06:14 A.M., but because of thick cloud cover and fear of hitting incoming troops, their bombs landed well inland. The bombs killed plenty of cows and some local French residents but left the sands of Omaha and its defenders unscathed. Indeed, Omaha was as “flat as a pancake,” in Green’s words.

The Bedford boys’ hearts sank.

Even if the bombs had hit the beach, there would have been no craters for shelter: Most of the bombs were 100-pound devices designed for high fragmentation and had “instantaneous fuses” that would “prevent cratering of the beach and consequent delay in the movement of traffic across it.”
¹⁸
Yet the Bedford boys had been assured that there would be craters.

Green gave the hand signal for Company A to make the final run to the beach. His craft touched bottom about thirty yards from the shoreline and then bucked up and down in heavy surf. He opened the doors, lowered the ramp, and then turned to Fellers: “Good luck.”

Fellers thanked Green for getting the men in on time.

The armor-plated door leading onto the ramp opened. Fellers stood, exited, and then clambered down the ramp. The middle row filed after him. “They went out in very good order,” recalled Green. “They didn’t need to be ushered out and about—they knew what they had to do.”
¹⁹