The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice (17 page)

Nance positioned his body so he was facing the machine gun head on, providing less of a target. If he did get hit, it would be over quick— a shot to the head. He looked at his rifle; it was useless. Wet sand had gotten into the workings.

Nance held his breath as the sound of the bullets got louder. Then his body began to shake with terror. Another burst of bullets. He looked to his right—a Company A rifleman was up on his feet and sprinting, trying to escape the machine gun volleys. Nance recognized the runner. It was twenty-two-year-old John Reynolds. Reynolds stopped, knelt down and raised his rifle to return fire. He never got to pull the trigger. Nance saw him fall dead.

Finally, the bullets stopped spitting across the beach towards Nance. Perhaps the Germans had found another runner. There was no retreat for any man on D-Day—he had to push on. Nance crawled forward, aiming for a cliff-face three hundred yards away. Suddenly his right foot felt like Frank Draper Jr. had hit it with a baseball bat. Part of his heel had been shot away. Bullets again stitched the sand, again heading in his direction. “They came so close,” recalled Nance. “Then, suddenly, when I thought there was no more hope, I looked up in the sky. I didn’t see anything up there. But I felt something settle over me. I got this warm feeling. I felt as if somehow I was going to live.”
¹³

Nance lay as still as he could, hoping the machine gunner would think he was dead. But even corpses were now targets for the Germans above Dog Green. “That machine gunner just wouldn’t let me be. He’d send a line of bullets my way, pass on to another target then come back for me again, like he was playing cat and mouse.”
¹⁴
Nance tried in vain to dig a shallow foxhole in the sand and shingle with his hands. Then he spotted a tidal pool. It looked deep enough for a man to disappear beneath its surface.

Nance crawled as fast as he could, slithering into the pool’s tepid waters. He filled his lungs and ducked down. Suddenly, a bullet pierced the strap on his World War I binocular case. Nance ducked down again and again. Some time later, when he came up for air, there was a soldier from New York not far from him. The machine gun bullets returned. Nance again turned to face them head on. He told the New Yorker to do the same. The bullets moved away.

Nance and the New Yorker scrambled across the last yards towards the cliff. At last, they felt shingle beneath them. Nance collapsed, blood pouring from his foot. But at least he was safe. He looked out to sea. “I recognized two [dead] officers. They were face up, lying in the water. A lot of men were caught by the tide. Had we been on dry land, a lot of men would have made it.”
¹⁵

The tide had crept up behind Nance, drowning Company A men who no longer had the strength to crawl. Among them, it is thought, was Raymond Hoback. Nance had trained them. He had tried to be good to them. He had read their last love letters. As he now lay on the bloodstained pebbles below Vierville sur Mer, he still felt responsible for them, every last one. “I was their officer. It was my duty. . . . They were the finest soldiers I ever saw.”
¹⁶

O
THER THAN
N
ANCE
, it is thought that just one man survived from Company A’s headquarters boat—medic Cecil Breeden. As soon as he reached the sands, he stripped off his pack, shirt, helmet, and boots. Then he stood up. He wanted other men to see him, and to follow his example. They must get up and free of the kit that could soon drown them.

“Medic! Medic!”

Breeden walked back into the water to pull wounded men up the beach, away from the advancing tide. Slowly, a few others shook off their packs and began to help.
¹

The Germans had cut Company A to ribbons but they were still not satisfied. They now riddled wounded men with arms outstretched in supplication. They peppered soldiers who could not crawl and American teenagers risking their own necks to save them. The lazy machine gunners shot rescuers in the back. Snipers aimed for the forehead. By some miracle, Breeden wasn’t hit.

As Breeden “[stayed] with his work indomitably,”
²
Company A’s Private Russell Pickett came to and found himself lying on wet sand. Just before his craft had landed, he had heard a “low rumble” and had then been knocked unconscious. A dead man, whom he guessed had pulled him up the beach, now lay twelve feet away. The tide lapped at Pickett’s feet. He couldn’t move his legs. He didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. All he had was a combat knife. Someone had pulled off his pack. “I began to think I’d been hit in the back and I worked my arms around to feel but I couldn’t find anything wrong.”
³

Petrified he would drown with the incoming tide, Pickett desperately grabbed for Mae West life preservers among macabre flotsam nearby. He put one under each arm and another around his chest and began to float ashore. He saw a replacement from Ohio nicknamed “Whitey”—he only knew a handful of men in Company A by their real names. “He got shot and it knocked him down and he got up again and they hit him again, in the leg, and spun him around,” Pickett recalled. “Then he crawled away, out of my sight, even after he’d been hit twice.”

Pickett recognized another man, a Lieutenant Fergusson, a recent replacement who had played football for the U.S. Army. “He was huge. I knew him pretty well because he’d sneak around and play poker with us guys in training. He’d been hit real bad. The top of his head was down over his face. You couldn’t see anything but a mass of bloody flesh. It was like his scalp had peeled down over his face.”

“I can’t see,” shouted Fergusson.

“Turn left and go!”
⁴

Fergusson turned left but was cut down within a few yards by a machine gun.

Pickett fought to keep his head above water as he floated towards the shore with the tide. Eventually, he would be fished out of the water and taken back to the
Empire Javelin
.

The Americans kept coming, Company B arriving at 7 A.M. Radio operator Bob Sales stood a few feet from Captain Ettore Zappacosta, Company B’s commanding officer. As their craft came in “on target,” right at the base of the Vierville draw, Zappacosta told Sales to “crawl up on the edge and see what you can see.”
⁵
The beach was a stone’s throw away but Sales couldn’t see anybody from Company A fighting, just corpses. Where were the Bedford boys and their buddies? Had they landed elsewhere?

“Captain,” shouted Sales, “there’s something wrong. There’s men laying everywhere on the beach!”

“They shouldn’t be on the beach.”
⁶

Sales hadn’t seen a living soul on the beach but it was obvious that plenty of machine gunners were in the bluffs: Bullets sprayed back and forth, tearing up the beach in puffs of sand.

A British bowman said he was going to drop the ramp. Sales ducked down again. Zappacosta was the first out. MG-42 bullets riddled him immediately. “I’m hit, I’m hit,” he called out. Every man who followed Zappacosta down the ramp met the same fate, caught in a relentless crossfire.

Sales would have been killed too but he stumbled as he exited, lost his balance, and fell into the water off the side of the ramp. He was still wearing his radio. He struggled under water to release it; if he didn’t get the damned thing off his back, he knew he would never fill his lungs with air again. Sales finally ripped the pack free and surfaced. He was several yards in front of the craft. The machine guns were now enjoying open season. Men were still exiting, still dropping the instant they appeared on the ramp. “Everybody was getting cut down as soon as they came off,” Sales said. “Those German machine guns—they just ate us up.”
⁷

Up above on the bluffs, triggers of the Germans’ MG-42 machine guns were hot to the touch. “It was the first time I shoot at living men,” recalled one German in 1964. “I don’t remember exactly how it was: The only thing I know is that I went to my machine gun and I shoot, I shoot, I shoot.”
⁸

Sales spotted one of the 1st Battalion’s surgeons, Captain Robert Ware, a fellow Virginian with a flaming red buzz cut: “He had brought himself in on an early wave rather than later in the day because he knew there was going to be a lot of wounded. When that ramp went down, they opened up and they got him. Just cut the boat to pieces. He’d got me a three-day pass to London. Treated my knee after a river crossing in England, came from near my home in Lynchburg.”
⁹

Sales looked around again. He couldn’t see any other survivors from his boat. A mortar shell exploded, stunning Sales. Some time later, feeling “very groggy,” Sales grabbed onto a log that had been part of a beach defense. A live mine was still attached to one end. Suddenly, another soldier was at his side, helping strip off his heavy assault jacket so he wouldn’t drown.

Sales used the log as cover, pushing it in front of him, his face pressed to the wood. Finally, he got to the beach, where he spotted his boat’s communications sergeant, Dick Wright, who had jumped off after Zap-pacosta. He was badly wounded and had been washed ashore. When he saw Sales he tried to raise himself up on his elbows to tell him something. But before he could utter a word, a sniper hiding in rocks along the bluff shot him.

“It looked like his head exploded. Pieces just fell about in the sand. And I lay there, just figuring I’d be next. I said to myself: ‘That sniper done and seen me, too.’ And evidently something distracted him, another boat maybe, a bigger target, because he didn’t get me. I buried my head in the sand as far as I could, put my arms over my head, and I just waited. I reckon I lay there thirty minutes.
¹⁰

“I’d seen a wall, maybe 150 feet away. I thought: ‘If I can get to that wall, I got a little protection. And maybe I can get another gun or something.’ I had fifty yards to go—a long way, especially when you’re expecting a man to kill you. So I started using dead bodies. I would crawl to one, and then real easy, I’d move to another one. That was the only protection.”
¹¹

All around Sales, Company B men were being picked off as they crawled forward. Those lingering on the water line were raked by continuous machine-gun fire. “Man,” thought Sales, “I have to be awful careful here.”
¹²
Sales inched forward. The corpses of Bedford boys and others dotted the beach, every ten yards or so. Some faces were familiar. They’d smiled at him across bars. They’d passed him on cold parade grounds.

“I never talked to a living soul from A Company that day,” recalled Sales. “But I saw their bodies. I don’t remember the names. I was so scared to death. But there was quite a few of them. It was definitely A Company I crawled around—there was nobody else that could have been dead that quick. There’d be a body with legs off, sometimes just a leg, mangled parts. I heard later that Captain Fellers and Captain Zap-pacosta— couple of great buddies—were washed up on the beach within thirty feet of each other.”
¹³

Suddenly, Sales saw another Company B man, Private Mack Smith, by a cluster of rocks—at the base of the sea wall. Sales crawled over. He’d made it. Smith had been hit three times in the face. An eyeball lay on his cheek. Sales gave him a “morphine jab,” popped the eye back into its socket, and then bandaged him.
¹⁴

“Them’s failed, man,” said Smith. “We gotta get off this beach. They gotta send boats in for us.”
¹⁵

The pair stayed at the sea wall, both in shock, for what felt like an eternity. Sales would be taken off the beach that afternoon but would return before nightfall after persuading a doctor to allow him to join a launch going back for wounded on Omaha. “There wasn’t a man off my boat who lived, except me. Not one. Every one of them got killed that day,”
¹⁶
he said.

Some men from Company B in Private Hal Baumgarten’s landing craft did live, but not many. As his boat neared the shore, slightly to the east of the D-1 draw, icy water crashed in and was quickly up to Baum-garten’s waist. Company B’s Lieutenant Harold Donaldson leaned against the door of the landing craft. “Well, what the hell are you waiting for?” he shouted. “Take off your helmets and start bailing.”
¹⁷
Bullets ricocheted off the LCA. To Baumgarten’s left, another of Company B’s landing craft suddenly exploded, hit by an 88mm shell. Fragments of men and wood showered down.

They moved forward, the thunder of explosions growing louder and louder. Then the ramp was down. Men exited as fast as they could—into the crosshairs of yet another MG-42 machine gun.

Baumgarten jumped, rifle above his head. A bullet skimmed his helmet. He landed in six feet of water, bright red from men mown down in front of him, including Donaldson—killed as soon as he exited.

Baumgarten spotted the sea wall, three hundred yards away. Barbed wire curled along the top. Beyond, a bluff rose a hundred feet or so and was veined with trenches linking snipers, mortar crews, rocket launchers, and several MG-42s.

Baumgarten waded ashore, bullets spattering around him. There were two waterproofed tanks to his left. Men huddled against them. One fired its 76mm cannon at the Germans along the bluffs, now some two hundred yards away. The other was disabled. A dead man hung from its turret. The rubber flotation skirts had fallen off both.

Where were the other tanks scheduled to land at the D-1 Vierville draw?

A machine gun opened up, just above the sea wall, slightly to Baum-garten’s left. A bullet hit his rifle. There was a “clean hole in its receiver in front of the trigger guard. The seven bullets in the receiver had stopped the German bullet from penetrating the rifle to hit [his] chest.”
¹⁸

Another Company B man, nineteen-year-old private Robert Dittmar, fell on his back about ten feet away.

“I’m hit—Ma, Mother,”
¹⁹
he cried and then lay dead.

Baumgarten dropped to his knees behind a defensive obstacle called a “Czech hedgehog:” four iron girders welded together to form a star-like shape. Bedford Hoback lay thirty yards to his left. Hoback looked wounded. Three others from Company A lay motionless beside him.

“There was a pillbox built into the bluff to my right,” recalled Baum-garten. “It appeared to be camouflaged as a seaside cottage. The pillbox’s machine gun could sweep the beach laterally with its deadly fire. What miracle kept me from being hit? I removed the protective latex condom from the mouth of [a] rifle, and fired at the shine of a helmet on the bluff slightly to my right . . . after my shot, the gunfire from that area ceased.”
²⁰

Fighting back felt good. But the feeling didn’t last long. Fragments from an 88mm shell hit Baumgarten in the face, shattering his jaw and slicing his upper lip in two. “The roof of my mouth was cut up, and teeth and gums were lying all over inside,” he would recall. “Blood poured freely from the gaping wound.”
²¹
The same shell also hit Bedford Hoback square in the face. “His head dropped—he was done for. Next to him lay Elmere Wright. I was certain it was him because of his nose; it was just like Dick Tracy’s in the cartoon.”
²²

Baumgarten washed blood from his face. He was in severe shock yet still able to stand. His limbs were unharmed. He quickly threw off most of his kit and then slithered forward using corpses and “hedgehogs” as cover. There were no reinforcements landing behind him to divert the Germans’ fire. Because beach obstacles had not been cleared on Dog Green, Companies C and D had veered far off course and were landing two beach sections to the east. The Germans above the D-1 Vierville draw had nothing to do but pick off anyone who so much as twitched.

Meanwhile, a thousand yards from the beach, John Barnes and Roy Stevens managed to keep their heads above water. They could hear a fierce firefight around the Vierville draw. As they bobbed up and down in the heavy swells, they also heard twenty-year-old Second Lieutenant Gearing’s calming voice. He urged them to keep close together. That way they could help the weakest stay afloat.
²³

Sergeant John Laird, a small Scotsman whose family hailed from near Greenock in Scotland, thought they should swim ashore and help Company A fight its way off the beach.

“Let’s swim in,” he called out.

“No, let’s wait here,” replied Gearing.

Laird wanted to know how far it was.

At least a thousand yards, someone replied, but no one really knew.

“We can’t make it,” Gearing insisted. “Too far. We’ll wait and get picked up by some passing boat.”
²⁴