The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (15 page)

Summers set out immediately, not even taking the time to learn the names of the men he was leading, who were showing considerable reluctance to follow this unknown sergeant. Summers grabbed one man, Sgt. Leland Baker, and told him, “Go up to the top of this rise and watch in that direction and don’t let anything come over that hill and get on my flank. Stay there until you’re told to come back.” Baker did as ordered.

Summers then went to work, charging the first farmhouse, hoping his hodgepodge squad would follow. It did not, but he kicked in the door and sprayed the interior with his tommy gun. Four Germans fell dead, others ran out a back door to the next house. Summers, still alone, charged that house; again the Germans fled. His example inspired Pvt. William Burt to come out of the roadside ditch where the group was hiding, set up his light machine gun, and begin laying down a suppressing fire against the third barracks building.  Once more Summers dashed forward. The Germans were ready this time; they shot at him from loopholes but, what with Burt’s machine-gun fire and Summers’s zigzag running, failed to hit him. Summers kicked in the door and sprayed the interior, killing six Germans and driving the remainder out of the building.  Summers dropped to the ground, exhausted and in emotional shock. He rested for half an hour. His squad came up and replenished his ammunition supply. As he rose to go on, an unknown captain from the 101st, misdropped by miles, appeared at his side. “I’ll go with you,” said the captain. At that instant he was shot through the heart and Summers was again alone. He charged another building, killing six more Germans. The rest threw up their hands. Summers’s squad was close behind; he turned the prisoners over to his men.  One of them, Pvt. John Camien from New York City, called out to Summers: “Why are you doing it?”

“I can’t tell you,” Summers replied.

“What about the others?”

“They don’t seem to want to fight,” said Summers, “and I can’t make them. So I’ve got to finish it.”

“OK,” said Camien. “I’m with you.”

Together, Summers and Camien moved from building to building, taking turns charging and giving covering fire. Burt meanwhile moved up with his machine gun.  Between the three of them, they killed more Germans.  There were two buildings to go. Summers charged the first and kicked the door open, to see the most improbable sight. Fifteen German artillerymen were seated at mess tables eating breakfast. Summers never paused; he shot them down at the tables.

The last building was the largest. Beside it were a shed and a haystack. Burt used tracer bullets to set them ablaze. The shed was used by the Germans for ammunition storage; it quickly exploded, driving thirty Germans out into the open, where Summers, Camien, and Burt shot some of them down as the others fled.  Another member of Summers’s makeshift squad came up. He had a bazooka, which he used to set the roof of the last building on fire. The Germans on the ground floor were firing a steady fusillade from loopholes in the walls, but as the flames began to build they dashed out. Many died in the open. Thirty-one others emerged with raised hands to offer their surrender.  Summers collapsed, exhausted by his nearly five hours of combat. He lit a cigarette. One of the men asked him, “How do you feel?” “Not very good,” Summers answered. “It was all kind of crazy. I’m sure I’ll never do anything like that again.”

Summers got a battlefield commission and a Distinguished Service Cross. He was put in for the Medal of Honor, but the paperwork got lost. In the late 1980s, after Summers’s death from cancer, Sergeant Baker and others made an effort to get the medal awarded posthumously, without success. Summers is a legend with American paratroopers nonetheless, the Sergeant York of World War II. His story has too much John Wayne/Hollywood in it to be believed, except that more than ten men saw and reported his exploits.

D-Day was a smashing success for the 4th Division and its attached units. Nearly all objectives were attained even though the plan had to be abandoned before the first assault waves hit the beach. Casualties were astonishingly light, thanks in large part to the paratroopers coming in on the German defenders from the rear. In fifteen hours the Americans put ashore at Utah more than 20,000 troops and 1,700 motorized vehicles. By nightfall, the division was ready to move out at first light on June 7 for its next mission, taking Montebourg and then moving on Cherbourg.

7 -      Omaha Beach

IF THE GERMANS were going to stop the invasion anywhere, it would be at Omaha Beach. It was an obvious landing site, the only sand beach between the mouth of the Douve to the west and Arromanches to the east, a distance of almost forty kilometers. On both ends of Omaha the cliffs were more or less perpendicular.  The sand at Omaha Beach is golden in color, firm and fine, perfect for sunbathing and picnicking and digging, but in extent the beach is constricted.  It is slightly crescent-shaped, about ten kilometers long overall. At low tide, there is a stretch of firm sand of three hundred to four hundred meters in distance. At high tide, the distance from the waterline to the one- to three-meter bank of shingle (small round stones) is but a few meters.  In 1944 the shingle, now mostly gone, was impassable to vehicles. On the western third of the beach, beyond the shingle, there was a part-wood, part-masonry seawall from one to four meters in height (now gone). Inland of the seawall there was a paved, promenade beach road, then a V-shaped antitank ditch as much as two meters deep, then a flat swampy area, then a steep bluff that ascended thirty meters or more. A man could climb the bluff, but a vehicle could not. The grass-covered slopes appeared to be featureless when viewed from any distance, but in fact they contained many small folds or irregularities that proved to be a critical physical feature of the battlefield.  There were five small “draws,” or ravines, that sloped gently up to the tableland above the beach. A paved road led off the beach at exit D-1 to Vierville; at Les Moulins (exit D-3) a dirt road led up to St.-Laurent; the third draw, exit E-1, had only a path leading up to the tableland; the fourth draw, E-3, had a dirt road leading to Colleville; the last draw had a dirt path at exit F-1.

No tactician could have devised a better defensive situation. A narrow, enclosed battlefield, with no possibility of outflanking it; many natural obstacles for the attacker to overcome; an ideal place to build fixed fortifications and a trench system on the slope of the bluff and on the high ground looking down on a wide, open killing field for any infantry trying to cross no-man’s-land.  The Allied planners hated the idea of assaulting Omaha Beach, but it had to be done. This was as obvious to Rommel as to Eisenhower. Both commanders recognized that if the Allies invaded in Normandy, they would have to include Omaha Beach in the landing sites; otherwise the gap between Utah and the British beaches would be too great.

The waters offshore were heavily mined, so too the beaches, the promenade (which also had concertina wire along its length), and the bluff. Rommel had placed more beach obstacles here than at Utah. He had twelve strong points holding 88s, 75s, and mortars. He had dozens of Tobruks and machine-gun pillboxes, supported by an extensive trench system.

Everything the Germans had learned in World War I about how to stop a frontal assault by infantry Rommel put to work at Omaha. He laid out the firing positions at angles to the beach to cover the tidal flat and beach shelf with crossing fire, plunging fire, and grazing fire, from all types of weapons. He prepared artillery positions along the cliffs at either end of the beach, capable of delivering enfilade fire from 88s all across Omaha. The trench system included underground quarters and magazines connected by tunnels. The strong points were concentrated near the entrances to the draws, which were further protected by large cement roadblocks. The larger artillery pieces were protected to the seaward by concrete wing walls. There was not one inch of the beach that had not been presighted for both grazing and plunging fire.  Capt. Robert Walker of HQ Company, 116th Regiment, 29th Division later described the defenses in front of Vierville: “The cliff-like ridge was covered with well-concealed foxholes and many semipermanent bunkers. The bunkers were practically unnoticeable from the front. Their firing openings were toward the flank so that they could bring flanking crossfire to the beach as well as all the way up the slope of the bluff. The bunkers had diagrams of fields of fire, and these were framed under glass and mounted on the walls beside the firing platforms.” To reporter A. J. Liebling, who climbed the bluff a few days later, it looked like “a regular Maginot Line.”

The men attacking this formidable position had been on their Higgins boats since midnight. They were seasick, exhausted, their legs trembling from standing so long in the bouncing boats. Still, the misery caused by the spray hitting them in the face with each wave and by their seasickness was such that they were eager to hit the beach, feeling that nothing could be worse than riding on those damned landing craft. Adding to the problems for the Americans, no unit landed where it was supposed to. Companies were a kilometer or more off target.  When the ramps went down, the Germans opened fire. “We hit the sandbar,” one coast guardsman recalled, “dropped the ramp, and then all hell poured loose on us. The soldiers in the boat received a hail of machine-gun bullets. The army lieutenant was immediately killed, shot through the head.” In the lead boat, LCA (landing craft, assault) 1015, Capt. Taylor Fellers and every one of his men were killed before the ramp went down. LCA 1015 just vaporized. No one ever learned whether it was the result of hitting a mine or getting hit by an 88 shell.

All across the beach the German machine guns were hurling fire of monstrous proportions on the hapless Americans-one German gunner fired 12,000 rounds that morning.

Pvt. John Barnes, A Company, 116th, was in an LCA. As it approached the shoreline abreast with eleven other craft, someone shouted, “Take a look! This is something that you will tell your grandchildren!” If we live, Barnes thought.

The LCA began to sink. “Suddenly, a swirl of water wrapped around my ankles,” Barnes remembered. “The water quickly reached our waist. I squeezed the CO2 tube in my life belt. The buckle broke and it popped away. I was going down under. I climbed on the back of the man in front of me and pulled myself up in a panic.” Some men had wrapped Mae Wests around their weapons and inflated them. Barnes saw a rifle floating by, then a flamethrower with two Mae Wests around it. “I hugged it tight but still seemed to be going down. I couldn’t keep my head above the surface. I tried to pull the release straps on my jacket but I couldn’t move. Lieutenant Gearing grabbed my jacket and used his bayonet to cut the straps and release me from the weight. I was all right now, I could swim.” The assault team was about a kilometer offshore. Sergeant Laird wanted to swim in, but Lieutenant Gearing said, “No, we’ll wait and get picked up by some passing boat.” But none would stop; the coxswains’ orders were to go on in and leave the rescue work to others.

After a bit, “we heard a friendly shout of some Limey voice in one of the LCAs.  He stopped, his boat was empty. He helped us to climb on board. We recognized the coxswain. He was from theEmpire Javelin. He wouldn’t return to the beach. We asked how the others made out. He said he had dropped them off OK. We went back to theEmpire Javelin, which we had left at 0400 that morning. How long had it been? It seemed like just minutes. When I thought to ask, it was 1300.” Barnes and his assault team were extraordinarily lucky. About 60 percent of the men of A Company came from one town, Bedford, Virginia; for Bedford, the first fifteen minutes at Omaha was an unmitigated disaster. G and F Companies were supposed to come in to the immediate left of A Company, but they drifted a kilometer farther east before landing, so all the Germans around the heavily defended Vierville draw concentrated their fire on A Company. When the ramps on the Higgins boats dropped, the Germans just poured the machine-gun, artillery, and mortar fire on them. It was a slaughter. Of the 200-plus men of the company, only a couple of dozen survived, and virtually all of them were wounded.  Sgt. Thomas Valance survived, barely. “As we came down the ramp, we were in water about knee-high and started to do what we were trained to do, that is, move forward and then crouch and fire. One problem was we didn’t quite know what to fire at. I saw some tracers coming from a concrete emplacement which, to me, looked mammoth. I never anticipated any gun emplacements being that big. I shot at it but there was no way I was going to knock out a German concrete emplacement with a .30-caliber rifle.”

The tide was coming in, rapidly, and the men around Valance were getting hit. He found it difficult to stay on his feet-like most infantrymen, he was badly overloaded, soaking wet, exhausted, trying to struggle through wet sand and avoid the obstacles with mines attached to them. “I abandoned my equipment, which was dragging me down into the water.

“It became evident rather quickly that we weren’t going to accomplish very much.  I remember floundering in the water with my hand up in the air, trying to get my balance, when I was first shot through the palm of my hand, then through the knuckle.

“Pvt. Henry Witt was rolling over toward me. I remember him saying, ‘Sergeant, they’re leaving us here to die like rats. Just to die like rats.’ “ Valance was hit again, in the left thigh by a bullet that broke his hip bone. He took two additional flesh wounds. His pack was hit twice, and the chin strap on his helmet was severed by a bullet. He crawled up the beach “and staggered up against the seawall and sort of collapsed there and, as a matter of fact, spent the whole day in that same position. Essentially my part in the invasion had ended by having been wiped out as most of my company was. The bodies of my buddies were washing ashore and I was the one live body in amongst so many of my friends, all of whom were dead, in many cases very severely blown to pieces.” On his boat, Lt. Edward Tidrick was first off. As he jumped from the ramp into the water he took a bullet through his throat. He staggered to the sand, flopped down near Pvt. Leo Nash, and raised himself up to gasp, “Advance with the wire cutters!” At that instant, machine-gun bullets ripped Tidrick from crown to pelvis.