Also undetected and unexpected by the assault troops were German reinforcements. Rommel in mid-March had shifted the 352nd Infantry Division to the coast from St.-Lô, twenty miles inland, placing two regiments behind Omaha and Gold Beaches alongside two regiments from the feebler 716th Infantry Division, while a third 352nd regiment bivouacked in reserve at Bayeux. Neither Ultra nor conventional intelligence sniffed out the move; belated suspicions of reinforcement reached Omar Bradley’s First Army headquarters on June 4, too late to alert the scattered fleets under a radio blackout. The thirteen thousand troops from the 352nd—mobile, dangerous, and so young that Wehrmacht officers requisitioned milk from French farmers to build their bones—had spent much of their time in recent weeks hauling timber in dray carts from the Forêt de Cerisy to buttress the Atlantic Wall. Nearly half the division’s infantry strength, including two battalions on bicycles, had been dispatched before dawn to the southern Cotentin with orders to confront reported paratroopers. Some of those invaders proved to be “exploding puppets,” hundreds of airborne dummies with noisemakers, accompanied by a few British tricksters popping flares and playing gramophone recordings of gunfire.
If the Omaha defenses had been thinned to three weak battalions by such dupery, they remained far more lethal than the single immobile regiment scattered over a fifty-mile front that most GIs had expected to biff aside. Rather than the three-to-one ratio favored by attackers in storming an entrenched foe, some units now sweeping toward land would meet odds of three to five. The foreshore that had first warranted only a succession of code numbers, and then a homely code name, now would earn other enduring epithets, including Bloody Omaha and Hell’s Beach.
* * *
For those who outlived the day, who survived this high thing, this bright honor, this destiny, the memories would remain as shot-torn as the beach itself. They remembered waves slapping the steel hulls, and bilge pumps choked with vomit from seasick men making “utterly inhuman noises” into their gas capes. Green water curled over the gunwales as coxswains waited for a tidal surge to lift them past the bars before dropping the ramps with a heavy clank and a shouted benediction: “It’s yours, take it away!”
They remembered the red splash of shell bursts plumping the shallows, and machine-gun bullets puckering the sea “like wind-driven hail” before tearing through the grounded boats so that, as one sergeant recalled, “men were tumbling out just like corn cobs off a conveyor belt.” Mortar fragments said to be the size of shovel blades skimmed the shore, trimming away arms, legs, heads. The murder holes murdered. Steel-jacketed rounds kicked up sand “like wicked living things,” as a reporter wrote, or swarmed overhead in what the novelist-soldier Vernon Scannell called an “insectile whine.” Soldiers who had sung “Happy D-Day, dear Adolf” now cowered like frightened animals. They desperately gouged out shallow holes in the shingle with mess kit spoons and barked knuckles, mouths agape in a rictus of astonishment intended to prevent artillery concussions from rupturing their eardrums.
They remembered brave men advancing as if “walking in the face of a real strong wind,” in Forrest Pogue’s image, all affecting the same tight grimace until whipcrack bullets cut them down. Above the battle din they remembered the cries of comrades ripped open, merging at moments into a single ululation described by the BBC reporter David Howarth as “a long terrible dying scream which seemed to express not only fear and pain, but amazement, consternation, and disbelief.” And they remembered the shapeless dead, sprawled on the strand like smears of divine clay, or as flotsam on the making tide, weltering, with their life belts still cinched. All this they would remember, from the beaten zone called Omaha.
Army and Navy engineers, lugging twenty-eight tons of explosives, were supposed to land three minutes behind the infantry spearhead to blow sixteen gaps, each fifty yards wide, through tidal-zone obstacles emplaced in three belts. Little went right: some engineers landed early and alone, some landed late, nearly all drifted left—east—of their assigned beaches by up to a mile because of the current and navigation error. An 88mm shell hit Team 14’s landing craft, blowing the coxswain overboard and slaughtering the vessel’s entire Navy demolition squad; one man’s lower trunk and severed legs were described by a seaman as “sticking up in the water like a pitiful V for victory.” Seven died in Team 11 when shellfire hit their rubber boat; of forty men in Team 15, only four eluded death or injury. A mortar round caught Team 12, tripping the TNT primacord and explosive charges, and killing or wounding nineteen engineers in an explosion so violent that three-legged steel hedgehogs rained down “like fence posts falling,” a survivor reported.
Demolitionists shinnied up pilings or stood on one another’s shoulders to pluck off mines and place their charges, popping violet smoke grenades to signal an imminent detonation. Gunfire shot away fuses as fast as engineers could rig them, including one burst that also carried off the fuse man’s fingers. Terrified infantrymen sheltered behind the German obstacles “like a cluster of bees,” even as engineers screamed, kicked, and threatened to blow their charges anyway. By seven A.M., as the floodtide began to swallow the obstacles, only six of sixteen gaps had been cleared through all three belts, and at a fell cost: more than half of the engineers would be dead, wounded, or missing by midmorning.
The fiascos multiplied. Sherman amphibious tanks, ostensibly seagoing with their inflatable canvas skirts and twin propellers, began plopping into the waves from LCT ramps “like toads from the lip of an ornamental pond,” as the historian John Keegan later wrote. Yet the tanks had only nine inches of freeboard in a pond with six-foot seas; of thirty-two Shermans in one battalion, twenty-seven sank trying to cross six thousand yards of open water, with a loss of 9 officers and 137 men. “There was a certain gallantry,” the BBC’s Howarth noted. “Commanders of the second, third, and fourth tanks in each [LCT] could see the leaders founder; but the order had been given to launch, and they launched.” Farther west, a Navy lieutenant sensibly recognized the rough sea as unfit for a thirty-three-ton swimming tank, and LCTs carrying most of another armor battalion made for shore instead. Eight Shermans went under when their vessels took direct hits, but twenty-four others clanked ashore.
Artillerymen also struggled to land their guns. A dozen 105mm howitzers from the 111th Field Artillery Battalion had been loaded onto DUKW amphibious trucks, each of which also carried fourteen men, fifty shells, and a protective rampart of eighteen sandbags, enough to make the DUKW “altogether unseaworthy,” as the Army belatedly recognized. Eight quickly shipped water and capsized, and three others were lost to waves or shellfire before reaching shore. “I can still hear those men calling for help over the noise,” a master sergeant later recalled.
Two infantry regiments washed onto Hell’s Beach early that morning, from the two assault divisions that formed V Corps. To the west, the 116th Infantry—rural Virginians marinated in Confederate glory and descended from the Stonewall Brigade of 1861—had trained in Britain for twenty months as part of the 29th Infantry Division, long enough to earn a derisive nickname: “England’s Own.” Officers ordered men in landing craft approaching the shore to keep their heads down, as one lieutenant explained, “so they wouldn’t see it and lose heart.” They saw soon enough. On the right flank of the invasion zone, German gunners abruptly turned beach Dog Green into an abattoir. Without firing a shot, Company A was reportedly “inert and leaderless” in ten minutes; after half an hour, two-thirds of the company had been destroyed, including Sergeant Frank Draper, Jr., killed when an antitank round tore away his left shoulder to expose a heart that beat until he bled to death. Among twenty-two men from tiny Bedford, Virginia, who would die in Normandy, Draper “didn’t get to kill anybody,” his sister later lamented. A surviving officer reported that his men fell “like hay dropping before the scythe.”
German machine guns—with a sound one GI compared to “a venetian blind being lifted up rapidly”—perforated the beach, killing the wounded and rekilling the dead. All thirty-t
wo soldiers in one boat, LCA-1015, were slaughtered, including their captain. A lieutenant shot in the brain continued to direct his troops until, a survivor recounted, “he sat down and held his head in the palm of his hand before falling over dead.” Wounded men jabbed themselves with morphine or shrieked for medics, one of whom used safety pins to close a gaping leg wound. “A guy in front of me got it through the throat. Another guy in front of me got it through the heart. I run on,” a survivor later recalled. An unhinged soldier sat in the sand, weeping softly and tossing stones into the water. “This,” an officer declared, “is a debacle.”
More than a mile to the east, the 16th Infantry Regiment—veterans of landings in Africa and Sicily with the 1st Infantry Division—had its own debacle. The entire first wave carried east of its intended beaches. Simply reaching the waterline reduced Company L from 187 men to 123. Medics found that “the greater portion of the dead had died of bullet wounds through the head”; officers and sergeants alike began slapping wet sand over the rank insignia on their helmets to confound snipers. “Fire was coming from everywhere, big and little stuff,” a soldier in Company E recalled. Moved to computation by the demented shooting, one sergeant calculated that the beach was swept with “at least twenty thousand bullets and shells per minute.” Robert Capa, who had removed his Contax camera from its waterproof oilskin to snap the most memorable photographs of the Second World War, crouched behind a burned-out Sherman on Easy Red and murmured a phrase he recalled from the Spanish Civil War: “Es una cosa muy seria.” This is a very serious business.
The four-hundred-ton LCI 85, grounding ashore on the seam between Easy Red and Fox Green, had begun dispensing men down the left ramp when enemy 47mm and 88mm shells blew through the front hold, killing fifteen and wounding forty-seven. The Coast Guard crew backed off and steamed west several hundred yards only to face scorching fire upon putting in again. More than two dozen shells ripped into the ship, igniting troop compartments and leaving the decks slick with blood. White bandages from a shot-up medical company fluttered down through the smoke. On the bridge, the skipper reported, “we could hear the screams of the men through the voice tube.” Listing, burning, bleeding, LCI 85 steamed for the horizon, where the wounded and the dead were extracted before she capsized and sank.
By 8:30 A.M. the Omaha assault had stalled. The rising tide quickly reclaimed the thin strip of liberated beach, drowning those immobilized by wounds or fear. With no room to land more vehicles, a Navy beachmaster halted further unloading on much of the shoreline. “Face downwards, as far as eyes could see in either direction,” a 16th Infantry surgeon later wrote, “were the huddled bodies of men living, wounded, and dead, as tightly packed together as layers of cigars in a box.”
Two large boats burned furiously in the shallows of Dog White. LCI 91, carrying two hundred soldiers, had caught a shell in her fuel tanks, engulfing the well deck in flames. At least two dozen men were incinerated as others leaped into the sea, including one bright torch who dove in with even the soles of his boots blazing. Moments later, LCI 92, seeking cover in her sister’s smoke, struck a mine on the port bow. The explosion blew two soldiers from a hatch like champagne corks and trapped more than forty others belowdecks. “A sheet of flame shot up thirty feet in the air through the number one hold directly forward of the conning tower,” a yeoman reported. “Terror seized me.” German gunners then found the range to finish off the boat. A survivor dog-paddled to the beach not as an infantry officer ready for combat, as he later acknowledged, but as the “helpless unarmed survivor of a shipwreck.”
Only where escarpment turned to cliff, four miles west of Omaha, did the early-morning assault show promise. Three companies from the 2nd Ranger Battalion scaled the headland at Pointe du Hoc, first climbing freehand despite a rain of grenades, then using grapnels and braided ropes fired from mortar tubes. Comrades gave covering fire from ladders loaned by the London fire department and carried in DUKWs. As windswept as Troy, the promontory had been reduced to what one officer called “ripped-open dirt” by 250 shells from Texas’s 14-inch barrels. Rangers hauled themselves over the lip of the cliff, then used thermite grenades to wreck five shore guns that had been removed from their casemates and secreted in an apple orchard. The triumph was short-lived: they soon found themselves trapped by rallying Germans who spent the next thirty-six hours trying to sweep them from the scarp to the rocks below.
Back on Hell’s Beach, several thousand shivering soldiers also found defilade where they could and waited for a counterattack from the bluffs to bowl them back into the sea. “They’ll come swarming down on us,” murmured Don Whitehead. A lieutenant, who watched sodden bodies advance on the creeping tide, later wrote, “After a couple of looks back, we decided we couldn’t look back anymore.” Among those huddled on the beach was Captain Joseph T. Dawson, a lanky, dark-eyed veteran of Company G in the 16th Infantry. An hour earlier, Dawson had leaped from his landing craft onto Easy Red just as an artillery shell struck the boat, exterminating the thirty-three men behind him. “The limitations of life come into sharp relief,” he would write his family in Texas. “No one is indispensable in this world.”
* * *
From the gray deck of the command ship U.S.S. Augusta none of this was clear. A brown miasma of dust and smoke draped the French coast to the south, mysterious and impenetrable except by the cherry-red battleship shells soaring toward inland targets. A cramped First Army war room had been built on the cruiser’s afterdeck, ten feet by twenty, with a tarpaulin door, a Michelin map of France fastened to a sheet-metal wall, and a clock whose glass face had been taped against concussion. Other maps displayed the suspected location of enemy units, marked in red, and the range of German shore guns, delineated with concentric circles. Signalmen wearing headphones listened for radio messages, which they pounded out on a bank of typewriters. From Omaha only incoherent fragments had been heard, of sinkings, swampings, heavy fire. One dispatch picked up by another ship nearby advised, “We are being butchered like a bunch of hogs.”
At a plotting table in the center of the war room sat a tall, bespectacled man in a helmet, Mae West, and three-star field jacket. Again he asked—“What’s going on?”—and again got little more than an apologetic shrug. On several occasions as a young officer, Omar Bradley had studied Gallipoli, the disastrous British effort to capture Constantinople in 1915, and more recently he had scrutinized reports from Anzio. The preeminent lesson from both amphibious attacks, he concluded, was “to get ground quickly.” Was that happening at Omaha? Another shrug. He had expected the two assault regiments to be a mile inland by 8:30 A.M., but now he was unsure whether they had even reached France. Bradley had begun contemplating his course if the troops failed to get off the strand. He felt not only alarmed but also a bit ridiculous: this morning the army commander sported an immense bandage on his nose to cover a boil that had been lanced in the ship’s dispensary. Photographers were forbidden to take his picture.
After successfully commanding a corps in Africa and Sicily, Bradley had benefitted from hagiographic press coverage, including a recent Time cover story that called him “Lincolnesque … a plain, homely, steady man with brains and character.” Ernie Pyle wrote that “he spoke so gently a person couldn’t hear him very far,” while Liebling described “the high cranium, bare on top except for a lattice of gray hairs; the heavy, almost undershot jaw; and the deeply emplaced presbytic eyes, peering out from under the dark brows with an expression of omnivorous but benevolent curiosity.” That he still wore a cap with “Lieut. Col. O. N. Bradley” inked in the lining was considered emblematic of his humility; in fact, lieutenant colonel was his permanent rank.
Few could resist the biography. Son of a schoolteaching Missouri farmer who made $40 a month, married one of his pupils, and died when Omar was thirteen, Bradley had played football on an undefeated Army team that earned unlikely headlines, such as “West Point Finds Notre Dame Easy.” He also befriended a classmate who was now his boss and greates
t admirer: “Ice-in-hower,” as Bradley pronounced the name in his sodbuster twang. As a lieutenant, he had been sent to Montana to keep the copper mines open with fixed bayonets against labor agitators; later he taught mathematics at West Point while moonlighting as a construction worker, stringing cable for the Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson. He skipped the rank of colonel and was the first of fifty-nine men in the Military Academy class of 1915 to win a general’s stars. A teetotaler until the age of thirty-three, Bradley rarely drank; he had added the pint of whiskey and two flasks of brandy issued when he boarded Augusta to his unopened allotment from Sicily. Vain about his marksmanship—“If there’s a bird anywhere in shootin’ distance, I won’t miss it,” he once told a reporter—he had also nursed a sense of divine anointment ever since, in Tunisia, he drove his jeep over a mine that failed to explode. “I think I had some guidance from God,” he later said. “I felt that I must be destined to play an important part in the war.… I was saved by a miracle.”
Perhaps. But a few wondered if he was out of his depth, if he had been promoted beyond his natural level of competence, if some part of him remained “Lieut. Col. O. N. Bradley.” Patton, who had been his commander in the Mediterranean and would be his subordinate in France, had rated Bradley “superior” in all categories of generalship in September 1943, while privately calling him “a man of great mediocrity.” In his diary Patton added, with typical ambivalence: “Has a strong jaw, talks profoundly and says little. I consider him among our better generals.” The Omaha plan had been largely Bradley’s design, including the limited fire support from the Navy, and he had dismissed predictions of stiff losses as “tommyrot.”