Reader's Digest Soldier Stories Page 3
And they were. One, two, three-, and then score after score of the big transports thundered by overhead. On the peninsula, German flak began roaring and searchlights swept the sky.
A few minutes later, the commander turned to the radioman monitoring German military stations, alert for the first sudden burst of activity. “Well?” he asked. We held our breaths. “Still very light traffic, sir,” said the British expert, reading a Western thriller as he twiddled his dials. He was very efficient, and he always caught everything worth catching, but he considered the war, as he told me, a very dull way of earning one’s living. He wasn’t at all disturbed, as I was, about the danger of German searchlights picking us up. Fortunately, when they started poking around, the beams were deflected by clouds, and the Nazis apparently decided it was just another air raid. The coastal batteries, which could have given us terrible punishment, were still silent.
We knew that just then airborne divisions were going down. Parachutists went down first, to clear strategic fields of the poles and other traps which the Germans—forewarned by careless publicity of the scope of our airborne operations—had set for gliders. The parachutists worked quickly with grenades and mine detectors, but the glidermen suffered casualties nevertheless.
Along the beaches, Commandos and Rangers were busy, too. A dozen large units were mopping up crucial strong points, overrunning coastal batteries and wrecking communications centers. One of the most powerful German coast-defense batteries was tucked away in a huge concrete fortress, almost impregnable even to air and artillery attack. Immensely massive steel doors barricaded its entrance. Two Commandos stole a German staff car and, yelling, “Die Invasion hat begonnen!” at the top of their lungs, they careened up to the sentries and startled them into opening the gates wide enough to throw in their bombs. After that the gates could not be closed, and within a few minutes the last of the German garrison fell under a hail of lead from the Commandos’ tommyguns.
Up and down 60 miles of coast, the preinvasion raiders were doing their work on schedule. Their incredible exploits will make one of the greatest chapters in military history.
All this, however, seemed very far away to us on the Admiral’s flagship. As the reports came in, a bell would ring. The commander would read the message and put a new sticker on his chart. Finally, at three o’clock, the silence ahead of us split wide open. Pathfinder planes of the RAF had roared by overhead. Huge chandelier flares, red and green, came down over the beach. And then all hell broke loose. Geysers of fire and sand in closely patterned rows flashed upward as bombers, following their guides, laid down stick after stick. German flak spat from all directions, their tracers arching fantastic fireworks into the sky. They were pretty accurate, and from time to time a mortally wounded plane would plunge blazing earthward like a meteor, ending in a leaping flash of fire as it struck the ground.
On the bridge, a veteran captain—seemingly oblivious of the din—gave orders for lowering landing craft from our davits. He paused to look at the booming, lethal pyrotechnics and remarked to another correspondent and me that they reminded him of a “hell of a Fourth of July” he remembered as a kid.
All around us landing boats were forming circles ready to take off the troops from transports for the dash ashore. “Boat team number five form at station three” came the bosun’s bored voice over the loudspeaker system.
Dawn was breaking, and on the flag bridge, the Admiral and the General commanding the division we were putting ashore were worried. The waves were too high and the landing craft were bobbing around like corks. Troops clambering down the nets were having a tough time. Every time a GI landed with a smack on the bottom of his boat—his tin hat flying in one direction, his gun in the other—our hearts went into our throats. Was this going to be the catastrophe we had just avoided in the Sicilian landing?
Somehow at last the landing craft were loaded. The bleak strained faces at command positions began to relax. At 5:40—as though at touch of a button—the warships ahead of us began bellowing. Our teeth rattled as flash followed flash and shells of every caliber whined from the battleships, cruisers and destroyers into the beach. Over the whole assault area, 600 guns in 80 ships put down 2000 tons of explosives in ten minutes.
Actually both the bombing and the naval gunnery were the most carefully prepared and coordinated barrage of the war. On the highly important chart in the wardroom that scheduled the attack of every bomber squadron and the fire of every ship in our task force, German positions and batteries were marked. Their priority for attention had been decided according to their size, range and ability to interfere with our operation. One coastal battery particularly, set in the side of a hill and practically invulnerable to air attack, could have mauled us badly while unloading. “That one, gentlemen,” the Admiral had said at pre-D-Day briefing, “is a must.” Salvos of 14-inch shells from one of our battleships began hitting it precisely on schedule and, when a Ranger party arrived there a little later for mopping up, they found not one live German in the fortification.
Small, slow spotting planes cruised lazily over the target areas, their observers talking directly to their fire-control officers afloat and correcting aim as the shells came over. It was beautiful shooting and at almost regular intervals the commander in our intelligence room put a new sticker against one of the red rings on the chart. “DESTROYED,” it said.
Behind this curtain, the loaded landing boats formed exactly spaced waves for the final run to the beach. Heading them, Navy scouts in control craft found the exact boundaries of assigned beaches—no easy job in the dust and smoke of a bombardment which had blasted almost every recognizable landmark, and in the teeth of machine-gun and vicious mortar fire. The scouts guided in demolition crews of the naval beach battalion who, with their bombs and Bangalore torpedoes, had to blast a way through the maze of hedgehog-like steel structures, upended rails, barbed wire and mines. We could see them calmly paddling boats and setting their charges, with lead and steel slapping the water all around them. The leaders of this toughest job were men with Mediterranean experience, but the rest were boys being shot at for the first time.
Through cleared channels came like clockwork the personnel landing craft loaded with troops, and tank landing craft, with tanks firing from them. Over their heads and from the flanks, rocket craft sent fantastic salvos swishing, to explode mines on shore with their closely patterned miniature earthquakes and to tear open barbed wire. Small, fast rocket craft, motor torpedo boats, flak ships and destroyers close inshore poured a last burst of drenching fire, then again as by clockwork the curtain lifted and the leading landing craft rammed their bows into the sand, to drop ramps and discharge line after line of crouching, running, firing men and roaring tanks.
It was H Hour and the invasion had begun.
On and behind some of the beaches in the hours just before and after H, bad luck and mistakes caused heavy losses. One airborne outfit struck an area which the Germans happened to be using for anti-invasion maneuvers. Nazi machine gunners were in place and waiting as the Allied troops stepped out of the gliders. In one beach sector, the landing force struck an accidental last-minute German troop concentration.
The weather was not at all cooperative. Four-foot waves delayed troop loading at some places by over 60 minutes past schedule. By that time, the fast Normandy tide had dropped sharply, landing craft grounded far out and left men wading through four feet of water and under leaden hail without cover. The delay let the Germans regroup their artillery and it cost us lives, but it did not give them time to bring up sizable reinforcements, which might have caused disaster.
On the whole, however, surprise was complete. The picture I had seen ahead of me was repeated on beaches up and down the line. The Germans had, as a gold-braided wit said, been “caught with their panzers down.” The American and Royal navies had fulfilled Admiral Ramsay’s promise to Eisenhower—“We will land you there to the inch.” “The miracle,” as Ernie Pyle wrote, “of landing there a
t all” had been accomplished.
III. Beachhead Panorama
Going Ashore with the Troops
BY IRA WOLFERT
Wolfert won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches on the Battle for the Solomons. This article is largely based on a series of on-the-scene invasion dispatches he wrote for the North American Newspaper Alliance.
This Normandy beachhead of ours is the fourth beachhead I have been on in the last two years. All beachheads are unlike anything else on earth. Thousands of things are going on at once, from life to death, from hysterical triumph to crushing failure. Night is different from day only because the light is poorer, the tracer bullets more lurid, the waves creamier and your particular task either harder or easier. You work until your job is done or your superior feels too exhausted to work you any longer. Then you sleep until prodded awake by explosions or bullets or some other urgency.
Our first view of France, from the U.S. Coast Guard troop transport that carried us across the Channel, was that reflected by anti-aircraft shells lighting up the night above Normandy. It was a little past 1 a.m. on D Day, and paratroopers were beginning to land, their planes showered by whole buckets of blazing shells and golf-ball flak. One plane went down, then another and another, in plain sight of our ship, while our men stood silently in the darkness, their faces grim and their hearts sick.
The transport anchored about 11 miles offshore, and at dawn, after a terrific naval and air bombardment of the beaches, we transferred to small boats for the landing. The boats were being thrown five and ten feet into the air and digging deep into the troughs between the waves, and the leap from the slippery ladder to a greasy hatch had to be timed nicely.
To the right and left and ahead and behind, farther than a man could see, the scene was the same—a spreading mass of ships lying to, waiting patiently as cows to be unloaded, each deep laden and teeming with men and goods. The waters between them were teeming too, with small boats threading back and forth and hanging to the sides of the larger vessels like the metal spangles of a tambourine.
We passed under a sky full of airplanes laid layer upon layer on top of each other. We passed warships bombarding the enemy, and saw the splashes of enemy shells trying to hit the ships. An inferno was brewing on the beach; smoke was clotting up from it, and blinding white and orange blasts of explosions flickered hotly.
Then the war reached out a giant paw and struck dead ahead of us. There was a big explosion. Gray smoke and white water rose hundreds of feet into the air. Out of its center a mortally stricken minesweeper plunged and tilted, bleeding oil in spouts as if an artery had been severed. Then it righted itself and lay quietly, with the big gaseous-looking bubbling that ships make when they die.
Standing by to pick up survivors, we came first to those who had been blown farthest by the explosion. They were all dead. “Leave the dead and take the living first,” cried Lieutenant John Tripson.
And then, from all over the sea around us, sounding small and childlike in the wild world of waters, came cries of “Help! Help!” and one startling, pathetic cry of “Please help me!”
Big John Tripson is a Mississippi boy who used to play football for the Detroit Lions. His strength came in handy now. The wet boys in the sea with all they had on them weighed up to 300 pounds. Big John reached out and scooped them up with one hand, holding onto the boat with the other. We fished six out of the water, two of them uninjured, taking only the living and leaving the dead awash like derelicts in the unheeding sea. One man was naked. Every stitch of clothing, including his shoes and socks, had been blown off and his body was welted all over as if he had been thrashed by a cat-o’-nine-tails.
Other rescue ships had come alongside the minesweeper now, and we stood out again on our mission. Close to us was the U.S. cruiser Tuscaloosa. A German battery had challenged her, and she and an American destroyer had taken up the challenge. The Germans were using a very fine smokeless powder that made it impossible to spot their gun sites unless one happened to be looking right there when the muzzle flash gave them away. They also had some kind of bellows arrangement that puffed out a billow of gun smoke from a position safely removed from the actual battery. This was to throw off the spotters. But their best protection was the casements of earth-and-concrete 121/2 feet thick.
The affair between the battery and the warships had the color of a duel to it. When the Germans threw down the gauntlet, you could see the gauntlet splash in the water. It was a range-finding shell. Then the shells started walking toward our warship, in a straight line. If you followed them on back you would eventually get to the battery. This was what our warship commanders were trying to do. It was a race between skills. If the Germans landed on the ship before our gunners could plot the line of their shells, then they would win. If our gunners could calculate more rapidly, then we would win.
Captain Waller, in command of the Tuscaloosa, held his $15,000,000 warship steady, setting it up as bait to keep the Germans shooting while his gunners worked out their calculations.
The destroyer—I could not identify it—stuck right with our cruiser. The splashes kept coming closer. Our ships did not move. The splashes started at 500 yards off and then went quickly to 300 yards. Now, I thought, the warships would move. But they remained silent and motionless. The next salvo was 200 yards off. The next one would do it, the next one would get them, I was thinking. The next salvo blotted out the sides of the vessels in a whip of white water, throwing a cascade across the deck of the Tuscaloosa.
Now in this final second the race was at its climax. The Germans knew our ships would move. They had to guess which way, they had to race to correct range and deflection for the next salvo. Our ships had to guess what the Germans would think, and do the opposite.
The destroyer had one little last trick up its sleeve. And that tipped the whole duel our way. Its black gang down below mixed rich on fuel, and a gust of black smoke poured out of the stacks. The ship had turned into the wind, so that the smoke was carried backward. The Germans could not tell whether it was the wind doing that or the destroyer’s forward speed. They decided that it was forward speed and swung their guns, and straddled perfectly the position the destroyer would have occupied had it gone forward. But the destroyer had reversed engines and gone backward.
Now the game was up for the Huns. The warships swung around in their new positions and brought their guns to bear; their shells scored direct hits, and the Germans lay silently and hopelessly in their earth.
• • •
On the first beach we touched the air smelled sweet and clean with the sea. Clouds of sea gulls swooped overhead, filling the air with a whole twitter of flute notes as they complained of the invasion by American troops. There was bleak strength here, and bare wild blowy beauty, and death over every inch of it.
The Germans had sown every single inch of the soil with mines. In 24 hours our men had cleared only narrow paths, losing 17 wounded and one dead in doing so.
They walked, slept, ate, lived and worked along those paths. When they walked they put one foot carefully before the other. When they lay along the paths to sleep they put rocks alongside themselves to keep from turning over.
We had landed in the early afternoon. The wind was dying then, and the black and gray smoke stood up in spires wherever one looked and hung in the gentle wind. Smoke came from planes that had been shot down and from mines being set off by mine detectors and from American guns and German shells. Normandy seemed to be burning.
Men were coming out of the sea continually and starting to work—digging, hammering, bulldozing, trucking, planning, ordering, surveying, shooting and being shot at. Amid the artillery and machine-gun fire, and the rush and smack of shells, you could hear typewriters making their patient clatter and telephones ringing with homey businesslike sounds.
German prisoners were coming down one side of a road while American assault infantry were going up the other side. The Americans had that odd preoccupied look of men going into
battle; but they were a fine, bold, brawny sight as they swung along.
“Where are you going?” I asked one of them. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m following the man ahead.” The man ahead was following the man ahead, too. Finally I asked the head of the column. “I’m following the column ahead,” he said.
I laughed and he laughed, but he laughed with a jubilant sound. “Well,” he told me, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. We’ve all got the same idea in this army, and if you just follow the man ahead you’re bound to get to where the doing is to be done.” He looked very tan and healthy as he said this, walking along with a long-legged slouch, chewing a slab of cheese from a ration tin as if it were a cud of tobacco. He was a soldier to be proud of.
Our men would go along until fired upon. Then they would investigate what was firing on them. If they had enough force on hand to solve the problem, as the military saying goes, they solved it. If not, they contained the problem and sent for what force was needed—air, artillery or ground reinforcement.
The first French people I saw were a family of typical Norman farmers—tall, blue-eyed, sturdy and very red-cheeked. American soldiers going up to the front had left the mark of their passing on the household’s dining table—chewing gum, hard candy and some cigarettes. We talked about the bombardment, and I asked how they managed to live through it.
“An act of God,” they said. “But the Germans, they were worse than the bombardment.”
I had forgotten what the French word for “run” is, and I asked if the German soldiers billeted in their house had “promenaded away quickly” from the bombardment. They all laughed heartily.
“The Germans,” one of the men said, “promenaded from the bombardment—ZIP! The way an airplane promenades through the air.”
The Germans were tough veteran fighters. You never got a chance to make more than one mistake against them. Yet they were willing to surrender and seemed only to want sufficiently strong inducement. They were veterans of duty in Russia. The Russians seem to have made them very tired of the war. They fight while they think they are winning, but it is not hard to hammer them into believing they are losing. Then they give up.