The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 Page 8
There, hardly fifty yards from Lady Irene’s battered nose, stood the squat Bénouville bridge over the Caen canal. An astonished sentry turned and fled, bellowing in alarm. A Very flare floated overhead, silvering the dark water, and fifty enemy soldiers—mostly Osttruppen conscripts from eastern Europe—stumbled toward the western bridge ramp as gunfire pinged from girders and rails. Too late: Howard’s men shot and grenaded their way across, shouting “Able,” “Baker,” and “Charlie” to keep the three platoons intact. “Anything that moved,” a British soldier later acknowledged, “we shot.”
One platoon commander fell dead from enemy fire, but within a quarter hour the span belonged to the British. The German bridge commander was captured when his car, laden with lingerie and perfume, skittered into a ditch; to atone for the loss of his honor, he asked in vain to be shot. Three rickety French tanks crewed by Germans lumbered toward the bridge only to be smacked with Piat antiarmor fire. Two fled and the third burned for an hour after a crewman crawled from his hatch with both legs missing. Major Howard soon got word that the other half of his command had captured the nearby Orne River bridge at Ranville. He ordered the heartening news to be broadcast in a coded radio message, then dug in to await both reinforcement and a more resolute enemy counterstroke.
Across the Orne and Dives floodplains additional gliders plummeted after midair collisions caused by treacherous crosswinds, or crash-landed with the usual mangled undercarriages. One Horsa skidded through a cottage and emerged, it was said, bearing a double bed with a French couple still under the duvet. Hunting horns and bugles tooted in the night as officers rallied their scattered companies. After one vicious burst of gunfire, an unhinged young paratrooper cried, “They got my mate! They got my mate!” Mates fell, but so did bridges: those over the Orne were captured, and four across the Dives were blown.
Perhaps the most perilous mission fell to the 9th Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, ordered to destroy a coastal battery at Merville believed capable of ranging Sword Beach, easternmost of the OVERLORD quintet. Surrounded by a cattle fence, minefields, barbed-wire thickets, and machine-gun pits, the big guns and two hundred gunners were protected by steel doors and concrete six feet thick, with twelve feet of dirt overhead. Of 750 paratroopers dropped to do the deed, only 150 landed near the assembly area. Instead of sixty lengths of bangalore torpedo—metal tubes packed with explosive to breach barbed wire—just sixteen could be found by three A.M.
No matter. The bangalores blew two gaps rather than the planned four. Creeping paratroopers defused mines and trip-wire booby traps with their fingers. While a diversionary attack forced the main gate, assault teams slaughtered Germans by the score and spiked the guns by removing their breechblocks. A signal officer dispatched the news to England by banded pigeon. Though the guns proved both smaller and fewer than expected—only 75mm, and two rather than four—the menacing Merville battery had fallen. The price had been high: “I went in with 150,” the battalion commander reported, “and came out with only 65 on their feet.”
The butcher’s bill had indeed been high for airborne forces on both flanks of the invasion crescent. Fewer than half of the 4,800 British troops now in France were either sufficiently near or sufficiently alive to join the fight in coherent units on June 6; still, the fraction exceeded that of American forces to the west. Yet this day would be famous even before it dawned, in no small measure because of the gutful men who had come to war by air. Beset by mischance, confounded by disorder, they had mostly done what they were asked to do. Now the battle would hang on those who came by sea.
First Tide
SHIP by ship, convoy by convoy, the OVERLORD fleets slid into the broad, black Bay of the Seine. A vanguard of minesweepers carved an intricate maze of swept channels, demarcated by dan buoys agleam in the phosphorescent sea. Sailors and soldiers alike were astonished to find the Barfleur lighthouse still burning east of Cherbourg; among the world’s tallest and most conspicuous beacons, the rotating double flash was visible for thirty miles. Ahead lay the dark coastline where it was said that Norman pirates once paraded lanterns on the horns of oxen to imitate ships’ lights, pulling rings from the fingers of drowned passengers on vessels lured onto the reefs. Glints of gold and crimson could be seen far to starboard over the Cotentin and far to port above the Orne—airborne troops had apparently found the fight they were seeking. A pilot in a P-51 Mustang, peering down at the armada spread across the teeming sea, would recognize an ancient, filthy secret: “War in these conditions is, for a short span, magnificent.”
On the pitching decks below, grandeur remained elusive. Riflemen on the bridge wings of two old Channel steamers, H.M.S. Prince Baudouin and H.M.S. Prince Leopold, watched for mines beyond the bow waves. “Fear,” a Coast Guardsman on LCI-88 mused, “is a passion like any other passion.” A ship’s doctor on Bayfield confessed to drinking “so much coffee that I was having extra systoles every fourth or fifth beat.” A veteran sergeant from Virginia aboard the Samuel Chase recorded, “The waiting is always the worst. The mind can wander.” Waiting for battle induced the philosopher in every man. “Mac,” a young soldier in the 16th Infantry asked a comrade, “when a bullet hits you, does it go all the way through?” A chaplain peering over the shoulder of a Royal Navy officer found him reading Horace’s Satires: “Si quid forte jocosius hoc mihi juris cum venia dabis dixero.” If I perchance have spoken too facetiously, indulge me.
At two A.M. the ship’s loudspeaker on U.S.S. Samuel Chase broke up a poker game and summoned GIs to breakfast, where mess boys in white jackets served pancakes and sausage. In lesser messes, troops picked at cold sandwiches or tinned beef from Uruguay. On the bridge of H.M.S. Danae, an officer shared out drams of “the most superb 1812 brandy from a bottle laid down by my great-grandfather in 1821.” A British Army officer aboard the Empire Broadsword told Royal Naval Commandos: “Do not worry if you do not survive the assault, as we have plenty of backup troops who will just go in over you.”
Precisely what the enemy knew about the approaching flotillas remained uncertain. The German radar network—it stretched from Norway to Spain, with a major site every ten miles on the North Sea and Channel coasts—had been bombed for the past month. In recent days, 120 installations at forty-seven sites between Calais and Cherbourg had received particular attention from fighter-bombers and the most intense electronic jamming ever unleashed; the German early warning system had now been whittled to an estimated 5 percent of capacity. Various deceptions also played out, including the deployment of three dozen balloons with radar reflectors to simulate invasion ships where none sailed. Near Calais, where a German radar site had deliberately been left functioning, Allied planes dumped metal confetti, known as Window, into the airstream to mimic the electronic signature of bomber formations sweeping toward northern France. West of Le Havre and Boulogne, planes flying meticulously calibrated oblong courses also scattered enough Window to simulate two large naval fleets, each covering two hundred square miles, steaming toward the coast at eight knots.
The actual OVERLORD fleets deployed an unprecedented level of electronic sophistication that foreshadowed twenty-first-century warfare. Six hundred and three jammers had been distributed to disrupt the search and fire-control radars in enemy shore batteries, including 240 transmitters carried aboard LCTs and other small craft headed for the beaches, and 120 high-powered jammers to protect large warships. Jamming had begun at 9:30 P.M., when the first ships drew within fifteen miles of that brilliant Barfleur light.
Of particular concern were glide bombs, dropped from aircraft and guided by German pilots using a joystick and a radio transmitter. First used by the Luftwaffe in August 1943, glide bombs—notably a model called the Fritz-X—had sunk the Italian battleship Roma and nearly sank the cruiser U.S.S. Savannah off Salerno. Hitler had stockpiled Fritz-Xs and the similar Hs-293 to attack any invasion; Ultra revealed that 145 radio-control bombers now flew from French airdromes. But Allied ships were no longer as defenseless as t
hey had been in the Mediterranean, where skippers had ordered electric razors switched on in the desperate hope of disrupting Luftwaffe radio signals. Now the dozen different jammer variants humming in the Bay of the Seine included devices designed against glide bombs specifically. In cramped forecastles on U.S.S. Bayfield and other ships, oscilloscope operators stared at their screens for the telltale electronic signature of a glide bomb—“a fixed pip, one that will stick straight up like a man’s erect penis,” in one sailor’s inimitable description. After pinpointing the precise enemy frequency, a good countermeasures team could begin jamming within ten seconds. Or so it was hoped.
Allied bombing had intensified at midnight. “Each time they woke us up in the night somebody would say, ‘It’s D-Day.’ But it never was,” wrote Bert Stiles, an American B-17 pilot. “And then on the sixth of June it was.” More than a thousand British heavy bombers struck coastal batteries and inland targets in the small hours, gouging gaping craters along the Norman seaboard. Antiaircraft fire rose like a pearl curtain, and flame licked from damaged Allied planes laboring back toward the Channel. A Canadian pilot radioed that he was losing altitude, then sent a final transmission before plowing into France: “Order me a late tea.” Transfixed men aboard Augusta watched a stricken bomber with all four engines streaming fire plunge directly at the ship before swerving to starboard to crash amid the waves a mile astern.
Behind the British came virtually the entire American bomber fleet of 1,635 planes. B-26 Marauder crews, aware that paratroopers in the Cotentin were pressing toward the causeways on the peninsula’s eastern lip, flew parallel to the shoreline below six thousand feet to drop 4,414 bombs with commendable accuracy along Utah Beach.
Less precise was the main American force, the 1,350 B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators of the Eighth Air Force, funneled from England in a roaring corridor ten miles wide and led by pathfinder planes flipping out flares at one-mile intervals like burning bread crumbs. Their targets included forty-five coastal fortifications, mostly within rifle range of the high-water mark from Sword Beach in the east to Omaha in the west. Given the imprecision of heavy bombers at sixteen thousand feet—under perfect conditions, less than half their bombs were likely to fall within a quarter mile of an aim point—the primary intent was not to pulverize enemy defenses but to demoralize German defenders beneath the weight of metal.
Conditions were far from perfect. Overcast shrouded the coast as the formations made landfall, six squadrons abreast on a course perpendicular to the beaches. Eisenhower a week earlier had agreed to permit clumsy “blind bombing” if necessary, using H2X radar to pick out the shoreline and approximate target locations. On the night of June 5, he authorized another abrupt change requested by Eighth Air Force: to avoid accidentally hitting the approaching invasion flotillas, bombardiers would delay dumping their payloads for an additional five to thirty seconds beyond the normal release point.
For an hour and a half, three thousand tons of bombs gouged the Norman landscape in a paroxysm of hellfire and turned earth. Minefields, phone wires, and rocket pits inland were obliterated, but less than 2 percent of all bombs fell in the assault areas, and virtually none hit the shoreline or beach fortifications. Repeated warnings against fratricide “had the effect of producing an overcautious attitude in the minds of most of the bombardiers,” an Eighth Air Force analysis later concluded; some added “many seconds” to the half-minute “bombs away” delay already imposed. Nearly all payloads tumbled a mile or two from the coast, and some fell farther. Many thousands of bombs were wasted: no defenders had been ejected from their concrete lairs. Whether they felt demoralized by the flame and apocalyptic noise behind them would only be discerned when the first invasion troops touched shore.
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Heavy chains rattled through hawse pipes across the bay, followed by splash after mighty splash as anchors slapped the sea and sank from sight. An anguished voice cried from a darkened deck, “For Chrissake, why in the hell don’t we send the Krauts a telegram and let them know we’re here?” Another voice called out: “Anchor holding, sir, in seventeen fathoms.”
Aboard Princess Astrid, six miles from Sword Beach, a loudspeaker summons—“Troops to parade, troops to parade”—brought assault platoons to the mess deck. On ships eleven miles off Omaha, GIs in the 116th Infantry pushed single file through double blackout curtains to climb to the weather decks. Landing craft, described as “oversized metal shoeboxes,” swung from davits, waiting to be loaded with soldiers; others would be lowered empty, smacking against the steel hulls, to be boarded by GIs creeping down the cargo nets that sailors now spread over the sides. A Coast Guard lieutenant on Bayfield watched troops “adjusting their packs, fitting bayonets to their rifles and puffing on cigarettes as if that would be their last. There was complete silence.” Scribbling in his diary he added, “One has the feeling of approaching a great abyss.”
Nautical twilight arrived in Normandy on June 6 at 5:16 A.M., when the ascending sun was twelve degrees below the eastern horizon. For the next forty-two minutes, until sunrise at 5:58, the dawning day revealed what enemy radar had not. To a German soldier near Vierville, the fleet materialized “like a gigantic town” afloat, while a French boy peering from his window in Grandcamp saw “more ships than sea.”
Minesweepers nosed close to shore, clearing bombardment lanes for 140 warships preparing to drench the coast with gunfire. Blinkered messages from sweeps just two miles off the British beaches reported no hint of enemy stirrings, and Omaha too appeared placid. But at 5:30 A.M., on the approaches to Utah, black splashes abruptly leaped mast-high fore and aft of the cruisers H.M.S. Black Prince and U.S.S. Quincy, followed by the distant bark of shore guns. Two destroyers also took fire three miles from the shingle, and a minesweeper fled seaward, chased by large shells thrown from St.-Vaast. At 5:36 A.M., after allowing Mustang and Spitfire spotter planes time to pinpoint German muzzle flashes, Admiral Deyo ordered, “Commence counterbattery bombardment.”
Soon enough eight hundred naval guns thundered along a fifty-mile firing line. Sailors packed cotton in their ears; concussion ghosts rippled their dungarees. “The air vibrated,” wrote the reporter Don Whitehead. Ammunition cars sped upward from magazines with an ascending hum, followed by the heavy thump of shells dropped into loading trays before being rammed into the breech. Turrets slewed landward with theatrical menace. Two sharp buzzes signaled Stand by, then a single buzz for Fire! “Clouds of yellow cordite smoke billowed up,” wrote A. J. Liebling as he watched the battleship Arkansas from LCI-88. “There was something leonine in their tint as well as in the roar that followed.” The 12- and 14-inch shells from the murderous queens Arkansas and Texas sounded “like railway trains thrown skyward,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, watching through Zeiss binoculars as a war correspondent aboard H.M.S. Empire Anvil. Paint peeled from Nevada’s scorched gun barrels, baring blue steel, and sailors swept cork shell casings and the burned silk from powder bags into the sea. David K. E. Bruce, an Office of Strategic Services operative who would later serve as U.S. ambassador in three European capitals, wrote in his diary aboard U.S.S. Tuscaloosa:
There is cannonading on all sides as well as from the shore.… The air is acrid with powder, and a fine spray of disintegrated wadding comes down on us like lava ash.… The deck trembles under our feet, and the joints of the ship seem to creak and stretch.… Repeated concussions have driven the screws out of their sockets [and] shattered light bulbs.
German shells soared over the bay in crimson parabolas. “The arc at its zenith looks as if it would end up on the Quincy,” wrote an officer eyeing an approaching round. “I am wrong, happily wrong.” Ships zigged, zagged, and zigged some more, their battle ensigns snapping and their wakes boiling white. Seasoned tars could gauge the size of an enemy shell from the height of the splash, including the 210mm ship-killers thrown from the three-gun battery at St.-Marcouf. “It is a terrible and monstrous thing to have to fire on our homeland,” an admiral on the Fren
ch cruiser Montcalm advised his crew, “but I want you to do it this day.” A French woman ashore wrote in her diary, “It is raining iron. The windows are exploding, the floor is shaking, we are choking in the smell of gunpowder.” She piled her children and mattresses onto a horse cart and fled inland.
Allied planes swaddled the bombardment lanes with white smoke to blind German gunners. The destroyer U.S.S. Corry, which had fired four hundred rounds in an hour, slowed momentarily as sailors hosed down her sizzling 5-inch barrels. At that moment, the breeze tugged away the smoke screen long enough for St.-Marcouf to lay four shells in a neat line 150 yards to port. Corry’s skipper had just ordered twenty-five knots at hard right rudder when a stupefying explosion knocked the ship’s company to the deck if not overboard.
“We seemed to jump clear of the water,” a sailor later recalled. “A large fissure crossed the main deck and around through the hull.” The blast cracked the destroyer like an eggshell, opening a foot-wide gap across the keel and between her stacks, flooding the engine and fire rooms, and scalding sailors to death with steam from a ruptured boiler. Crushed bulkheads and debris trapped other men belowdecks. With power and light gone, the rudder jammed. Both the fantail and bow levitated above Corry’s broken back. Crewmen hoisted a signal: “This ship needs help.”
Most sailors on the destroyer believed that a salvo from German shore guns had struck the mortal blow, but subsequent reports blamed a sea mine. Eighty sweepers would trawl the Utah approaches, eventually finding two hundred mines; none, however, had yet discovered the enemy field across the boat lanes on Cardonnet Bank. An Ultra warning of the minefield had been sent to senior U.S. Navy commanders, “who appeared to have overlooked it,” a British intelligence study later concluded.