D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [51]
One soldier, who jumped into five feet of water, found that ‘bullets were splashing right in front of my nose, on both sides and everywhere. Right then and there I thought of every sin I’d committed and never prayed so hard in my life.’ A member of the 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry, watched the fate of a devout non-com, Sergeant ‘Pilgrim’ Robertson. He ‘had a gaping wound in the upper right corner of his forehead. He was walking crazily in the water without his helmet. Then I saw him get down on his knees and start praying with his rosary beads. At this moment the Germans cut him in half with their deadly crossfire.’
The prospect of crossing the stretch of beach in front of them seemed impossible. Any idea of trying to run through the shallows, carrying heavy equipment and in sodden clothes and boots, seemed like a bad dream in which limbs felt leaden and numb. Overburdened soldiers stood little chance. One had 750 rounds of machine-gun ammunition as well as his own equipment. Not surprisingly, many men afterwards estimated that their casualties would have been halved if the first wave had attacked carrying less weight.
There were cries in all directions: ‘I’m hit! I’m hit!’ A soldier from the 1st Infantry Division who had jumped into water up to his neck waded in slowly. He felt so exhausted that he lay down in a foot of water to rest. ‘Everything seemed like slow motion, the way the men moved under all their equipment. Overloaded we didn’t have a chance. I was so tired I could hardly drag myself along.’ Only nine men out of thirty-one in his platoon survived.
Machine-gun fire criss-crossed the beach and, ‘as it hit the wet sand, it made a “sip sip” sound like someone sucking on their teeth’. One soldier saw a fellow GI running from right to left, trying to get across. An enemy gunner shot him as he stumbled. ‘He screamed for a medic. An aid man moved quickly to help him and he was also shot. The medic lay next to the GI and both of them were screaming until they died a few minutes later.’ Some continued to shelter behind the beach obstacles as bullets clanged off them, but others realized that their only hope was to make it to the shelter of the sea wall. Company A of the 116th Regiment, landing opposite the heavily defended Vierville draw at the western end of Omaha, suffered the worst casualties.
While the German machine-gunners turned the foreshore and surf into a killing zone, their artillery fired at the landing craft. As the V Corps report later acknowledged, the concave curve of the beach allowed the Germans both ‘frontal and enfilade’ fire. A staff sergeant in the 1st Division on the eastern side of Omaha saw a direct hit on the neighbouring assault boat. Several of the men on board were blown ‘fifty or sixty feet in the air’. Few of the first tanks to land survived for long, but their burning hulls at least provided something to shelter behind.
Under heavy fire, men of the Navy combat demolition units started on their task. ‘We went to work,’ wrote one, ‘laying plastic explosive bags on the various obstacles, running from one to the other and connecting the group with primacord, an instantly exploding fuse. Some of the obstacles had GIs sheltering behind them. We told them to move forward or they would be blown up with it. As the tide rose, we raced from one to another.’ They cleared a 100-foot gap for the following landing craft to come in, but the rising tide forced them out of the water. ‘Only three out of sixteen gaps were cleared that morning.’ With water beginning to cover the mined obstacles, the coxswains in the succeeding waves had an even more dangerous task. General Gerow’s worst fears had been proved right.
With many of their