D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [63]
Apart from securing the causeways ready for the 4th Infantry Division’s advance from Utah beach, the other task of the 101st Airborne was to seize the lock on the River Douve at La Barquette and also take two bridges north-east of Carentan. This would later allow the American forces on the Cotentin and the 29th Division advancing from Omaha to link up. The biggest threat in the area was the unexpectedly large German force in Saint-Côme-du-Mont on the Carentan- Cherbourg road.
Major von der Heydte, a veteran of the German airborne invasion of Crete three years before, had pushed forward two battalions of his 6th Paratroop Regiment from Carentan. His men, among the most experienced of the Luftwaffe’s Paratroop Army, were to prove formidable opponents. When dawn broke, they gazed in amazement at all the different coloured parachutes lying in the fields. They wondered at first whether they represented different units, but soon got out their knives to cut themselves silk scarves. Heydte himself went forward to Saint-Côme-du-Mont later in the morning and climbed the church tower. From there he could see the huge armada of ships lying offshore.
For American paratroopers, the sound of the naval bombardment of Utah beach provided the first reassurance that the invasion was proceeding according to plan. But with the loss of so much equipment and ammunition in the drop, and the increasing concentration of German forces against them, everything depended on how quickly the 4th Infantry Division would arrive.
The landings at Utah proved the most successful of all, largely due to good fortune. The naval bombardment force, commanded by Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk in the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, was no less powerful than that at Omaha. Kirk had the battleship USS Nevada, the monitor HMS Erebus, the heavy cruisers USS Quincy and Tuscaloosa , the light cruiser HMS Black Prince and, for close-in support, the light cruiser HMS Enterprise with a dozen destroyers. As soon as the naval bombardment started, French civilians fled from their villages out into the countryside and awaited events in relative safety.
The gunfire, while failing to hit many of the German positions, cleared large parts of the minefields on which the enemy had relied. Meanwhile the medium bombers of the Ninth Air Force dropped their loads much closer to the target area at Utah than the Eighth had at Omaha, but even so the effect on German positions was negligible. The rocket ships were also inaccurate, but none of this seemed to matter.
Utah was the responsibility of VII Corps, commanded by Major General J. Lawton Collins, a dynamic leader known to his men as ‘Lightning Joe’. The assault was led by the 8th Infantry Regiment in Major General Raymond O. Barton’s 4th Infantry Division. Luck certainly played a large part when the current pushed the landing craft towards the Vire estuary. Colonel Van Fleet’s 8th Infantry came ashore 2,000 yards further south than planned, but on a stretch of beach which turned out to be far more lightly defended than where they were supposed to have landed.
The calmer waters meant also that none of the DD tanks were lost, except for four destroyed on a landing craft which struck a mine. One of the landing craft crewmen described them as ‘odd-shaped sea-monsters depending upon huge, doughnut-like, canvas balloons for flotation, wallowing through heavy waves, and struggling to keep in formation as they followed us’. In fact the light resistance presented few targets for the tanks to attack. Even the artillery was landed without loss. Altogether, the 4th Infantry Division’s 200 casualties on D-Day were far fewer than the 700 losses caused by an E-boat attack during Exercise Tiger off Slapton Sands in Devon that April.
The first senior officer ashore at Utah was the irrepressible Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt Jr, son of a former president and a cousin of Franklin D. Roosevelt.