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D-Day on Omaha Beach
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II - f - Omaha Beach: 0800-1200
The assault had gone forward, but not according to pull. Penetrations had been made where enemy defenses were thin and lightly held, on the long stretches of bluff between the draws scheduled for use as exits. The F-1 strong-point was knocked out, but the exit route here was so steep that no plans had been made for its early use, and there were no engineer parties at hand. In the case of the main draws, only at E-1 was a strongpoint (on the east side) being reduced by flanking action of a force which turned aside for this purpose after getting up the bluff; elsewhere, the small and often scattered assault groups were fighting inland toward their assembly areas. As a result, nearly all the enemy strongpoints defending the vital draws were still in action, especially at E-3 and D-3 which were scheduled for use by the first movement of traffic off the beach. On large stretches of the beach there was still enough fire to make landings costly and to stop all movement in front of the draws. The engineers, hampered by landing on wrong beaches and by loss of equipment, were unable to start on their main job of opening the beach for traffic. At 0800, there were no gaps anywhere in the shingle embankment to permit movement onto the beach flat.
As a result, the penetrations made in the next two hours could not be followed up properly. Vehicles were beginning to arrive, but they found only a narrow strip of sand to occupy and nowhere to move even for shelter from enemy fire. This fire and the difficulties with obstacles in the higher water led many craft to come in on Easy Green and Easy Red instead of other sectors, thereby threatening to clog that beach with vehicles under destructive artillery fire from the flanks. Consequently, the commander of the 7th Naval Beach Battalion radioed an order (about 0830) suspending all landings of vehicles. During the next few hours scores of craft, including dukws and rhino-ferries, were milling about off the Easy Green and Easy Red sectors, waiting for a chance to come in. The dukws had particular difficulty in the rough seas, in which they had to run at least at half throttle to maintain steerage way. The consumption this entailed would exhaust a fuel tank in 10 to 12 hours, leaving the craft in danger of foundering. The tie-up affected the heavier weapons scheduled to support the attack off the beach and inland. The Antitank Company of the 116th RCT landed one gun platoon of three 57-mm's, but they had to remain under fire for hours before they could move off the sand. Only two antiaircraft guns of the 16th RCT were landed out of two batteries, the others being sunk in the effort to unload. The Cannon Company of the 16th RCT got its halftracks ashore at 0830 after two attempts, but they could not move more than 50 yards through the litter of disabled vehicles. Its 6 howitzers were loaded on dukws, which were swamped one by one in the heavy seas with a loss of 20 personnel. Artillery units of the regimental combat teams were having a hard time getting toward shore, where they were scheduled to land between 0800 and 0900. The 111th Field Artillery Battalion of the 116th RCT suffered complete disaster. The forward parties, including observers, liaison and reconnaissance sections, and the command group, landed between 0730 and 0830 in front of les Moulins. Remnants of the 2d BLT were immobilized there in front of the draw, and the artillery personnel suffered as heavily as had the infantry in getting from their craft to the shingle. They quickly decided that the guns could not land there, but their radio had been disabled by sea water and no radio on the beach was working. Lt. Colonel Thornton L. Mullins, commander of the battalion, said, "To hell with our artillery mission. We've got to be infantrymen now." Although already wounded twice, Colonel Mullins went to work organizing little groups of infantry. Leading a tank forward, he directed its fire against an emplacement and as he started toward another tank across an open stretch, was killed by a sniper.
The howitzers of the battalion were coming in on 13 dukws, each carrying 14 men, 50 rounds of 105-mm ammunition, sandbags, and all essential equipment for set-up and maintenance. This load made the dukws hard to maneuver from the start, especially for inexperienced crews. Five dukws were swamped within half a mile after leaving the LCT's. Four more were lost while circling in the rendezvous area. One turned turtle as they started for the beach; another got within 500 yards of shore, stopped because of engine trouble, and was sunk by machine-gun bullets. The last two dukws went on and about 0900 were close enough to see that there was no place to land on the beach. When they drew together and stopped to talk things over, one was disabled by machine-gun fire and then set ablaze by an artillery hit. Eight men swam ashore or to another craft. The surviving dukw had some near misses from artillery shells, turned away from the shore, and tried to find out from both shore and Navy where to go in. Shore gave contradictory advice; Navy had no ideas at all. The dukw pulled alongside a rhino-ferry to wait, but in a short time the crew realized the craft was in a sinking condition. Determined to save the howitzer, two or three men stayed on. They managed to move the dukw as far as another rhino with a crane aboard, and unloaded the howitzer on this craft. The one gun of the 111th got ashore that afternoon in charge of the 7th Field Artillery Battalion.
Several other artillery units fared almost as badly. The 7th Field Artillery Battalion (16th RCT) lost six of its 105's on dukws that swamped en route to shore; the others could not land. The 58th Armored Field Artillery Battalion had taken part in the fire support of the first landings, firing from LCT's. The commanding officer and reconnaissance officer were casualties soon after landing at 0730. At 1030, three of its LCT's attempted to land and struck mines; one capsized, one sank in seven feet of water, and a howitzer on the third was jettisoned to keep the craft afloat. The 62d Armored Field Artillery Battalion, likewise involved in the preliminary bombardment, attempted no landings in the morning. Elements of two self-propelled antiaircraft battalions (the 197th and 467th) began to land after 0830. Losses in personnel and halftracks were considerable, but the guns were used in close support of infantry for fire on German emplacements.
Conditions on the beach improved in the later morning. Fire from the main enemy strongpoints was gradually reduced, as one gun emplacement after another was knocked out, often by tanks. Fighting both the enemy and the tide, the tanks were leading a hard life, caught on the sand between high water and the embankment, unable to get past the shingle to the beach flat, and an open target for enemy guns. Unit control was almost impossible, with tanks scattered over long stretches of beach and hampered in maneuver. The commander of the 741st Tank Battalion came ashore at 0820 with a 509 radio, but the radio was damaged by salt water and failed to function. The small command group had to contact individual tanks up and down the beach in an effort to control operations, losing three of its five members in the process. At the other end of the beach, Lt. Colonel John S. Upham, Jr., commanding the 743d, was shot down as he walked over to a tank for better direction of its fire. Nevertheless, the tanks kept on firing: one of them, disabled, until the rising tide drowned out the guns, others while the crew worked on dismounted tracks. Their achievement cannot be summed up in statistics; the best testimony in their favor is the casual mention in the records of many units, from all parts of the beach, of emplacements neutralized by the supporting fire of tanks. In an interview shortly after the battle, the commander of the 2d Battalion, 116th Infantry, who saw some of the worst fighting on the beach at les Moulins, expressed as his opinion that the tanks "saved the day. They shot the hell out of the Germans, and got the hell shot out of them."
The destroyer Carmick, by what was described as "silent cooperation," did her best to help some tanks on Dog Green which had managed to get up on the promenade road and were trying to fight west toward the Vierville draw. The destroyer's observers watched for the tanks' fire to show targets on the bluff edge, and then used the bursts as a point of aim for the Carmick's guns.
Support from naval units, necessarily limited during the first landings, began to count heavily later on. Some of the landing craft had tried to support the debarking troops with the fire from their light guns. When Company G was landing near les Moulins, the infantry saw a patrol craft stand off directly in front of the enemy strongpoint to the east of the draw and pump shell after shell into it. German artillery got the craft's range and forced it ashore, still firing; it continued in action until a shell made a direct hit, setting the craft ablaze. Later in the morning, two landing craft made a conspicuous, fighting arrival in front of E-3 draw. LCT 30 drove at full speed through the obstacles, all weapons firing, and continued the fire on an enemy emplacement after touchdown. At the same time LCI (L) 544 rammed through the obstacles, firing on machine-gun nests in a fortified house. These exploits also helped demonstrate that the obstacles could be breached by larger craft, which had been hesitating at the approaches.
Naval gunfire became a major factor as communications improved between shore and ships. At first, targets were still hard to find; Gunfire Support Craft Group reported at 0915 that danger to friendly troops hampered fire on targets of opportunity; an NSFCP in contact with ships was told by General Cota (about 0800) that it was "unwise to designate a target." Between 1000 and 1100 two destroyers closed to within a thousand yards to put the strong-points from les Moulins eastward under heavy, effective fire. All along the beach, infantry pinned at the sea wall and engineers trying to get at the draws to carry out their mission were heartened by this intervention. One result may have bee the decision to try to get some tanks through E-3 draw. At 1100, Colonel Taylor ordered all tanks available to go into action at that exit route. Of the several tanks that were able to move along the beach to the rallying point, only three arrived, and two of these were knocked out as they tried to go up the draw.
One of the participants in this effort was Captain W. M. King, who had been ordered to round up all the tanks and get them to E-3 draw. Captain King ran along the beach to the west, notifying each tank as he came to it. When he reached the last tank, he found the commander wounded and took over. Backing away from the shingle, King drove east, weaving in and out of the wreckage along the beach. He made 200 yards, then circled toward the water to avoid a tangle of vehicles and wounded men. A Teller mine, probably washed off a beach obstacle, blew the center bogie assembly of and broke the track. King and the crew proceeded on foot to E-3.
The decisive improvement along the beach came at E-1 draw. The strongpoint on the east side had been neutralized by flanking action of the platoon from Company E, 16th Infantry, after it reached the bluff top. The unfinished strongpoint on the other side was still partly in action, but was being contained by fire from Company M, 116th Infantry. Engineers of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion were able to bulldoze their first gap through the dune line, just east of this draw, about 1000 Company C of the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion made another gap to the west. The destroyers' intervention speeded up the progress; in the next two hours the antitank ditch was filled, mines were cleared, and the approach to the draw was made ready for vehicles. During the same period major infantry reinforcements were landing in front of E-1, and the last remnants of enemy resistance at that draw were about to be overpowered.
[Omaha Beachhead (6 June-13 June 1944) - American Forces in Action Series - Historical Division - War Department - 20 September 1945]
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