A Bloody Victory. Dan Harvey
I just prayed that I would not bring attention to myself, and with it the German machine gunners’ aim. The automatic fire from above churned the sand around us. I am sorry to say that a small group of us dived to take cover behind the heaped bodies of some comrades from the first wave, who had fallen victim to the accurate MG-42 fire. I heard the sickening thud, thud, thud as bullets from the deadly Mauser [MG-42 machine gun] found their mark in the dead bodies again and again and again, but we were safe. Then there was a lull when the German machine gunner needed to change ammo belts and we were away. A mad sprint to the bottom of the cliff and there, safe from view and from fire, we began to assess the utter havoc we were part of. Some guys threw up! This respite didn’t last.
Galvanising the remaining assets at hand and assembling those of us still fit to fight, our officers ordered the ascent of the cliffs. We fired up rockets propelling ropes and grappling hooks but the soaking of the ropes in the seawater left them heavier than expected and some did not reach their target. 100 foot ladders were also deployed and soon I was heading up on one of those. I was told later that the long ladders had been supplied by the London Fire Brigade. With the crescendo of the MG-42s barking overhead, I full expected this to be my last day on earth and I whispered an abridged Act of Contrition to myself as I climbed the ladder. Just as I reached the top, another lull, silence as the machine gunner and his assistant changed belts to reload. Peeking over the top, I saw one of my comrades, already topside, approach the gun emplacement casemate with a satchel bomb. This is a small rucksack stuffed with RDX high explosive. He had ignited the pull switch fuse and the bomb was smokin’! I thought being killed thirty seconds later wouldn’t make any difference so why don’t I hang on to the ladder just below the cliff top and see how my buddy gets on! Kaaboom! He had lobbed that smoker right into the loophole [opening] of the casement, sending the MG-42 crew to kingdom come! Up and at ’em! The destruction of the main obstacle in our path injected a new energy into us Rangers as we piled up on the headland. I needn’t tell you, we let rip. Myself and a buddy went around the back of a concrete bunker and found the steel door open. We had three grenades between us. I held the door and tossed in my grenade while he followed with his two. I slammed the door, hearing cries inside of ‘Achtung, Achtung, Achtung!’ which were answered by the grenades going Boom, Boom, Boom and the position was ours.
Pearse’s unit suffered almost 50 per cent casualties in the action. They were gallantly led by a Texas farmer, Lieutenant Colonel James Earl Rudder, who was himself twice wounded in the action. ‘Rudder’s Rangers’ quickly found and destroyed the 155mm Howitzers, but they had to hold out for two days against relentless German counterattacks, until they were finally reinforced on 8 June and the Germans withdrew. Holding out for those two days was a blur to Sergeant Ed Ryan; no sleep, no communications, no food, and perilously low on ammunition. But they had cracked the nut – they had taken the Pointe du Hoc clifftop battery: six 155mm Howitzer artillery guns in heavily reinforced concrete shelters; an impregnable position with formidable weaponry capable of flinging a 42kg high explosive shell nearly ten miles, with remarkable accuracy, from a commanding position dominating the landings at Utah and Omaha beaches. It was vital that these weapons would have to be captured or otherwise put beyond use. Having courageously fought their way to the clifftop, the rangers found, to their astonishment, that the gun emplacements were empty! Unknown, the Germans had withdrawn the artillery pieces during previous Allied aerial bombardments to avoid damage, hiding them nearby for rapid deployment, if required. Getting over their shock of finding telegraph pole dummies where the artillery pieces ought to have been, the real guns were looked for, found and destroyed. It had been one of the toughest missions handed down to any unit attacking Hitler’s Atlantic Wall that D-Day dawn.
In an assault along a fifty-mile front, the Allies targeted five beaches codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword on the Normandy coast. To defend against invasion, the Germans had built up a vast array of concrete coastal fortifications, artillery batteries, gun emplacements, minefields, barbed wire entanglements and improvised shoreline obstacles. In all, there were more than half a million men manning the shoreline obstacles from Holland’s dykes to Brittany’s peninsula, and even further north and south, from Norway to Spain. The Fifteenth Army, the Germans’ main defensive force on the northern French coastline, was placed at the Pas-de-Calais, along the narrowest point of the English Channel between France and England. The Seventh Army, a less formidable one, was in Normandy. There was, however, a generally accepted belief that Calais, the shortest route and most direct to Berlin, with the most straightforward line of communications, was the most logical and therefore the most likely. It was also thought probable that the invasion would involve a support and a main attack, but which would be where?
Strictly speaking, Field Marshal von Rundstedt had territorial command but German Field Marshal Rommel had sought and been granted responsibility by Hitler to inject his energies, experience and enthusiasm into the situation. Rommel relished the challenge and his appointment to the post began with an inspection tour of the Atlantic Wall, only to find it far from being impregnable. A previous Allied coastal assault on Dieppe, in August 1942, had been defeated and proved costly for the Allies. The Germans had taken a certain amount of complacent comfort and even willing delusion from this. With Calais strongly suggesting itself as the foremost invasion site, it was here that Hitler had his Atlantic Wall heavily concentrated, its port strongly fortified and significant concrete coastal defences erected.
Elsewhere Rommel found many gaps, weaknesses and shortcomings along the defences of France’s shoreline. He filled these identified weak points with further protections: pill boxes, gun emplacements (artillery set in reinforced concrete block house casements), mines and more mines. Rommel could not get enough mines. He was short of war materials, steel and concrete, and the labour force to build beach obstacles, so he adapted and improvised. He developed French conscript labour battalions, felled trees from woods and designed obstacles of his own, often with mines or fused shells placed on them. These crude, simple, unsophisticated-but-deadly barriers were erected in large numbers between high and low tide water marks. There were varying types, including concrete cones called ‘dragons’ teeth’ and criss-crossing lengths of steel, some made from redundant railway tracks, which were cut and welded together in a jagged, protruding, triangular starfish shape. Another steel gate-like barrier configuration, known as ‘Belgian Gates’, and tree trunks, wooden beams and poles were set deep into the sand, projecting seawards, with mines or fused shells attached. All these were erected to repel the inshore invasion craft, to impale and rip open the hulls of landing craft, or cause damage or death with exploding mines and shells; they were to cause disruption and confusion, and to force disembarkation at the furthest point offshore, thus exposing the troops to gunfire for longer. Inland, Rommel had also flooded large areas of open field in order to counter parachutists or glider-borne troops likely to land there. Another defensive deterrent he used was to set poles in such spots, with barbed wire slung between the poles; this became known as ‘Rommel’s asparagus’. It was intended that these would tear apart the flimsy gliders as they attempted to land. Whatever preparations were possible, Rommel undertook them, driving his men hard and unapologetically. In doing so, he intended to conduct the defence of Europe at the water’s edge, firmly convinced that the first twenty-four hours of the invasion would be vital.
D-Day was a bloody and terrifying battle; the horror of the events, the intensity of the fighting, the extent of the casualties and injured, were anticipated and planned for by the Allies. For months and even years ahead of the event, it was the fear of failure that occupied every waking moment of the D-Day invasion commanders, staff and planners. The consequences of failure were immense and the possibility of this was to haunt them incessantly and insidiously. The repercussions of a fiasco were huge, and there were no guarantees that it would not be a washout. If D-Day were not to succeed, if the planners had got it woefully wrong, not only would many deaths result on the day, but it would result in a lengthening of the war; the stark reality of extended fighting was many lives lost, a continuance of Nazi tyranny in Western Europe, and the potentially devastating effects of Hitler’s V-1 and V-2 rockets, or flying bombs – ‘the Doodlebugs’, as the British public called them. There was also the extension of Hitler’s secret weapons programme: the Messerschmitt Me 262, a jet-powered fighter prototype, and the V-3, a multi-barrelled gun capable of firing 140kg shells across the English Channel at a rate of one every six seconds – the so-called ‘London Gun’. The turning point of the war