Excerpts from Chapter 3: The American Landings, 6 June

'Dutch' Cota Builds a Legend

In the dead space in the German defences on Omaha where Company C and the 5th Rangers had landed, the assault force command group landed with Brigadier General Cota and the 116th's commander, Colonel D.W. Canham. The beach reeked of disaster, littered with corpses, burning tanks, wrecked landing craft, and all the other debris of war. The Germans had exactly the same impression from their position atop the bluffs. The commander of the Les Moulins Draw defences called in his report to General Kraiss, commanding the 352nd Division.

At the water's edge, the enemy is in search of cover behind the coastal-zone obstacles. A great many motor vehicles - among them ten tanks - stand burning on the beach. The obstacle demolition squads have given up their activities. Debarkation from the landing boasts has ceased ... the boats keep farther out to sea. The fire of our battle positions and artillery is well placed and has inflicted considerable casualties on the enemy. A great many wounded and dead lie on the beach ...

Cota and Canham were determined that whatever the Germans thought at the moment would not be the final say on the matter. Canham was wounded shortly after landing but refused to fall out. They agreed to separate, Canham to rally the men further to the west of Les Moulins Draw and Cota those at hand. A few men had already tried to slip over the bluffs, and most had been shot down. The rest were still huddled in clumps sometimes of a hundred or more men. And the preregistered German artillery was causing horrific casualties, especially the 150mm guns on the Pointe-du-Hoc, as their shells landed amid the huddling troops. Cota walked among them with an assurance that had bled out of them since they hit the beach. His message was simple: you may die attacking but you will surely die if you stay here. He organized the first group of a hundred men to return fire up the bluffs to keep the Germans down. He found a few engineers with bangalore torpedoes to blast a hole in a coil of barbed wire that ran along the base of the bluff. They blew a small hole in and a brave man rushed through only to be felled almost instantly by a machine gun. He cried out, 'Medico, I'm hit! Help me!' He died crying, 'Mama.' The rest of the men were stuck fast where they crouched. Cota raced through the hole in the wire unharmed. He yelled for more to follow, and they did. No one was hit. For some strange reason, the machine gun that had killed the first young soldier was silent. Cota led the men through a field of reeds until they found an abandoned German trench. They followed it up the bluff single-file. Cota hurried them along. Unknown to everyone else, they had passed out of the hell on the beach. The German positions had been sighted to fire onto the beach and not to their rear behind the bluff where Cota was now leading his Stonewallers and their Ranger comrades. It was 0900. Something else had happened. By his very example, Cota had reignited the initiative and sense of purpose of men who had been stunned by their ordeal on the beach. Although they were mingled from many units, they were now a unit again.

They followed the German paths to within quarter of a mile of the outskirts of Vierville where they were taken under fire by a few machine guns. Cota organized a base of fire that drove off the Germans while an assault group attacked into the village. The Germans fled. Cota's force entered Vierville unopposed and were met by another group of Americans who had climbed over the bluff, Company C men who had escaped the slaughter on the beach. They were joined by more men from the 2nd Battalion and 5th Rangers led by Colonel Canham. Their arrival was a telling indictment of the decision to land directly in front of the heavily defended draws. The units that had inadvertently landed between the draws had come ashore with few casualties. More importantly, their nerve had not been broken by the Germans' firepower. Their eagerness had got them over the bluffs on their own. Cota's force was growing, and it was directly behind the still effective German defences of the draw. The Battleship USS Texas was now taking a hand and sending its fourteen-inch projectiles up the draw. Cota led his men to attack the defenders of the draw from behind. Smarting under the big guns of the Texas, the Germans were vulnerable to a determined attack from the rear. They surrendered quickly and Cota walked down to the beach to announce that it was now open for business. The beach covered by the draw was a sickening sight with thirty to fifty dead every hundred yards.

Cota moved to blow the antitank wall at the mouth of the draw and start the remaining tanks and men up the draw and through Vierville to the hedgerow country beyond. A runner arrived to tell him that the 2nd and 3rd Battalions had also climbed the bluff east of Les Moulins Draw and taken it from the rear. These again were units that had landed inadvertently between the draws. The Stonewallers had overcome not only the German defences but the suicidal elements of the plan they had had to execute, at a cost of over a thousand dead and wounded. Whole companies had been wiped out in the 1st and 2nd Battalions. Nothing had gone according to that plan, and it was the aggressiveness and initiative of individuals like 'Dutch' Cota and others that had seized this victory. One officer remembered:

Everything that was done was done in small groups, led by the real heroes of the war. Most of them were killed ... The minefields behind the beach were strewn with these guys; they were lying around the hedgerows on top of the bluffs and, of course, they were piled - literally - on the beach proper. ... Very, very few were decorated, chiefly because no one was left to tell about what they did.

The Presence of the Commander

To the east, the 16th Regiment had also moved off the beach, due to its commander, Colonel George Taylor, and the Big Red One's Assistant Division Commander, Brigadier General Willard G. Wyman, in a simultaneous reenactment of Cota and Canham's motivating force. As small units of the 16th started to move inland off the beach, Taylor and Wyman organized the reduction of the remaining German strongpoints. The regiment was responding to a single will again. One troublesome gun emplacement mounted one of the dreaded 88mm antitank guns that had shot up a number of the Shermans that had come ashore. It was the key to the Colleville gap and seemed immune to Taylor's and Wyman's efforts. A destroyer almost beached itself to get close enough to fire accurately. Normally immune to naval gunfire because of its thick concrete carapace, the emplacement was not immune to bad luck as the destroyer sent a five-inch shell directly through the firing port. The destroyed blockhouse became the Big Red One's first division command post, named Danger Forward. From there Major General Huebner, the Division Commander, directed the 16th to drive inland and take Colleville as Cota had taken Vierville.

The Germans had been lulled into confidence by the message from the Les Moulins Draw that described the collapse of the landings. That confidence grew the higher it went up the chain of command. General Marcks, however, was the man on the spot. Reports of paratroopers in the Bayeux area had drawn him to the area on the right flank of the Omaha landings. The messages he was receiving now told him that the Americans were getting off the beach. General Kraiss' initial optimism had quickly evaporated as he realized his coastal defences had failed in a number of places. He hurriedly recalled his 915th Regiment, which he had sent off to chase the dummy paratroopers, but they were hours away on foot. He was able to commit a battalion of the 914th Regiment to destroy the Americans at Pointe-du-Hoc. Initial reports indicated that the guns had been saved just in time. Everything else had been committed, and the British were also getting off the beach in their landings on his right flank.

Max Wünsche and the Art of Timing

Marcks had taken the precaution of ordering Wünsche's battle group of the 12th SS from Balleroy north to the Bayeux-Carentan highway that paralleled the coast as soon as he had learned that the Allies were landing in that sector. The highway was three miles inland, some nine miles from Balleroy. The battle group had been attacked several times from the air and lost half-a-dozen vehicles. The attacks had slowed him down: each time the column had to scatter and then reassemble. However, it arrived intact at Formigny by noon, directly between Vierville and Colleville. The sound of the guns drew his attention to Colleville on his right. Marcks had admonished him to attack as quickly as possible any movement off the beach. 'They will be most vulnerable then,' he had said. Wonsche assembled his commanders to issue his orders, and repeated Marcks' warning. He was joined by a battalion con-Iniander of Kraiss' artillery regiment whose guns were furiously firing on the beaches from around Formigny. The ma)or was able to convey the latest intelligence he had. Most of the draws had fallen, he surmised, since he had lost contact with the defenders. The firing from Colleville meant the Americans were attacking off the beach. He was now only firing blindly at the preregistered beaches hoping to hit something. He would gladly support Wünsche's attack. Wünsche sent off the attached company of the reconnaissance battalion in that direction. The artilleryman laid out his map for the SS officers. It was familiar to them; they had planned for an exercise with the 352nd in this area for this very day. Marcks had taken one more precaution. He directed that the remaining elements of Hitlerjugend on their way from Lisieux be directed to this sector as well.

The battle group drove north to St. Laurent and turned east to Colleville, which they would be approaching from the west. German stragglers, over-age men from the 726th Regiment, told them that the Americans were swarming off the beaches and had taken Colleville. Already small parties of American infantrymen were being encountered. They were swept away as the SS sped down the road, their coming hidden by the hedgerows that lined the twisting roads. Wünsche called in the fire support from his own self-propelled battalion and that of Kraiss' battalion. The town was suddenly wreathed in explosions. Wünsche gave the signal, 'Achtung! ... Panzer, maaarsch.' The SS burst into Colleville, Panther tanks in the lead followed by SPWs, and spread out through the orchards on either side of the town. The Americans had not had time to organize a defence, and in any case did not have the heavy infantry weapons to fight tanks. They had all been lost on the beach. Their only hope was the few remaining tanks from the 741st Tank Battalion that had accompanied them off the beach.

They had been surprised first by the artillery that struck down many of them as they moved through the town. Those that reemerged from cover were cut down by the tanks and machine guns on the speeding SPWs. Every time the Americans formed a nest of resistance, the Panthers would fire into it point blank until it was silenced. The few Shermans tried to block the Panthers only to see their shot bounce off the frontal armour. The German high velocity 75mm guns had no such problems. They sliced right through the thin hulls and turrets of the Shermans. In less than fifteen minutes the battle group had coursed through the town. The surviving enemy were fading away back toward the beach. Wünsche's losses had been light, and his boys, men now, had done well.

His intelligence officer had worked fast on a group of prisoners and reported that they were from the 16th Regiment of the 1st Division. The enemy appeared to be moving up from the Colleville draw. That was the key point. No time to lose. The battle group reversed its path through Colleville and took the road northwest that led to the draw. Again a high-speed approach produced the maximum shock among the columns of infantry that they literally ran over coming north out of the draw. The Panthers were crunching over men who could not run fast enough to jump into the hedgerows. The following panzergrenadiers shot them up from their armoured personnel carriers.

The 1st Division staff had moved into a burned out German bunker at the mouth of the draw and set up a sign that proclaimed it 'Danger Forward'. Major General Clarence Huebner was standing outside at 1450 when the SS attacked into Colleville. A frantic call from the 1/16th's radio in the town screamed, 'Tanks, tanks, all over the town!' then silence. The antitank guns of the 18th Infantry, which had landed in the second wave, were at the end of the column that was moving up the draw towards Colleville. He had to get them forward as fast as possible, but the draw and the hedgerow-bound road were packed tight with infantry and a few tanks and jeeps. All hell broke loose up the road. In a few minutes the sleek lines of a tank with a black cross careened down the draw scattering the Americans. Its tracks were red with blood and bits of flesh. Its machine guns sprayed the area with its crowds of targets. A bazooka hit it under the turret and left only a scorch mark. Another one struck it in the rear setting it on fire. The crew were cut down as they tried to clamber out. Huebner was getting an AT gun in place when two more monsters came slithering down the draw. One of them fired directly into Danger Forward killing most of the division staff inside. The machine gun of the other killed Huebner as he was helping to sight a 57mm AT gun toward the draw. More Panthers came out of the draw to clank up and down the beach spraying machine gun fire and shooting directly into landing craft approaching the beach at the range of only a few hundred yards. The tanks were followed by the panzergrenadiers who crushed any resistance left.

From the command ships ashore, observers saw the gray-painted tanks emerge from the draw and fan out up and down the beach. Men were fleeing to the landing craft only to die in them as they exploded. The sickened voice of one of the observers was relayed to General Bradley aboard the cruiser, USS Augusta. He looked as if he had been struck in the face. An officer began to sob as the voice narrated the havoc ashore. Rear Admiral Alan G. Kirk, commanding the naval task force, spoke first. 'I can get some of them off the beach if we hold off the enemy with naval gunfire, but we will lose a lot of men from our own guns.' 'No, don't kill any more of our boys. It's almost all over now.' And it was. Everywhere men were surrendering as the Germans swarmed down onto the beach. A few made their way east and west away from the draw to link up with other units, but the bulk of the two infantry regiments and all the attached units had been lost. The proudest infantry division in the U.S. Army had been destroyed. It was almost 1600. Not even ten hours had passed since the Big Red One had landed.

All that remained on Omaha were the wounded Stonewallers around St. Laurent and Vierville and the 29th's second regiment to come ashore, the 115th Infantry from Baltimore. They were informed from the Augusta. The Germans' armour in the area had expended its supply of surprise at Collevil1e. The 29th was forewarned. Montgomery and Eisenhower learned of the disaster at the same time. Bradley recommended that the 29th be withdrawn and Omaha written off. It was doubtful that the decimated 1l6th already precariously positioned inland could resist the armoured force that had broken the 1st Division. They were a National Guard Division, for God's sake! How could they do better than the regular 1st Division? Could the British accept Omaha's second echelon divisions in their sector? Utah was in danger too. Montgomery encouraged him to 'fight It out, Brad. Don't Dunkirk on us.' Eisenhower supported his land forces commander. Fight it out, and prepare the 2nd Infantry Division to be put ashore immediately behind the 29th. Privately, Montgomery was more pessimistic. He immediately asked General Dempsey if his 2nd Army beachheads could accept V Corps' follow-on divisions. Yes, they could.

Wünsche had taken hours to get off the beach after resistance had collapsed. Thousands of prisoners had to be rounded up, and the draw was choked with bodies, debris and wrecked vehicles. It was not until early evening (1930) that his battle group was on the road again. He was proud of his men; they had conducted themselves like veterans and achieved an incredible victory in crushing this beachhead, a victory of the kind the Germans had not tasted since 1942. And the cost had been fewer than two hundred men out of his 2,500. His staff estimated that they had taken at least 5,000 prisoners. Their enthusiasm seemed boundless now. He would have to husband it carefully.

The night road-movement proved to be more difficult than the battle. Not all the Americans had been rounded up. Many small groups had melted into the countryside, and in the darkness clashed with his battle group. No firefight had been serious, only time-consuming. He was met by Kraiss at Formigny late that night (2213) when the battle group closed on the village and briefed on the situation to the west. The Americans had overwhelmed the coastal defence around the Les Moulins and Vierville Draws and were digging in further inland. Vierville was a strongpoint, it seemed. At least another infantry regiment had joined them as well as tanks and artillery had come ashore. Kraiss had attacked Vierville with his entire 915th Regiment but had been repulsed. Casualties had been heavy among his young Saxon soldiers. They had bounced off the Americans like a stonewall. At least the guns on Pointe-du-Hoc had been saved by a swift counterattack by the 914th. They had the remnants of an American commando battalion penned up on the tip of the cliff, and the guns continued to pound the landing beaches. The Americans had to be destroyed tomorrow at the latest or they would push so many troops through the beachhead that they could not be driven back into the sea. Available for the attack were Wünsche's battle group, a rocket launcher regiment being rushed forward by 7th Army, the 915th and most of the 914th Regiments, the 352nd Division's engineer battalion, and three artillery battalions. The rest of his division had either been overrun or pushed back by the British to the west where they were barely holding on outside of Bayeux. His division had one last effort left in it.

The Stonewallers and the Price of Tradition

While Kraiss and Wünsche were conferring, the 29th's commander, Major General Charles Gerhardt, came ashore. The plan had called for him to wait until the following day when enough of his men were to have been landed for Huebner to pass command to him. Now the plan and Huebner were gone, and it was a whole new game. Gerhardt was a tough, unrelenting man. He had worked his division hard in training and was not about to see it crushed on the beach. He and his staff came in behind the Marylanders of the 115th. The artillery regiment and the antitank battalion were just behind. Destroyers had laid enough smoke to obscure the aim of the guns at Pointe-du-Hoc and casualties had been acceptable. The battleships and cruisers of Admiral Kirk's task force were keeping up a constant drumbeat on the battery, hoping at least to neutralize its fire while the rest of the division got ashore. The Rangers had been evacuated in the night from their bitter toe-hold on the cliff. All through the night, scattered survivors from the Colleville disaster crossed through the 29th's lines. Many straggled down the beach, and the largest group, an entire battalion of the 18th Regiment that had been moving cross country when the Germans attacked down the draw, came in through the Marylanders outside St. Laurent. Gerhardt joined Cota outside of Vierville where the main line of resistance had been set up. Exhaustion had fallen over the remnants of the Stonewallers. Men were sleeping were they could and could not be roused. The accumulated stress of the landings, the attacks over the bluffs, and finally the German infantry counterattack had emptied them of physical and mental reserves. Gerhardt was more concerned about getting the fresher 115th in defensible positions by morning and landing the division's third regiment, the 175th, just after midnight. The surviving regiment of the Big Red One, the 26th, had been attached to Gerhardt as well. They could start landing in the morning. The 29th had to be ready for a stronger counterattack that would hit them in the morning. The tanks that had crushed the 1st Division were still out there.

One of Marcks' couriers had found the commander of the 25th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment outside of St. Lô. Known as 'Panzerineyer', SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Kurt Meyer had an acute sense of hearing for the 'sound of the guns'. In his wake was not only his own powerful regiment but the rest of the l2th SS, over ten thousand men in all. The tanks were all with Wünsche and Witt, but the 12th Jagdpanzer Battalion had twelve of the new Jagdpanzer IVs. There were also plenty of dual purpose flak guns as well as most of the artillery regiment. He stopped long enough in St. Lô to find out from the LXXXIV Corps chief of staff where the enemy was. He was directed toward Vierville to counterattack immediately.

By nightfall, he was filtering his battle group into position for a break-in that would lead him straight to the draws through which the enemy was being reinforced. He peremptorily attached the 915tb Regiment already in position. Kraiss swallowed his resentment and agreed. Panzermeyer was on the spot and ready. Kraiss would not be ready until tomorrow.

At 0200 on the morning of the 7 June, he attacked. Artillery fell into both the Vierville and Les Moulins draws, severing the troops inland from their lifeline to the beach. The Jagdpanzers fired their high velocity 75mms straight down the roads leading into the American positions and raced forward, the panzergrenadiers following in their armoured personnel carriers mixed with flak and self-propelled guns. As usual Meyer led the attack in his favourite command vehicle, a motorcycle. Both draws had been crowded with human and softskinned vehicle traffic moving up from the beach. Orange bursts of exploding shells lit the draw. Within minutes it was filled with shredded corpses, twisted equipment, and burning vehicles. The fire shifted then to the beaches which were equally packed. The Germans were through the American perimeter around Vierville in the first rush. Panzermeyer was behind the first company when the Americans began to react. Tanks emerged from the darkness firing into his still mounted grenadiers. The two lead Jagdpanzers were hit from the rear by a combination of antitank guns and tanks. They began to burn.

Meyer was not about to shrink back, nor were his young grenadiers. They had quickly dismounted and were attacking in the dark led by their veteran officers and NCOs. The battalions of the 915th Regiment were attacking around the perimeter as well. First Lieutenant Edward H. Lawson of Charlottesville remembered:

The village caught fire and the moon was out so there was plenty of light. The Navy was firing illumination shells too. The Germans just kept coming. My platoon was down to seven men when they rushed us. Sergeant Collins' face disappeared. Then they were among us. I shot one, two, then felt a hammer hit my chest and blacked out. I woke later that night. The fighting had passed, and there were only dead men around me. All of my seven and other young faces in those cloth-covered German helmets. The German medics found me in the morning.

Slowly the Stonewallers were pressed back through Vierville towards the draw. The hedgerows thinned out here along the bluff offering no protection to the short German rushes that had moved their attack forward so far. Naval gunfire lashed with high explosive and steel splinters the open ground that the Germans could not cross. It was cold comfort for Gerhardt. His division was bleeding to death. He doubted if the Stonewallers could muster a fit battalion now. They were played out and holding on by fingernails that could only slip. The 115th was fresher but had been pushed back to the Les Moulins draw as well. Reinforcements would only bunch up on the beach. The wounded now seemed to outnumber the unwounded. He reluctantly recommended the 29th be withdrawn.

General Gerow (5th Corps Commander) passed on the recommendation to Bradley aboard the Augusta. His great jaw set, then he said, 'Stop all reinforcement. Bring them off.' To the Navy's eternal credit, they did just that in the few remaining hours of darkness and the early morning. Naval gunfire kept the Germans at bay as first the wounded then the troops on the beach and finally the wasted infantry companies were one by one sent to the beach. The Germans did not cooperate. Panzermeyer's artillery and that of the 352nd continued to pound the draws and the beach adding to the butcher's bill paid by the 29th. Navy Lieutenant Jeffery Nelson was on one of the landing craft shuttling from the beach to the ships. By his third trip, the inch of water on the metal deck was pink. The wounded were being packed aboard as quickly as possible. Many of them were struck by shrapnel or high explosive as they filed down the beach and carried aboard bleeding. By the seventh trip in the early morning, the water on the deck was deep red. Everything except personal weapons was ordered to be abandoned. Corporal Peter Johnston, 2nd Battalion, 116th Regiment was one of those filing down the beach. His own Garand had been blown out of his hands in Vierville, but he saw his grim-faced division commander whose reputation as a razor-tongued martinet overwhelmed Johnston's fatigue. He snatched another rifle from the debris strewn about everywhere and passed the general with relief. Gerhardt was the last man off the beach.

Gerhardt stepped into the landing craft almost exactly twenty-three hours after the 1st and 29th Divisions had approached the shore of Normandy. It had been the bloodiest day for the U.S. Army since Antietam in 1862.

V Corps Losses at Omaha Beach 6 June 1944
Unwounded POWs     Wounded POWs     Evacuated Wounded     Killed     Missing     Total	8,626 2,712 3,391 2,311 884 17,924
Source: The Adjutant General, Losses in the ET0, 1944             (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1948), p.32.

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