D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

Division’s 116th Infantry, began to attack Colleville-sur-Mer. A couple of accounts state that many of the Germans in Colleville were drunk, some finding it hilarious to shout orders in English. The Americans fought their way in, but then found themselves bombarded by their own naval guns and suffered eight casualties. The cordite fumes became so intense that all of G Company, including the aid men attending the wounded, had to carry on in gas masks. Yellow signal flares failed to stop the fire, but eventually the warship ceased its bombardment. Not until some time afterwards did the headquarters of the German 352nd Infanterie-Division discover that the Americans had surrounded the village, having received a message that the ‘wounded can no longer be sent back’.

The 1st Division’s 18th Infantry came through, bypassing Colleville while the fighting there still continued. The 29th Division’s 115th Infantry had also pushed inland and attacked Saint-Laurent. A short time later, at 14.15 hours, the first German prisoners from the 352nd Infanterie-Division were identified from their paybooks. ‘I could not believe my eyes,’ wrote the intelligence officer soon after the battle, shaken that they had not been informed of its presence.

Once most of the observed fire on the beach had been eliminated, the armoured bulldozers managed to clear patches to speed the arrival of more troops and vehicles. Burnt-out tanks were hauled or pushed aside; even damaged landing craft were towed out of the way. One engineer with the 1st Division said that the smell of burnt flesh made it hard to eat for several days afterwards. The demolition teams continued to blow the German beach obstacles. For items which might have been booby-trapped, they used grappling hooks on long ropes. Enemy artillery rounds were still coming in — the German artillery would continue to ‘walk’ its fire up and down the beach — but many of the explosions which looked like shellbursts were mines or obstacles being blown by clearance teams.

The medical teams were also working at frenetic speed. Many of the wounded, especially those suffering from shock, were doubly vulnerable to the cold. Soldiers were sent to salvage blankets from a wrecked landing craft and gather extra field dressings from the dead. Medics could often do little more than administer morphine and patch up flesh wounds, such as those in the buttocks caused by mortar fragments. Some of the wounded were beyond hope. ‘I saw one young soldier, pale, crying and in obvious pain,’ wrote a captain in the 60th Medical Battalion, ‘with his intestines out under his uniform. There was nothing I could do except inject morphine and comfort him. He soon died.’

Doctors treated those suffering from combat trauma with Nembutal to knock them out. Plasma bags on drips were attached to those who had lost a lot of blood, a condition indicated by their hands going blue. Yet even with blankets and plasma, many were to die from shock and exposure during the night. Casualties of all sorts could now be sent back on empty landing craft to the ships, but the wounded on the more deserted stretches had a long time to wait. In the chaos of landing some sectors still lacked medical teams. The 1st Division’s medical battalion had been so hard hit on landing that it had to concentrate on its own casualties first. Soldiers wounded in the minefields up on the bluffs had the longest wait of all, since engineers had to clear paths to get to them. Many lay there all through the night until they could be reached in daylight.

The wounded were taken out to the ships such as the Samuel Chase and the Bayfield or to LSTs, which had been prepared as temporary hospital ships for the return journey. From the landing craft, they were lifted by net litters on derricks. On board there was ‘organized confusion’ as doctors carried out triage. One wounded soldier suddenly realized that his right leg was missing. The aid men had to hold him down as he yelled, ‘What am I going to do? My leg! I’m a farmer.’

Those who were going to die received morphine and plasma, and were then ‘left alone to whatever fate would befall them’. Sailors carried the dead on litters to the ship’s refrigerator, a solution which was not popular with the cooks. They were even more appalled when one of the surgeons began carrying out operations in their galley. The Bayfield had only one experienced army surgeon on board, assisted by navy surgeons unused to the work. Most of the medical orderlies had also never seen battle wounds before. One of them, faced with a ranger who had received terrible head wounds, did not realize that the man’s brains were held in only by his helmet. When he removed the helmet, the brains started to fall out. He ‘tried to push the brain back into the skull with very little success’. A doctor tried to reassure the horrified orderly that the man would have died anyway.

At 17.21 hours, Colonel Talley radioed the USS Ancon to say that the beach would permit ‘wheeled and tracked vehicular traffic’ over most of the area below the high-water mark. The relief for General Gerow was considerable. Gerow, determined to establish his corps headquarters on French soil before nightfall, went ashore. He crossed the beach in an armoured bulldozer sent by Colonel Talley to fetch him, and reached the corps command post at 20.30 hours. It was still within 500 yards of the front line.

Major General Charles H. Gerhardt, the diminutive martinet who commanded the 29th Division, had landed a little earlier. He set up his own headquarters, sitting on a box of C-Rations as he examined the map. Both generals had a great deal to reflect upon: their next moves and the casualties of that day. More than 2,000 men were reported killed, missing or wounded, and these figures are still not clear.[9] During his interviews with survivors, the official historian, Forrest C. Pogue, found they ‘assumed that everyone else had been killed or captured. This kind of fog of war was responsible for terribly exaggerated casualty estimates, although those at their worst were still well under the pre-D-Day fears.’ The only certain fact is that 3,000 French civilians died in the first twenty-four hours of the invasion, double the total number of American dead.

Even though Allied casualties on D-Day were far lighter than the planners’ estimates, that did not in any way reduce the shock of the first wave’s slaughter at Omaha. Company A of the 116th Infantry Regiment, a National Guard outfit, became a symbol of the sacrifice, albeit an unrepresentative one. One of the survivors of that company met Brigadier General Cota the next morning. Cota asked him what unit he was from. When he told him, Cota just shook his head in sadness. ‘He knew better than I that Company A was practically… well, it was out of action.’ Around 100 men out of 215 had been killed and many more wounded.[10]

Omaha became an American legend, but a crueller truth lay ahead in the fighting to come. The average losses per division on both sides in Normandy were to exceed those for Soviet and German divisions during an equivalent period on the eastern front.[11]

8. Utah and the Airborne

The dawn of D-Day on the Cotentin peninsula brought only a little clarity to the scattered American airborne troops. The tall hedgerows of the Normandy fields made it hard to orientate themselves. For many, daylight meant that they could at last light a cigarette without giving their position away. Finding containers and equipment bundles also became easier. A French boy with a horse and cart helped an airborne staff officer gather them up. German soldiers also profited as a result of the manna from heaven which had rained down in containers during the night. They helped themselves to American K-Rations and cigarettes.

Those paratroopers who had survived the drop began to coalesce into mixed groups and attack their objectives, although they had no radio contact with their divisional headquarters. They were, however, aided by an even greater German confusion. The cutting of telephone wires by paratroopers and the Resistance had proved an invaluable tactic. German forces on the peninsula were also uncertain in their reactions. They had no idea where the main American paratroop forces were concentrated and they lacked leadership. Generalleutnant Falley of the 91st Luftlande-Division was dead from the ambush near his headquarters, and Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm Graf von Schlieben, the commander of the 709th Infanterie-Division, was still absent.

Schlieben had been asleep in a hotel in Rennes prior to the Seventh Army map exercise planned for that day. The telephone rang at 06.30 hours, waking him. ‘The war game has been cancelled,’ a staff officer informed him. ‘You are requested to return to your unit.’ Schlieben, realizing that the Allies had stolen a march on them, told his driver to take the road up the west coast of the peninsula. They drove as fast as possible and turned inland, stopping only to collect a wounded German soldier spotted in a hedgerow by the side of the road. Schlieben could hear heavy guns firing to the east.

When the curfew expired at 06.00 hours, French civilians emerged from their houses to find out what had been happening during the night. In Montebourg, north of the main drop zones, they went to the central square, where they saw ‘American prisoners with blackened faces’ guarded by German soldiers. The Americans winked at