“…we are assembled on the open deck. The invasion barges were swinging on the cranes, ready to be lowered.
Waiting for the first ray of light, the two thousand men stood in perfect silence; whatever they were thinking, it was some kind of prayer.” ..MR0-
THE COAST OF NORMANDY WAS STILL miles away when the first unmistakable popping reached our listening ears. We ducked down in the puky water in the bottom of the barge and ceased to watch the approaching coast line. The flat bottom of our barge bit the earth of France. The boatswain lowered the steel-covered barge front, and there, between the grotesque designs of steel obstacles sticking out of the water, was a thin line of sand covered with smoke-our Europe, the “Easy Red” beach.
MY BEAUTIFUL FRANCE LOOKED sordid and uninviting, and a German machine gun, spitting bullets around the barge, fully spoiled my return. The men from my barge waded in the water. I paused for a moment on the gangplank. The boatswain who was in an understandable hurry to get the hell out of there, mistook my picture-taking attitude for explicable hesitation, and helped me make up my mind with a well-aimed kick in the rear. The water was cold and the beach still more than a hundred yards away. The bullets tore holes in the water around me, and I made for the nearest steel obstacle. A soldier got there at the same time, and for a few minutes we shared its cover. He took the waterproofing off his rifle, and began to shoot without much aiming at the smoke-ridden beach. The sound of his rifle gave him enough courage to move forward.
THE GRAY WATER AND THE GRAY SKY made the little men, dodging under the surrealistic designs of Hitler’s anti-invasion brain trust, very effective. I tried to move away from my steel pole, but the bullets chased me back every time. Fifty yards ahead of me, one of our half-burnt amphibious tanks stuck out of the water and offered me my next cover. Now the Germans played on all their instruments and I could not find any hole between the shells and bullets that blocked the last twenty-five yards to the beach. The tide was coming in, and now the water reached the farewell letter to ny family in my breast pocket. Behind the human cover of the last two guys, I reached the beach. I threw myself flat and my lips touched the earth of France. I had no desire to kiss it.
I FERVENTLY WISHED I COULD BE BENEATH THE earth now and above later. The chances to the contrary were becoming increasingly strong. I turned my head sideways and found myself nose to nose with a lieutenant from our last night’s poker game. He asked me if I knew what he saw. I told him no. “I’ll tell you what I see,” he whispered, “I see my ma on the front porch, waving my insurance policy.”
IT WAS THE UGLIEST BEACH IN THE WHOLE world. Exhausted from the water and the fear, we Jay flat on the small strip of wet sand between the sea and the barbed wire. The slant of the beach gave us some protection, so long as we lay flat, from the machine gun and rifle bullets, but the tide pushed us against the barbed wire, where the guns were enjoying open season.
THE NEXT MORTAR SHELL FELL BETWEEN THE barbed wire and the sea, and every piece of’ shrapnel found a man’s body. The Irish priest and the Jewish doctor were the first to stand up on the “Easy Red” beach. It was a new kind of fear shaking my body from toe to hair, and twisting my face. The men around me lay motionless. Only the dead on the water line rolled with waves. I did not think and I didn’t decide it. I just stood up and ran toward the boat. I stepped into the sea between two bodies and the water reached up to my neck. I reached the boat. I climbed aboard. The skipper was crying. His assistant bad been blown up all over him, and he was a mess. The barge brought us to the U.S.S. Chase, the very beat I had left only six hour,, before. On the Chase, the last wave of the 16th Infantry was just being lowered, but the decks were already full with returning wounded and dead. The mess boys who had served our coffee in white jackets and with white gloves at three in the morning were covered with blood and were sewing the dead in white sacks.
Only 30 years old on D-Day, Capa, on assignment for LIFE magazine, was the prototype of the daring combat photographer. He believed in working “the closer the better.” Capa was killed by a land mine 10 years after D-Day, covering France’s war in Vietnam. On June 6.1944, he wrote in his diary: “The war correspondent has his stake his life–in his own bands, a-nd he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.”
“We cannot afford to fail,” said Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the Allied commander. He had assembled a vast invasion force: 155,000 troops, more than 5,000 ships and boats, and 12,000 aircraft. But in the end, it al;l came down to a break in the weather. The attackers needed a full moon, for the sake of night-landing paratroopers, and a low tide around dawn to make beaches accessible. The first likely day, June 5, was washed out by a storm. The weathermen predicted a brief clearing on the 6th. “OK,” said Ike, “let’s go.”
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, the German commander, believed the Allies had to be stopped at the water’s edge. He laced the shoreline with trenches, pillboxes, land mines and gangly obstacles known as “Rommel’s asparagus.” Still, the Germans were taken by surprise. Adolf Hitler expected an attack on Calais, where the English Channel is narrowest; be slept through the Normandy landing and then refused to send reinforcements. Rommel thought the attack would come on a high tide at dawn; on D-Day, be was in Germany for his wife’s birthday.
In the early hours, almost nothing went according to plan for the Americans. The paratroopers flew into an unexpected fog bank and missed most of their drop zones behind Utah Beach. To the east, Omaha quickly became a meat grinder. Allied air and naval bombardments had failed to knock out the German defenses. As they approached the shore, flat-bottomed landing craft were pushed off course by a strong current and landed in the wrong places. Struggling through heavy surf, the first assault teams walked into the Germans’ carefully planned fields of fire and took nearly 50 percent casualties. Many of the more than 2,000 Americans killed on the stormy coast died without firing a shot. “Omaha Beach was a nightmare,” Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, the U.S. field commander, wrote later. Some of the GIs thought the landing had failed, and so did some of the Germans. But individual Americans took the initiative. They improvised new plans and fought their way up the dunes. Finally they broke through the Nazi defenses, and the invasion ended in success.
Hitler assumed that his enemies would first try to capture a major port such as Calais or Cherbourg. But the Allies had learned a bitter lesson from the Dieppe raid in 1942, when a Canadian division was chewed up in a futile attack on a fortified French port. Instead of hitting a harbor first, they assaulted the beaches of Normandy–and then built port facilities on the spot. Expendable Allied ships were sunk to make breakwaters. Giant floating piers, code-named “Mulberries,” were brought in to the beaches to handle cargo. Barrage balloons hovered overhead, anchored by stout cables that protected the beach from attack by low-flying German planes. And Allied warplanes roamed far inland, preventing Nazi ground forces from mounting a decisive counterattack. “We must gain space rapidly and peg out claims well inland,” the British field commander, Gen. Bernard Montgomery, said before the invasion. His paratroopers made rapid progress, but elsewhere the invaders moved ahead slowly. To the east of Omaha Beach, the British and Canadians on Sword, Juno and Gold soon bogged down, some in equally fearsome fighting. It took them six weeks to capture Caen, their objective on the first day. By then, the Americans had broken out in the west, and the race to Paris was on.
Hitler insisted that his troops fight to the last man; they were not allowed to fall back and regroup. Some German units fought well: others, padded out with old men, boys and conscripts from Nazi-occupied countries, gave up quickly. One abject group of Nazi soldiers surrendered, by semaphore, to the U.S. destroyer McCook, which was shelling them from offshore. Gen. Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben, commander of the German garrison in Cherbourg, warned his troops that “withdrawal from present positions is punishable by death.” Later, with American artillery pointed at his own bunker, von Schlieben decided it was time to surrender.
