Fifty years later Pointe-du-Hoc
remains an incredible, overwhelming sight. It is hardly possible to say
which is more impressive, the amount of reinforced concrete the Germans
poured to build their casemates or the damage done to them and the craters
created by the bombs and shells. Huge chunks of concrete, as big as
houses, are scattered over the kilometer-square area, as if the gods were
playing dice.
The tunnels and trenches were
mostly obliterated, but enough of them still exist to give an idea of how
much work went into building the fortifications. Some railroad tracks
remain in the underground portions; they were for handcarts used to move
ammunition. There is an enormous steel fixture that was a railroad
turntable.
Surprisingly, the massive
concrete observation post at the edge of the cliff remains intact.
It was the key to the whole battery; from it one has a perfect view of
both Utah and Omaha Beaches; German artillery observers in the post had
radio and underground telephone communication with the casemates.
The craters are as big as ten
meters across, a meter or two deep, some even deeper. They number in the
hundreds. They were a godsend to the rangers, for they provided plenty of
immediate cover. Once on top, rangers could get to a crater in seconds,
then begin firing at the German defenders.
What most impresses tourists
at Pointe-du-Hoc -- who come today in the thousands, from all over the
world -- is the sheer cliff and the idea of climbing up it by rope. What
most impresses military professionals is the way the rangers went to work
once they got on top. Despite the initial disorientation they quickly
recovered and went about their assigned tasks. Each platoon had a specific
mission, to knock out a specific gun emplacement. The men got on it
without being told.
Germans were firing
sporadically from the trenches and regularly from the machine-gun position
on the eastern edge of the fortified area and from a 20mm anti-aircraft
gun on the western edge, but the rangers ignored them to get to the
casemates.
When they got to the
casemates, to their amazement they found that the "guns" were telephone
poles. Tracks leading inland indicated that the 155mm cannon had been
removed recently, almost certainly as a result of the preceding air
bombardment.
The rangers never paused. In
small groups they began moving inland toward their next objective, the
paved road that connected Grandcamp and Vierville, to set up roadblocks to
prevent German reinforcements from moving to Omaha.
Lieutenant Kerchner moved
forward and got separated from his men. "I remember landing in this zigzag
trench. It was the deepest trench I'd ever seen. It was a narrow
communications trench, two feet wide but eight feet deep. About every
twenty-five yards it would go off on another angle. I was by myself and I
never felt so lonesome before or since, because every time I came to an
angle I didn't know whether I was going to come face-to-face with a German
or not." He was filled with a sense of anxiety and hurried to get to the
road to join his men "because I felt a whole lot better when there were
other men around."
Kerchner followed the trench
for 150 meters before it finally ran out near the ruins of a house on the
edge of the fortified area. Here he discovered that Pointe-du-Hoc was a
self-contained fort in itself, surrounded on the land side with
minefields, barbed-wire entanglements, and machine-gun emplacements. "This
is where we began running into most of the German defenders, on the
perimeter."
Other rangers had made it to the road, fighting all the way, killing
Germans, taking casualties. The losses were heavy. In Kerchner's D
Company, only twenty men out of the seventy who had started out in the
LCAs were on their feet. Two company commanders were casualties;
lieutenants were now leading D and E. Capt. Otto Masny led F Company.
Kerchner checked with the three COs and learned that all the guns were
missing. "So at this stage we felt rather disappointed, not only
disappointed but I felt awfully lonesome as I realized how few men we had
there."
The lieutenants decided that there was no reason to go back to the
fortified area and agreed to establish a perimeter around the road "and
try to defend ourselves and wait for the invading force that had landed on
Omaha Beach to come up."
At the base of the cliff at around 0730, Lieutenant Eikner sent out a
message by radio: "Praise the Lord." It signified that the rangers were on
top of the cliff.
At 0745, Colonel Rudder moved his command post up to the top, establishing
it in a crater on the edge of the cliff. Captain Block also climbed a rope
to the top and set up his aid station in a two-room concrete emplacement.
It was pitch black and cold inside; Block worked by flashlight in one
room, using the other to hold the dead.
Sergeant South remembered "the wounded coming in at a rapid rate, we could
only keep them on litters stacked up pretty closely. It was just an
endless, endless process. Periodically I would go out and bring in a
wounded man from the field, leading one back, and ducking through the
various shell craters. At one time, I went out to get someone and was
carrying him back on my shoulders when he was hit by several other bullets
and killed."
The fighting within the fortified area was confused and confusing. Germans
would pop up here, there, everywhere, fire a few rounds, then disappear
back underground. Rangers could not keep contact with each other. Movement
meant crawling. There was nothing resembling a front line. Germans were
taken prisoner; so were some rangers. In the observation post a few
Germans held out despite repeated attempts to overrun the position.
The worst problem was the machine gun on the eastern edge of the fortified
area, the same gun that had caused so many casualties on the beach. Now it
was sweeping back and forth over the battlefield whenever a ranger tried
to move. Rudder told Lieutenant Vermeer to eliminate it.
Vermeer set out with a couple of men. "We moved through the shell craters
and had just reached the open ground where the machine gun could cover us
also when we ran into a patrol from F Company on the same mission. Once we
ran out of shell holes and could see nothing but a flat 200-300 yards of
open ground in front of us, I was overwhelmed with the sense that it would
be impossible to reach our objective without heavy losses." The heaviest
weapon the rangers had was a BAR, hardly effective over that distance.
Fortunately, orders came from Rudder to hold up a moment. An attempt was
going to be made to shoot the machine gun off the edge of that cliff with
guns from a destroyer. That had not been tried earlier because the
shore-fire-control party, headed by Capt. Jonathan Harwood from the
artillery and Navy Lt. Kenneth Norton, had been put out of action by a
short shell. But by now Lieutenant Eikner was on top and he had brought
with him an old World War I signal lamp with shutters on it. He thought he
could contact the Satterlee with it. Rudder told him to try.
Eikner had trained his men in the international Morse code on the signal
lamp "with the idea that we might just have a need for them. I can recall
some of the boys fussing about having to lug this old, outmoded equipment
on D-Day. It was tripod-mounted, a dandy piece of equipment with a
telescopic sight and a tracking device to stay lined up with a ship. We
set it up in the middle of the shell-hole command post and found enough
dry-cell batteries to get it going. We established communications and used
the signal lamp to adjust the naval gunfire. It was really a lifesaver for
us at a very critical moment."
Satterlee banged away at the machine-gun position. After a couple of
adjustments Satterlee's five-inch guns blew it off the cliffside. Eikner
then used the lamp to ask for help in evacuating the wounded; a whaleboat
came in but could not make it due to intense German fire.
The rangers were cut off from the sea. With the Vierville draw still
firmly in German hands, they were getting no help from the land side. With
the radios out of commission, they had no idea how the invasion elsewhere
was going. The rangers on Pointe-du-Hoc were isolated. They had taken
about 50 percent casualties.
A short shell from British cruiser Glasgow had hit next to Rudder's
command post. It killed Captain Harwood, wounded Lieutenant Norton, and
knocked Colonel Rudder off his feet. Lieutenant Vermeer was returning to
the CP when the shell burst. What he saw he never forgot: "The hit turned
the men completely yellow. It was as though they had been stricken with
jaundice. It wasn't only their faces and hands, but the skin beneath their
clothes and the clothes which were yellow from the smoke of that shell --
it was probably a colored marker shell."
Rudder recovered quickly. Angry, he went out hunting for snipers, only to
get shot in the leg. Captain Block treated the wound; thereafter Rudder
stayed in his CP, more or less, doing what he could to direct the battle.
Vermeer remarked that "the biggest thing that saved our day was seeing
Colonel Rudder controlling the operation. It still makes me cringe to
recall the pain he must have endured trying to operate with a wound
through the leg and the concussive force he must have felt from the close
hit by the yellow-colored shell. He was the strength of the whole
operation."
On his return trip in 1954, Rudder pointed to a buried blockhouse next to
his CP. "We got our first German prisoner right here," he told his son.
"He was a little freckle-faced kid who looked like an American .... I had
a feeling there were more of them around, and I told the rangers to lead
this kid ahead of them. They just started him around this corner when the
Germans opened up out of the entrance and he fell dead, right here, face
down with his hands still clasped on the top of his head."
Out by the paved road, the fighting went on. It was close quarters, so
close that when two Germans who had been hiding in a deep shelter hole
jumped to their feet, rifles ready to fire, Sergeant Petty was right
between them. He threw himself to the ground, firing his BAR as he did so
-- but the bullets went between the Germans, who were literally at his
side. The experience so unnerved them they threw their rifles down, put
their hands in the air, and called out "Kamerad, Kamerad." A buddy of
Petty's who was behind him commented dryly, "Hell, L-Rod, that's a good
way to save ammunition -- just scare 'em to death."
In another of the countless incidents of that battle, Lt. Jacob Hill
spotted a German machine gun behind a hedgerow just beyond the road. It
was firing in the general direction of some hidden rangers. Hill studied
the position for a few moments, then stood up and shouted, "You bastard
sons of bitches, you couldn't hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle!"
As the startled Germans spun their gun around, Hill lobbed a grenade into
the position and put the gun out of action.
The primary purpose of the rangers was not to kill Germans or take
prisoners, but to get those 155mm cannon. The tracks leading out of the
casemates and the effort the Germans were making to dislodge the rangers
indicated that they had to be around somewhere.
By 0815 there were about thirty-five rangers from D and E Companies at the
perimeter roadblock. Within fifteen minutes another group of twelve from F
Company joined up. Excellent soldiers, those rangers -- they immediately
began patrolling.
There was a dirt road leading south (inland). It had heavy tracks. Sgts.
Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn thought the missing guns might have made the
tracks. They set out to investigate. At about 250 meters (one kilometer
inland), Lomell abruptly stopped. He held his hand out to stop Kuhn,
turned, and half whispered, "Jack, here they are. We've found 'em. Here
are the goddamned guns."
Unbelievably, the well-camouflaged guns were set up in battery, ready to
fire in the direction of Utah Beach, with piles of ammunition around them,
but no Germans. Lomell spotted about a hundred Germans a hundred meters or
so across an open field, apparently forming up. Evidently they had pulled
back during the bombardment, for fear of a stray shell setting off the
amunition dump, and were now preparing to man their guns, but they were in
no hurry, for until their infantry drove off the rangers and reoccupied
the observation post they could not fire with any accuracy.
Lomell never hesitated. "Give me your grenades, Jack," he said to Kuhn.
"Cover me. I'm gonna fix 'em." He ran to the guns and set off thermite
grenades in the recoil and traversing mechanisms of two of the guns,
disabling them. He bashed in the sights of the third gun.
"Jack, we gotta get some more thermite grenades." He and Kuhn ran back to
the highway, collected all of the thermite grenades from the rangers in
the immediate area, returned to the battery, and disabled the other three
guns.
Meanwhile Sgt. Frank Rupinski, leading a patrol of his own, had discovered
a huge ammunition dump some distance south of the battery. It too was
unguarded. Using high-explosive charges, the rangers detonated it. A
tremendous explosion occurred as the shells and powder charges blew up,
showering rocks, sand, leaves, and debris on Lomell and Kuhn. Unaware of
Rupinski's patrol, Lomell and Kuhn assumed that a stray shell had hit the
ammo dump. They withdrew as quickly as they could and sent word back to
Rudder by runner that the guns had been found and destroyed.
And with that the rangers had completed their offensive mission. It was
0900. Just that quickly they were now on the defensive, isolated, with
nothing heavier than 60mm mortars and BARS to defend themselves.
In the afternoon Rudder had Eikner send a message -- by his signal lamp
and homing pigeon -- via the Satterlee: "Located Pointe-du-Hoc -- mission
accomplished -- need ammunition and reinforcement -- many casualties."
An hour later Satterlee relayed a brief message from General Huebner: "No
reinforcements available -- all rangers have landed [at Omaha]." The only
reinforcements Rudder's men received in the next forty-eight hours were
three paratroopers from the 101st who had been misdropped and who somehow
made it through German lines to join the rangers, and two platoons of
rangers from Omaha. The first arrived at 2100. It was a force of
twenty-three men led by Lt. Charles Parker. On the afternoon of June 7,
Maj. Jack Street brought in a landing craft and took off wounded and
prisoners. After putting them aboard an LST he took the craft to Omaha
Beach and rounded up about twenty men from the 5th Ranger Battalion and
brought them to Pointe-du-Hoc.
The Germans were as furious as disturbed hornets; they counterattacked the
fortified area throughout the day, again that night, and through the next
day. The rangers were, in fact, under siege, their situation desperate.
But as Sgt. Gene Elder recalled, they stayed calm and beat off every
attack. "This was due to our rigorous training. We were ready. For
example, Sgt. Bill Stivinson [who had started D-Day morning swaying back
and forth on the London Fire Department ladder] was sitting with Sgt. Guy
Shoff behind some rock or rubble when Guy started to swear and Bill asked
him why, Guy replied, 'They are shooting at me.' Stivinson asked how he
knew. Guy's answer was, 'Because they are hitting me.'"
Pvt. Salva Maimone recalled
that on D-Day night "one of the boys spotted some cows. He went up and
milked one. The milk was bitter, like quinine. The cows had been eating
onions."
Lieutenant Vermeer said he could "still distinctly remember when it got to
be twelve o'clock that night, because the 7th of June was my birthday. I
felt that if I made it until midnight, I would survive the rest of the
ordeal. It seemed like some of the fear left at that time."
The rangers took heavy
casualties. A number of them were taken prisoner. By the end of the battle
only fifty of the more than two hundred rangers who had landed were still
capable of fighting. But they never lost Pointe-du-Hoc.
Later, writers commented that
it had all been a waste, since the guns had been withdrawn from the
fortified area around Pointe-du-Hoc. That is wrong. Those guns were in
working condition before Sergeant Lomell got to them. They had an
abundance of ammunition. They were in range (they could lob their huge
shells 25,000 meters) of the biggest targets in the world, the 5,000-plus
ships in the Channel and the thousands of troops and equipment on Utah and
Omaha Beaches.
Lieutenant Eikner was
absolutely correct when he concluded his oral history, "Had we not been
there we felt quite sure that those guns would have been put into
operation and they would have brought much death and destruction down on
our men on the beaches and our ships at sea. But by 0900 on D-Day morning
the big guns had been put out of commission and the paved highway had been
cut and we had roadblocks denying its use to the enemy. So by 0900 our
mission was accomplished.
"The rangers at Pointe-du-Hoc
were the first American forces on D-Day to accomplish their mission and we
are proud of that."
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