"christ, Scarab, this isn't fat guy goes nutzoid, we can't just airlift you out of every troublesome situation you get yourself into. and especially not when you're just scared, because I'm not going to risk my ass and my chopper piloting you out of the city every time you see a soya product."
- CynicalMagician
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| Textbook Perfect | | | Author: | | | IP: | cache-dhXXXX | | Date: | 03/16/03 02:03 | | Game Type: | Other | | Labels: | Rare game(1), Great Writing(1), Long(1), Series(1) | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 8, Min: 8
Lifetime Rating for SupeRc0pKr: 8.2353 |  |
Leaders: 01
Though you may extract any message you like from this story, this was written primarily to remember those men who jumped off into darkness and went ashore through chest-deep water on 6 June, 1944, into Normandy. Whatever the criticisms there may be of the Normandy invasion and of the participating armies, the bloody months that the Allied and Wehrmacht forces spent in hedgerow country is something to be remembered, not just as a major point in history, but also in human existence. As a literary piece of work, I doubt this will have that much of an impact, but I hope that it holds more meaning as a simple observation of history.
[Prologue]
[H-Hour]
[Pointe-du-Hoc]
[The Battery]
[Into the Breach]
[The Coastal Road]
[Casualty]
[Road to Vierville]
[Counter-Attack]
[End of 6 June]
9 March, 1944: Exercise FOX
Hughe Wayne - New York City, New York - was a first lieutenant in the United States Army. He had signed up for service early in 1942 with the officer corps, deciding to leave his steady job in an automobile factory to join the war effort. He had half-expected that his family would want him to, and convinced himself that he wanted to. His father was a veteran of the Great War, and advised his son that he should join as an officer if he decided to go into the armed forces.
"Trust me," he had said, "it'll be a lot easier on you if you do."
Wayne and second platoon of A Company, 116th Regimental Combat Team, marched in column, following first platoon within the Dartmouth port. Ahead of them, they saw their attack transport, a 500 foot-long ship, gray-clad and rising and falling limply with the waves. It would carry them and 1,200 other men in what their battalion commander called their "practice run" for the "real deal." The attack transport seemed lifeless anchored to the port, its crew moving sluggishly on and off-board.
"Look out there, one of those tommy boats."
The platoon glanced farther out into the English Channel and saw it; one of the five destroyers that would escort the FOX training landing. It was black in the distance, guns silhouetted against the moon-lit water, and dragged past the port, heavily shadowed against the moon-lit horizon.
"Lieutenant, what's the size of the guns on that thing? Was it fourteen-inch?" the private asked.
"Five-inch," Wayne said.
"Well, shoot, I guess a couple of five-inch guns aren't too bad as fire support, eh, Lieutenant?"
"I suppose so. High explosives are high explosives. Do damage no matter what the size."
"Still," another squad leader, Sergeant Brown, joined in. "I wouldn't mind a couple battleships behind us when we hit the beach. Those sixteen-inch guns, they would play a number on those Germans. Leave a little for us to mop up, right, Lieutenant?"
"It'd get pretty loud."
Brown had proven himself to be a real army man, personally interested in fighting the war. He had never seen combat before, but was sure that he would be more than up to it. His enthusiasm for the military had allowed him to make sergeant, and then a squad leader position. The company thought he was an "OK guy," but perhaps a little too energetic on standard maneuvers and regulation. Perhaps he just had a bit of the pre-invasion jitters. His squad was much more mellow than he, or rather much more depressed. Brown had enlisted the day of his eighteenth birthday. They had been drafted. The invasion wasn't any more ominous to them as it was to Brown, but all these training exercises were enough to make a man go mad.
The column marched on, passing a convoy of 1st Infantry Division trucks, and the 16th Regimental Combat Team badgered their 116th counterpart as they rolled and motored by. The 1st Division - "The Big Red One" - was one of America's most celebrated units, often in the media spotlight. Officers in the US Army, particularly the higher-ranking officers, division commanders, competed rather actively for media attention. The war was a chance for great prestige and glory for many unit commanders in the United States Army.
"You boys coming along for the ride?" one private shouted over the coughing roar of his deuce-and-a-half truck.
"Just make sure to strap that gear in real nice and tight, we'll handle Jerry and you just bring up the chow."
The 116th RCT was actually a part of the 29th Infantry Division, but, for the initial landings, they would be attached to 1st Division, as they would be leading the beach assault.
"Yeah, fuck you," one of Wayne's men shouted as the trucks drove off. "We'll be past the bluffs before you bastards can finish wankin' in front of the cameras!"
"Hey, quiet down," from Wayne.
Another young soldier, a corporal, shook his head. "You know, those First Div. boys aren't that much different from us Twenty-Niners. Jesus, you're all idiots."
"I said quiet down," Wayne repeated. "We don't need any of that before our first run-through."
A Company entered their assembly area, a "sausage-shaped" stretch of road built off the main port roads. The main port roads could not be used extensively, because the sheer amount of traffic that would cross over them would render them impassable. The jagged treads of Army tanks and tough wheels of Army vehicles would tear them up and turn the assembly area into a quagmire, and so the Army had improvised and constructed four "sausage" assembly areas surrounding Dartmouth and the other ports that would be used for Exercise FOX.
"What's the deal with the Lieutenant?" a young rifleman asked.
"Yeah, did you hear what he said about having heavier fire support? 'It'd be pretty loud.'"
"Word has it," Staff Sergeant Dunn quipped, "that the Lieutenant is a pacifist."
"A pacifist? What the fuck's he doing in the Army?"
"He's not a pacifist," an NCO scoffed. He was the platoon sergeant, Burkeley. Forty years old, six-foot-two, and the most effective disciplinarian authority that the men of A Company had ever known. "Jesus Christ, 'the Lieutenant is a pacifist,' you've got to be shitting me, Dunn. No fucking way to talk about your CO during an operation like this. Eight weeks before D-Day and here you are starting a goddamn mutiny. Tell you what, second platoon, everybody just shut the hell up right now like the Lieutenant says and save me the goddamn trouble of humiliating you in front of the entire division."
"Ah, sorry, Sergeant." Dunn was a good sergeant. He rarely ran into trouble, but wasn't a do-gooder. The men thought Dunn was also "an OK guy," but they said it in-between beers.
Burkeley stalked ahead of the column, muttering to himself, "'the Lieutenant is a pacifist,' Gee-zus fucking Christ," and Wayne held back a smile.
10 March, 1944: Exercise FOX, assault phase
Wayne patted the shoulder of a corporal before he threw his leg over the edge of the ship to begin scaling the net down into the LCT.
"Yeah, Lieutenant," came the testy reply and the corporal - whose name Wayne could never quite catch - pushed off onto the netting and began to fumble his way down along with the other men of A Company.
"Hey!" the battalion commander barked. "What are you men doing? Can't you climb a net, soldier? The Germans won't wait for you to get down that net when we hit the beach, they'll shoot you if you go at it like that! Use your arms, soldier, use your arms!"
The men muttered their misgivings as they struggled on the netting, shoulders and backs aching under their seventy-pound packs. Wayne watched as the men descended to their Higgins boats, their tan assault jackets and olive-green pants slowly fading as they dropped into the cold mist. He looked away as they disappeared into the landing craft. They had been out on the English channel for a night, and many of the inexperienced soldiers had been considerably weakened from the overseas trip. They were landing at the Slapton Islands, south of Dartmouth-in-Devonshire, where the bluffs would simulate the Omaha landings fairly accurately. Exercise FOX was only one of many training programs that preceded the actual invasion of France on 6 June. After FOX, there would be two "dress-rehearsals," Exercises FABIUS I and TIGER.
From the complaints and disposition of A Company, Wayne doubted that the men would be able to handle even one go. A Company didn't take the invasion seriously, at least not now.
"All right," the battalion commander called, "Over and down you go, Lieutenant Wayne."
"Yes, sir, over and down."
30 May, 1944
Sergeant First Class Wescott of 2nd Ranger Battalion examined the precisely-crafted pieces of the de-constructed Thompson, marvelling at the complexity and exactness of the weapon. This would be the submachine gun he'd be taking with him on D-Day. The Thompson was issued to NCOs in Ranger practice. He wiped the action clean and re-oiled the weapon, already too accustomed to the grease and black stains that splotched his hands.
Wescott was one of the more experienced veterans in the squad he had responsibility over; he'd fought in North Africa and in Sicily with the 1st Infantry Division. He'd been part of the divisional reconnaissance battalion, almost continually at the head of any 1st Division advance. He absorbed Ranger doctrine and tactics particularly well; the company commander had made him a squad leader once the 2nd Battalion had formed in 1943.
"You guys ever wonder what'll happen if we don't secure the cliff?" a Ranger asked off-handedly. He was Aster, known to be the squad's most sarcastic mind.
"We'll hold the cliff," another, Corporal Martin, answered. "There's nothing at the pointe that's going to able to pry us off."
"There he goes again," Aster replied, "the world's greatest GI!"
The other Ranger didn't answer. The squad was close enough, though they had their differences. Aster was almost against fighting the war, though he was an excellent operator. Martin's espirit de corps and personal devotion to victory begrudgingly made him the center of morale in Wescott's squad, probably in all of F Company. They had come along with Wescott from 1st Infantry Division, and so while they didn't quite like each other's attitudes regarding the war, they had grown used to them. In all other respects they were good friends.
The others, Privates, first class Penn and King, had come in from another unit, 34th Infantry Division. They were good fellows, friendly and easy-going, just like every other American GI. They sat engaged in a game of poker on their bunks. Penn had more winnings, as per usual; King regularly lost half his two week's pay to his adept opponent, though no one was ever quite sure exactly how fair Penn played.
"He's got a point, though," Penn spoke after a pause. "Captain says that the only Germans garrisoning the pointe are boys and old men."
"That's right, son," Aster mimicked the Ranger company commander's southern distortion. "You boys don't have to worry about the Germans in nah-man-dee," he punched at the word "Normandy," exagerrating the captain's emphasis, "because most of the soldiers are invalids, boys and men who are too young or too old to make real soldiers."
King and Penn broke into chuckles, trying to emulate Aster's expression but only managing to bring up a poor, "No-man-dee."
"I don't trust that too much," Aster went on, then re-iterated. "I don't put too much stock on it. Some kraut's got a gun, a rifle, he can put you down easy if he's eighteen or forty."
"Touche," Wescott offered, and snapped the Thompson's bolt forward, his stained hands moving deftly across the weapon's action. "Small arm's a small arm, all it takes is a bullet and you're a casualty."
The Rangers already knew that, but Wescott wondered if they actually applied it. They were still cocky, probably from the completion of their Ranger training, and still thought they were bullet-proof - that kraut bullet would hit some other Joe, not them. Everyone thought they were invincible until they were put down.
Wescott held the Thompson up gingerly, so that he wouldn't stain the wood finish with his hands.
"Very nice, Sarge," Penn mentioned, not really looking.
"You could sleep with that thing." Aster said, then added, "Too bad it's the only thing you'll ever sleep with."
The Rangers, Wescott noted, weren't that anxious about the great invasion. To them, it was just another maneuver; they were combat veterans, they had already seen everything. Wescott wasn't anxious, but he was unsure if Normandy would be different from previous operations. In Tunisia, and Sicily, the Germans were in the same position as their American counterparts, fighting a war far away from home. In France, the Fatherland was just over the horizon.
5 June, 1944
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B in Normandy, had pushed the 352nd Division closer to the coast of Normandy that day, on a sudden instinct. He had long been known for his fingerspitzengefuhl, that "finger-tip" intuition for the battle that had allowed him to dominate tactical combat in North Africa, and so the move came unquestioned by the German troops.
Leutnant Paul von Geissler, commanding 1. Kompanie, motioned to the hedgerows lining either side of a sunken lane. "You see? Walls. All around us."
The 130 men of 1. Kompanie looked around them, at the constrictive corridors of tangled branches and roots lining the dirt road on which they were assembled. This was not the first time they had seen hedgerow country. They had been on duty in Normandy for some time. The men had grown accustomed to the impassable Norman hedgerows which made large-scale maneuver impossible.
He led the men with him into one of the fields, walking through a gap in the cover. "You will all study the terrain here. Everything is sited just perfectly for us to defend against an Allied drive from the beach. These sunken roads, they will funnel enemy movement into narrow columns. Not much firepower will be needed to stop them there. Just a machine gun or two is enough to halt movement until reinforcements are brought up."
Geissler pointed to the sides of the orchards, where five-foot tall branches and roots created walls of plant growth, thickly woven and limiting visibility down to fifty meters at most. "When they see that they cannot advance down the roads, they will attempt to come through these hedgerows. We will position ourselves just behind them, they offer us good cover. But do not fire on them immediately. That will simply drive them off, and they will return with stronger support. Instead, wait in ambush, draw them close, then shoot. In this terrain, you will be isolated from your fellow platoons. Support and reinforcement will come only slowly; therefore, you must all give determined resistance, separated or not. Do you understand? There can be no half-hearted defense here. We must hold our lines and give ground only when necessary; then counter-attack accordingly to re-claim it."
The soldiers of 1. Kompanie nodded their heads. They trusted Geissler's leadership. This was the same natural understanding of tactics and terrain that had proved Geissler's competence in battle countless times. He was an oustanding officer by any measure.
If they ever ran into trouble, Geissler would appear ahead of them, leading them directly into combat. Abandonment was a soldier's greatest fear in the vast expanse of Russia. Geissler never abandoned 1. Kompanie men.
It had become his life's devotion, as of late. The men had heard him say numerous times that the mission was no longer to conquer all of Europe. That had died in Russia, along with the hundred or so men formerly of 1. Kompanie that had perished in that theater of operations. Now, Geissler had often said, now they must only fight together in order to keep each other life, not for volk und vaterland, but for their homes and families. Taking over the world did not matter; getting through the war did.
The company marched back onto the main road to assemble in combat teams. Mortar squads would zero-in their equipment on certain key positions, and machine gun groups would disperse themselves among the infantry, the gunners adjusting the sights on their weapons, their assistants linking jingling belts of ammunition together. Geissler, black-gloved hands relaxed at his sides, walked up the road. 1. Kompanie worked with as though it were a well-oiled machine. Before, they had been almost parade-like, emphasizing good dress, strong devotion to the Fuhrer. Since they had come off the line in Russia, they had lost that ceremonial touch; all that remained was that cold, hard discipline that they had forged on the anvil of shot and shell. In one light it was an admirable, respectable soldier's discipline. In another, it was a frighteningly mechanical behavior.
On some occasions men had come back from leave, shaking their heads resignedly - problems with the wife, kids forgot who their fathers were, a few didn't have a home to go to. Geissler knew why. For some of these men it was too late to go back home. They had become what their battalion commander in his military pride would have called "real soldiers." Geissler called them ghosts.
6 June, 1944: Operation OVERLORD
Sergeant First Class John Wescott had not known that he would have hated water as much as he did that morning. The Channel was cold, gray, and its spray weighed his assault jacket down, made him feel heavy. Sixty-pound assault packs hung from each Ranger's shoulders, and many of them, aged twenty years or younger, might have been mistaken for boyscouts on an outing were it not for their steel helmets and rifles.
The 2nd Ranger Battalion seemed to be on schedule, until at some point, word was passed through the flotilla carrying the battalion across the Channel that they were approaching the coast of Normandy at the wrong point. They were a few miles east of their objective, due to the strong tide; the flotilla would have to head back westward along the coast, already under fire from German coast defenses. A 20mm anti-aircraft gun fired down heavy incendiary upon them from the cliff bordering the beaches, and for the moment the Rangers could do nothing to suppress it. They were packed up into British-made LCAs - landing craft which carried twenty or so men - and their weapons were wrapped in pliofoam.
Wescott kept his head down, helmet pushed low over his brow. A DUKW, one of the amphibious two-ton trucks equipped with London Fire Department ladders, started to take fire, just twenty or thirty meters away from Wescott's LCA. Streaks of red ribbons, tracer rounds from the AA gun, pounded against the DUKW, one piercing through its light armor and shattering an axle. The truck was going down. Members of the crew bailed out as 20mm continued shooting down into the broken DUKW, ripping the olive-green vehicle to shreds with red arcs of fire and drowning it in the white-laced blue of the Channel.
Further east, the 116th Regimental Combat Team of the 29th Infantry Division had commenced landings at Omaha Beach. It was 0630.
Machine gun fire had already began to punch against the ramps of the LCAs, and once the ramps were dropped, murderous fire from the bluffs poured into their ranks. Thirty-five pillboxes and eight casemates covered Omaha beach alone, all manned with German MG-42 machine guns and various field guns, ranging from 37mm anti-tank weapons to the 88mm dual-purpose anti-aircraft gun. The landing points were swathed with beach obstacles - hedgehogs and barbed wire to funnel advancing armor and infantry into concentrated fields-of-fire and mine belts. And farther out, there were "Belgian gates," and mine-tipped wooden poles, to break-up landing craft approaches.
1st Lieutenant Hughe Wayne shoved his men out of the LCA, already taking fire from a machine gun, and jumped out into chest-deep water. A torrent of automatic fire slapped 7.92mm rounds into the Channel around him, tracking erratic lines of frothing water across the beach. Wayne waded directly into a floating mass of soaked brown cloth and crimson material - one of his soldiers, hit by machine gun fire.
Assault companies were rushing out of the landing craft as best as they could, rifles at high port, but the German defenders poured in a devastating barrage of fire made up of automatic bursts of fire, mortar bombs, and high-explosive rounds fired from anti-tank guns the moment the landing craft ramps dropped. Wayne's platoon lost nine of its number, almost an entire assault team, within moments of the ramp dropping. They had been caught in a crossfire from the strong points on Dog Green, and a machine gun pummeled the LCA with constant fire, its 7.92mm rounds entering the landing craft and ricocheting off of the sides, punching into the men - tearing through their muscle tissue, splintering bone, piercing through their dying bodies into fellow soldiers - and dropping them into the blue Channel or on the gray floor of the landing craft, to bleed to death. They could not be helped; if anyone paused to assist them they'd be shot, too, and so those men that had not been hit were jumping out into chest-deep water, the machine gun still tracking them and sending long bursts into the water. A Company of the 116th Regimental Combat Team waded forward in the Channel water, some hit by MG-42s, others suddenly going under as they hit a shell crater. A few were swimming, as the coxswains who had taken the LCAs in were dropping the ramps too far away from the beach. 88mm and 75mm guns and mortars were bracketing the LCAs, setting the empty ones ablaze and turning those that had not deposited their cargo into a bath of dismembered limbs and tattered organs. Wayne moved at a snail's pace, despite his desire to rush forward, as he pushed ahead, constantly within earshot of a machine gun burst slapping into the water or hitting a soldier moving in. Those American troops that had managed to make an egress out onto the beach now huddled down against whatever cover they could find, on their bellies in knee-deep water. Wayne saw his soldiers behind the hedgehog fences made up of railroad tracks, cowering against the 7.92mm rounds that glanced away in loud metallic clanks, and shoving up dead bodies in front of them as a shield to take automatic fire.
An 88mm round crashed into an LCA nearby that had arrived a few minutes late, the concussion terrible and deafening, the scream of the German weapon - arriving in the instant after the round had hit - chilling, a steel ghost's wail. The boat blew out a puffy pillar of billowing black smoke after an initial spike of black-laced flame and shrapnel, and men cartwheeled into the air out of the craft, limbs reduced to ragged stumps, pieces of bone and metal and shrapnel flickering out of the destroyed LCA in a concentric arc. Wounded troops bobbed out of the water moments later, flailing wildly, screaming.
There was no cover anywhere on the beach. The beach obstacles on land, the hedgehog fences, offered little protection from the barrage of small arms fire coming from the bluff, but the troops were frozen, paralyzed. Fire was traumatic, saturating the beach with flying metal, and pre-sighted artillery and mortars had already begun to drop their own incendiaries onto the clustering, huddling Americans wading ashore. Soldiers plunged into the water, riddled with shrapnel, those that had taken direct hits from the anti-tank guns obliterated, strips of their flesh permeating the water and the sand.
"Get forward!" NCOs, sergeants, were shouting. "Get out of the fucking water!" They were roaring, marching forward, leading by example as they had been taught to.
Officers, huddled close to their radio operators, shouted out orders to nearby lieutenants. They spoke to two different parties at once; first castigating an inactive platoon leader, then repeating a broken message to the cowering enlisted man working the radio beside them.
"Third platoon's ashore!" one lieutenant ahead of Wayne waved to a captain crouching beside a hedgehog.
"Then, goddamn it, get them off this goddamn beach!" the captain replied.
A moment later, mortar rounds dropped down in a line, plowing up towards the hedgehog fences on the beach, and the captain somersaulted as a plume of exploding sand and debris erupted beneath him. He landed sitting upright in the water in some macabre baptism, one of his legs missing from the knee. Struggling to maintain his composure, the company officer turned towards the radio operator, who was now a white corpse, rising with the waves and letting rivulets of blood from his meaty neck and face wounds pool into the water.
Farther ahead, the lead elements of A Company rushed onto dry land, out of the water. Men weaved from beach obstacle to beach obstacle, as bullets cracked around them and mortars blew out craters of sand beneath them. Squad leaders led the initial advance. A sergeant turned to wave his men up, taking cover behind a forward beach obstacle, and a moment later machine gun fire tore through him, and he dropped with a frightening rubber-legged dance. His squad, seven men, the others already killed, scrambled for cover, into shell holes buried in the beach and behind other beach obstacles, but four were cut down in rapid sequence as the machine gun fire - its source still unidentified - stuttered into them, drawing splashes of scarlet onto the brown sand.
Wayne reached the first line of hedgehog fences without breath. The Channel was cold. Shoving through water onto the beach was difficult with full kit. Machine gun fire continued to pour in without abating. He found his men huddled down on their knees, soaked and shivering, covering their heads from the mortars that were firing down onto the beach. Ahead of him, Wayne saw 200 yards of flat ground, with no cover, possibly mined, and then the sea wall.
The sea wall was anywhere from four to twelve feet high, and provided protection from the machine guns and other small arms situated on the bluff. However, it put the pillboxes and nests into enfilade positions, which meant that infantry that reached the sea wall would essentially be pinned down - there would be no forward movement. But, at the moment, there was no better place to go.
"Get moving," Wayne ordered, breathlessly, pointing out his squad leaders - the three that remained from the gauntlet on the way in. "Get off the beach, get to the sea wall!" One hand waved forward, while the other held on tightly to his rifle.
The men would not budge. They scrambled tighter against the beach obstacles, kept their bellies to the ground, cradled in the water. Fire continued to spray down the assault companies, all over Omaha beach. There would be heavy losses, heavier than already incurred, if they started an advance across the open beach. They stayed down where they were, afraid to move.
"Let's get moving!" Wayne repeated.
"Sir," a squad leader replied, "The fire's too heavy, we won't make it across!"
Wayne looked out before him, saw nothing but the open beach, where a few teams had attempted to charge forward, only to be cut down in the murderous crossfire, lines of tracers and puffs of dirt converging down onto them from several angles. The sky beyond the seawall at Omaha was a deep gray, overcast. He looked behind him, where the landing craft were pulling out, some shattered, broken, from the gun emplacements in the casemates, burning off a black smoke that seemed to carpet the entry into Omaha, their cargo roasting inside. And around him, the mortars, the red tracers of machine guns, the solid streaks of anti-tank gunfire were ripping the 116th Regimental Combat Team into crimson pieces of disintegrated flesh and ragged cloth. The distant chatter of machine gun fire heralded the eventual swath of invisible steel that wiped the shoreline, cutting down men wading in and those that were standing up to move forward. Sergeants and officers shouted over the boom and crash and screams of artillery, of mortars, but their straining voices were lost in the sea of crying wounded and burning metal.
Wayne gave a glaring glance at his men, "We will move off this beach, and we will advance up to the sea wall. You don't have a choice, not with those Germans shooting down on you out here." Wayne watched as two men nearby his platoon were pierced by a burst of machine fire that ripped through their bodies violently, spraying a crimson mist around them as the high-velocity rounds tore through them. "If you want to get out of here, you've got to act. Lying here will accomplish nothing."
His men nodded to themselves, gaining some sense through their fear. The heavy defensive fire on the beach terrified the men, paralyzed them; Wayne's voice was level and calm. He was the officer-in-charge.
Wayne himself was afraid, somewhere deep down in his human conscience. He could not hesitate, though, he could not freeze. As an officer, he held a responsibility to the men under him. He couldn't see or hear his company commander anywhere, so he had no directives or orders to act upon - the actions of the platoon were up to him.
"Let's get out of the water," he shouted, the crash of artillery bursts almost drowning out his voice to the semi-deafened men. "Let's get out of the water! Get to the sea wall!"
His platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Burkley, pushed forward out of the Channel, and passed the order down. "Second platoon! On your feet, on your feet, let's go!"
Wayne's men rose out of the cold Channel water, pushed themselves off the dark brown sand, and began their advance forward, in the face of strong enemy fire. German fire tracked the platoon, bringing a steady current of small arms fire and a halting series of high-explosive rounds down on them, and men began to fall, stumble, having been hit by 7.92mm projectiles or slivers of searing hot metal that buried themselves deep in flesh. Out on the beach, on the dry sand, Wayne could feel the vapor trails of the German bullets against his clothes and skin, inebriated with the Channel water. He dove into a shell hole that appeared a few meters away, taking cover and catching his breath.
A few other second platoon soldiers dove into shell holes, machine gun rounds whipping around them, invisible because the gunners were not using tracers. One of Wayne's soldiers fell into his shell hole, shaking stiffly.
"You okay, soldier?" Wayne called out over the deafening stutter of automatic fire.
The soldier did not answer, only whimpered in reply.
"Hey, you okay?" Wayne leaned over, touched the soldier's arm, and when his hand came away it was covered in blood. The soldier had been shot through the heart, and Wayne saw him stop breathing there, skin white and clammy.
Wayne rolled over onto his belly, rose to his knees, and rushed forward again, trembling. He saw other men rise, then fall again, and red splotched their backs suddenly, exit wounds from the automatic fire. Wayne continued to move forward, wishing he could stop to help the wounded. But he wasn't a superman, and he knew that the machine gun fire could hit him as easily as it could his platoon.
Bullets impacted through one of Wayne's squad leaders, emitting moist thuds and then piffs as the rounds punched through him and into the sand. Jesus, he said to himself, Jesus. The wounded soldier was down, lying prostrate against the red-brown sand - it had been stained with his blood - but another long machine gun burst tattooed into him as he cried out, sending a spray of scarlet up along with strips and bits of cloth and his assault jacket. The squad leader drew silent.
An anti-tank gun fired a round at them; it landed a ten or twenty meters away, right in front of a private. The shell burst deafened Wayne, stunned him, sent agitated dark brown sand cutting into his face along with bits of stray shrapnel. The private had disappeared, limbs strewn in the air and body disintegrated, and it was almost an afterthought, the way the 75mm shell landed so close; the impact had been much more violent than the end of the soldier's life. Wayne's vision blurred, trembled violently, and his head seemed to be spinning around in circles, but he kept moving forward - he could still feel the criss-crossing paths of vapor trails brushing against him, the bullets screaming, buzzing past - and stumbled to his knees. He nearly blacked out, with the concussive force of the 75mm gun still echoing in his ears.
Wayne managed to drop into another shell hole, the pillbox atop the bluff enormous, visible as he lay down in the burned-out earth. Muzzle flashes flickered on and off from the pillbox, the strong point, and while Wayne could not see tracers, he could see the lines of bouncing sand ripping towards advancing soldiers. They were falling, dropping, without a sound, the impact of the machine gun bursts jerking them to the side and off their feet.
He had to get out of there, he had to get his platoon out of there. Wayne rose from the earth again, covered in wet sand, and sprinted forward, intending to reach his destination in this last run. A few soldiers called for help, for mothers and fathers, for God, but no one came to help them. They screamed for nothing. Wayne saw one soldier go down to a knee, his foot sliding beneath him, and Wayne grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him forward, the soldier crying out as he did so. He'd been hit in the knee, and only now did Wayne see the blood on the sand, the shattered bone creasing through his exposed leg.
"Come on, let's go," Wayne grunted, and helped the wounded soldier to his other leg, "Let's go, get moving."
The soldier groaned with each step forward, and Wayne kept him moving, even as he saw the soldier's knee begin to swing at odd angles. They reached the rise in level sand a moment later, a machine gun having tracked them the entire fifty meters to cover.
Wayne had been one of the first to reach the sea wall. Two of his squads remained on the beach. Sergeant First Class Burkeley pushed them forward.
"Pick up those feet!" Burkeley shouted, "Get moving, this isn't a fucking playground!" His voice, Wayne noted, was powerful, as a sergeant's voice should be, but even though Wayne took comfort in Burkeley's strong confidence, he knew that the fate of the platoon rested solely in his own hands.
Single shots - rifle fire - slapped around Burkeley's position, and he immediately ducked his head down, then felt himself crushed against the ground as a shell - mortar, artillery, 60mm, 75mm, Burkeley couldn't tell - landed nearby. Two soldiers collapsed near him, one falling directly adjacent to Burkeley, and he saw the wounded soldier's face contort agonizingly in pain, a scream roaring from his mouth but inaudible, because Burkeley had been deafened by the metallic shatter of the detonating shell.
When Wayne looked back at the stringy remains of the soldier that had been hit by the 75mm, he nearly vomitted. Jesus, he repeated, Oh God Jesus. He heard a burst of small arms fire buzz overhead, the tracers whining with a cold determination to adjust on advancing bodies.
Pointe-du-Hoc
Sergeant First Class Wescott and the rest of 2nd Ranger Battalion had long been ready to hit the beaches - any longer on those LCAs and the entire battalion would be seasick. It was 0710; they were forty minutes off schedule. They had travelled some three miles westward, having approached the beach too far east of their intended position. In doing so, the Ranger Battalion had run a gauntlet of German fire from all along the coast.
Pointe-du-Hoc consisted of a near-sheer cliff facing the beach, with a mere 30 meters of open ground on the beach before running into the base of the cliff. German defenses had been designed to defend against a land assault from the rear, because a seaborne invasion - one that would require scaling the 80-100 foot cliff - was deemed nigh impossible to the German defenders. D, E, and F Companies of the 2nd Ranger Battalion had been assigned to take the Pointe. Intelligence and reconaissance reports prior to the invasion had sighted a battery of 155mm guns - artillery which could cover Omaha to the west and Utah Beach to the east. The destruction of the German heavy artillery would be necessary in order to provide an American beachhead into Normandy.
Wescott heard the coxswain of his boat tell his crew to prepare to drop the ramps. He peered over the edge of the LCA, and saw the precipice of Pointe-du-Hoc towering towards a graycast sky. The cliff had been pounded by a suppressive barrage of naval fire just an hour before, but, like Omaha, it had only warned the Germans, protected in concrete shelters, of the approaching Americans.
The two lead boats of the Ranger flotilla fired a stream of rocket-propelled grapnel hooks towards the cliff. They would be the instrument with which the Rangers would scale the Pointe - they would climb, with full pack and gear, "like real mountainmen," Wescott had quipped detachedly weeks prior to D-Day.
Wescott's LCA floated to a gradual stop at the beach before Pointe-du-Hoc, still under fire from the cliffs. The ramp dropped, and the Rangers moved out into chest-high water. Machine gun fire from the enfilade off to the eastern cliff had intensified, now firing in longer bursts, and Wescott watched as other men from F Company waded forward helplessly under fire.
The cliff and the beach below it were barren, cratered and ripped apart from the naval barrage that preceded the Ranger battalion's assault. The rocks at the base of the cliff were blackened, the cliff itself a ruddy brown from the abuse doled out by the 14- and 5-inch guns. Wescott's foot slipped on a sudden downslope and he went under, the Channel water enveloping him and wrapping his assault jacket around him heavily. A shellhole, carved into the shore and covered by the tide. Wescott strained forward, unbearably cold, and gave an agonizing push upward with the next step. He broke the surface, freezing, eyes squeezed shut against the cold, and stumbled ashore, his submachine gun clutched in an iron grasp against him.
"Up to the cliff!" Wescott ordered to the other Rangers who had waded ashore, and slogged ahead, boots and clothing and gear weighing him down and slowing him to what felt like an uphill climb.
Only thirty meters lay between the icy water and the blackened cliff, and the Rangers covered that distance at a crawl. German troops had appeared at the precipice above, and were firing down upon the invaders. The machine gun and 20mm aided them, cutting lines of coughing sand in the beach and forcing those Rangers who had not already taken cover to embrace the ground.
Wescott rose to his feet and rushed to the base of the cliff, brought his Thompson up, and ripped the weapon out of its protective pliofoam cover. Rifle fire from the Rangers on the beach had already opened up when Wescott jammed in a magazine and pointed the submachine gun skyward. The German soldiers, eight of them, pulled back from the edge of the cliff, not before tossing grenades down below, the craggy precipice chipping and shattering as American fire flickered upward behind them. Their grenades, potato mashers, ripped themselves apart with a violent, metallic crash, but none of the Rangers were hit by any stray shrapnel.
"Get to the grapnel hooks!" a Ranger shouted.
Wescott heard the thump of a mortar, and the water and sand behind him began to rise up in columns of dark, acrid smoke and plumes of frothing liquid. Those Rangers still on the beach, including half of F Company, sheltered their eyes against the sharp stabs of dirt and sand that pelted against them.
The Rangers grabbed hold of the ropes hanging against the scarred cliff, and Wescott watched as a few shook loose and dragged the grapnel hooks down from the cliffs, twirling and spinning before plummeting dumbly into the sand. A DUKW struggled ashore, the low growl of its engine almost inaudible over the crash of the mortar and the incessant chattering of machine gun and rifle fire, and crawled onto the loosened sand. A few Rangers cursed at those grappling hooks that had not even reached the top of the cliff, and had only thumped uselessly against the Pointe before falling back down.
"What's wrong?" a Ranger officer, a captain, inquired one of the enlisted men.
"Ropes are too wet," someone said, "They're weighed down and the goddamn hooks couldn't pull them to the top."
Wescott, himself an NCO and outwardly oblivious to such a state, did not sense any fear or anxiety in the manners of his comrades. They seemed to be overtaken by some common force, and the common thought and motive that ran through them was only the cliff, scaling the cliff, taking the cliff.
The captain stalked towards the growling DUKW truck, pointing towards the ladder mounted on its back. "Someone jump onto that ladder, let's lay it against the cliff!" He directed the crew towards the base of the cliff, under fire now from the Germans above. Still, he did not so much as flinch, and the DUKW pulled alongside the scarred cliffside in good order. It was shaky at the base of the cliff, as the shelling from the USS Texas had left chunks of loose rock and earth piled up there.
"No way the ladder's going to hold," a Ranger said, more to himself than the four or five other men around him.
One of the Germans above threw a potato masher grenade down. It landed twenty meters away, exploded, and one Ranger stumbled wildly away, then crumpled to the ground, much of the right side of his body torn and ripped.
"Medic! Medic!"
An officer brought his men together, a platoon. "Put some suppressive fire on those Germans! Where's my BAR man? You, cover the edge of the cliff!"
A moment later, there was no need, as a series of explosions pounded against the top of the Pointe. They were the naval guns of the Talybont, a British destroyer. Black smoke poured in a screen over the cliff, and the Germans firing down on the invading Rangers pulled away, to take cover in concrete shelters and pillboxes. Another cluster of 5-inch shells screamed overhead, and crashed against the Pointe, trailing white ribbons of smoke behind them.
The grappling hooks were tried again, seven or eight of them; one or two made it, then fell back down after they were tugged upon, and the rest were apparently still too heavy. Some of the Rangers were swearing. They had been taking heavy fire and had not been able to shoot back. The single mortar, while not exactly a light matter, had been serving more as a nuisance than a danger, and the machine gun fire from the enfilade and the Germans firing down from the cliff and the 20mm AA gun, also in enfilade, were keeping the Ranger movement on the beach and near the cliff in check.
Wescott saw three soldiers from his squad approaching him. Their assault jackets were still soaked, and sand layered their hands and knees.
"Where's the rest of first squad?" Wescott's voice was steady, almost casual.
"Don't know, Sergeant, scattered all over the beach, I suppose."
"Find as many of the boys as you can. Once we can get these grappling hooks up, I'll lead the squad in, and you'll be right on me. I don't think the Germans have defensive positions facing us, so we should be able to fight them out in open combat."
"I'm on it."
Sergeant First Class Wescott grabbed hold of one of the taut ropes holding on the cliff and began his ascent up onto Pointe-du-Hoc. Fire criss-crossed above and below him as Germans again tried to dislodge the grappling hooks and fire down onto the Americans coming up, and Americans opened fire to repel the defenders from approaching the edge of the Pointe.
Wescott found his arms shaking as he strained upward. His pack, the Thompson, everything pulled him back towards the earth in an irresistible vacuum - but he did not let himself slide back down the cliff, descend back down to the sand. A few others around him were sliding, defeated, down the ropes, unable to keep their ground. As a sergeant, first class, Wescott could not allow himself to fall. As a Ranger, an enlisted serviceman in the United States Army, he could not allow the wet, almost slick rope, or the sheer cliff, or the stubborn Germans above him to conquer over him.
"Keep climbing!" F Company Rangers were shouting below him. "Keep moving up! Next, next person, someone start up this rope!"
The rope bit viciously into his hands. When he braced himself against the rock cliff, Wescott felt his arms scrape unpleasantly against the rough surface. A grenade exploded somewhere below him, purple fading into red fading into white. Wescott's ears were ringing, both from the noise erupting around him and the strain he felt on his body. He was cold, he had been standing stiffly in a shaky landing boat, and he had had very little to eat before landing - scaling the cliff at Pointe-du-Hoc should have been impossible. Wescott could hear his fellow Rangers struggling just as desperately as he was though, and he continued to move upward, cutting and tearing his hands everytime he pulled up, scraping the skin off his elbows and forearms with each half-foot he rose.
"Damn it." A simple curse, directed at the rope and the cliff.
But the precipice lie just above him. Bits of earth showered down on him, from the small arms fire rising up behind him. The mortar sent its 80mm rounds down onto the beach below, and Wescott heard screams but ignored them. Only a few more feet, five or six more stretches - his arms were shaking very visibly now, he had no footholds and the rest of the climb would be by his upperbody strength alone. He saw a Ranger lift himself unsteadily onto the cliff, breathing hard, and then bring his weapon, his rifle, about. The Ranger opened fire, from the kneeling position, and emptied his magazine at an unseen group of Germans. Wescott heard them shouting, the sergeants bullying the other enlisted into battle.
Wescott's lacerated hand, aching and sore, gripped the top of the cliff powerfully. He drew himself upon the cliff, holding tightly upon the grapple and throwing his leg over to the edge.
"Attaboy, Sergeant...!" from below.
Wescott looked across the Pointe and saw nothing but destroyed earth, pockmarked with countless shell holes, fires burning in and around the German battery. The stench of cooking metal and sulfurous fumes perfumed the earth. Pointe-du-Hoc seemed to have been completely obliterated from the earth, but German rifle fire had already begun to flicker from within the battery.
Wescott's Thompson snapped up, shouldered. A long burst, stitching into the grass ahead of him, spraying into dark field-gray figures. A German machine gun team was approaching, moving up onto the cliff, and behind them, Wescott saw the trench network, with pillboxes overlooking them, all barred and contained by a barb wire fence, all scarred and scorched by naval guns. Shouting, German, coming from ahead of them, and three soldiers popped out of the grass, two with arms cocked to throw grenades.
"Light 'em up!" But Wescott didn't need to tell the other three or four Rangers on the cliff - two Thompsons and two rifles opened up immediately, dropping all three of the Germans before they could make a move, the crimson mist of their blood showering behind them, onto the dead, shredded grass.
One of the German grenades went off, showered the point of the cliff with dark debris and earth.
"All right, let's move!" Wescott said. "Fan out, spread out, and keep low, put down heavy fire as suppression!"
Wescott rose, hunched over, M1 Thompson still shouldered, and stepped lightly forward, into the grass now. The trench network lie two hundred or so meters ahead, with one gun emplacement - camouflaged - facing the Rangers, a hundred meters away. The rest of the defensive network faced inland, and Wescott could see Germans dashing through the trenches, hugging the blackened ground and dead grass. The German machine gun team appeared into view again, moving out of a shell crater. Automatic fire roared open from the submachine guns, and the Germans hit the ground, shouting out alerts, orders. One of the riflemen took all three of the gunners out with clean, accurate shots into their prostrate bodies, and the Ranger team continued forward.
"Casemate," one of the Rangers alerted, pointing ahead. He identified an emplacement that rose three feet above the ground, and was skillfully camouflaged in netting and a mix of branches. Its machine gun had already begun to send sporadic fire out onto the approaching Rangers, but its source had not been located until now.
"Stay low, let's put up some smoke."
Another team of Rangers reached the top of the cliff, all panting, breathing heavily. They watched as Wescott and the others threw smoke grenades, and one of them pumped his arm, hand extended - move up!
"Casemate ahead, casemate ahead! Keep behind the smoke, two teams, team one - suppression fire, team two - maneuver!" Wescott pointed out a BAR gunner and a squad leader in turn.
Eleven Rangers dashed through the expanding smoke screen, and materialized through it, advancing forward at the gun emplacement that lay no more than fifty meters ahead. It was a concrete structure, placed well under ground and with firing slits wide enough to cover the entire cliff. And, as Wescott and the Ranger team discovered, two machine guns, MG-42s, were placed inside, as a second roar of automatic fire opened from the gun port.
Scarlet ribbons - 7.92mm tracers - and invisible anti-personnel rounds shattered the grass around the Ranger team. Two of their number went down, the air punched out of their lungs from the impact of the high-velocity, rapid-fire rounds, and they tumbled limply to the ground. The others went down to cover, the grass and earth around them whipping apart as automatic fire, scythe-like, ripped across the Ranger team's position.
Wescott went down on one knee and fired, his submachine gun stuttering, the .45 caliber rounds burying themselves into the concrete structure and chipping away the heavy concrete covering. The other Rangers were already firing, two moving up with grenades in hand. He could hear the heavy emission of the BAR, and Wescott rose, charged the casemate. Three others moved up with him, and dove into two separate shell holes after covering twenty meters. The earth was damp, with the scent of freshly-mauled earth clinging to it fiercely. Wescott peeked over the lip of the shell hole, was immediately forced back down as a spray of 7.92mm pounded against his position.
"Grenades at the ready!" Wescott ordered.
Two explosions, grenades from the two advancing Rangers, not very far apart, and the fire from the machine gun abated for just a moment. Two of the Rangers with Wescott rose from the shell crater, emptied their rifles out into the emplacement, and went down. Wescott and another threw their munitions shortly after, one of the grenades thumping directly inside the casemate, and then came the detonations, one directly outside, the other coming from within and pouring a familiar black smoke out of the gun ports.
"Okay, circle around to the sides and take them from the flank, at the entrance!" Wescott dropped an empty magazine, jammed in a fresh one. The Thompson was heavy in his hands, much heavier than it looked, but his arms were not straining. His left arm cradled the Thompson easily, while his right waved towards new firing points, new positions to take up.
The Rangers stalked around the to the rear of the gun emplacement, weapons shouldered and stepping gingerly on wilted grass. Two soldiers, in field-gray, dashed out of the casemate, running within the shallow trench connected to it. Two short bursts and both of them collapsed, sliding down against the wall of the trench. Three more rushed out after a pause, one firing a submachine gun wildly, another throwing a grenade out past the exit trench, which exploded harmlessly away from the Rangers. Another withering barrage of small arms fire, and the Germans garrisoning the casemate fell forward, blood arcing out of their wounds in fountains of red.
"Clear!"
"Jerry's ahead, machine gun," one of the Rangers, a private from D Company, had spotted another line of Germans approaching, moving through the trench network. Fire had already begun to crack near the casemate, and the Rangers all went prone to find cover. Wescott and the private jumped down into a shell crater, the MG-42 tracking them and then pummeling their position with full-automatic fire, tossing bits of earth and concrete down onto their helmets.
"More infantry," someone shouted, "Twenty plus, coming from the trenches!"
Wescott and the advance group were fifty meters from the edge of the cliff. F Company Rangers were now moving up, after rallying at the precipice, under fire from a mortar. They moved out, heading to Wescott's position, twenty men strong, all from first platoon.
"Covering fire!" a Ranger shouted, and fire erupted from the men with Wescott.
The barrage was short, lasting all of three or four seconds, but it checked the German infantry from maneuvering out of the trenches. They huddled down, no more than a hundred fifty meters away, and began to set up their automatic weapons - MG-42s - under heavy rifle fire. Wescott and a second Ranger, with their submachine guns, emptied out their magazines, hoping to suppress the Germans for another moment, and Wescott scrambled out of the shell hole and jumped down into the trench. It wasn't more than four feet deep.
"Let's head down," Wescott said, "We'll fight them at point-blank, push them back if we can."
One of the F Company Rangers of first platoon dove down against the casemate, rifle fire still pelting down on his position even under good cover.
"Sergeant Wescott? Are you there? Martin reporting!"
Wescott shouted back. "Martin, take your men and lay down a base-of-fire, I'll take these boys and push them back into the battery."
"Understood, Sergeant. Let's go first squad, suppressing fire!"
Wescott turned then, and dashed further into the trench. The casemate behind him gave off echoes from gunshots, both far and near, and gave the sense that fire was coming from all around, from everywhere. The Ranger team had gone in perhaps fifty meters before they ran into a gentle rise in the trench. The trench ended, and there was another fifty meters to go before they had entered the main battery network.
Without pausing, Wescott pushed up the ramp, Thompson at the hip, and fired as he broke onto open ground. A dozen Germans, atleast, were lined up along a trenchline no more than sixty meters away, and they immediately turned their guns on the American sergeant who had seemingly appeared from beneath the earth. A few turned away and took cover as .45 rounds streamed into their cover, and Wescott dove into the main battery without incident. His men followed right behind, all firing rapidly to cover their movements, the last taking a bullet full in the chest. His legs turned to rubber, knees suddenly unable to support his body weight, and the Ranger crumpled just before reaching the battery trench, rifle clattering to the ground.
"Grenades," Wescott said. The battery trench was a square network, four lines, reinforced by concrete, and with 155mm guns placed in the center, all with camouflage covering and dug-in a few feet into the ground, to protect them from bombardment. Wescott did not know exactly where the guns were located, but he could see several camouflage nets within the battery trenches.
Two grenades went down the trench, exploding as they bounced past the corner, and Wescott led the rush around. He threw himself against the trench wall, Thompson up and firing as the Germans, dazed, leaned against the wall, shouted an alert. Two of them were hit, five rounds divided between them, the puffs of dust and dirt rising off them signifying successful shots, but those behind them opened fire. Wescott saw a Ranger beside him fall back, dead, and he squeezed the trigger on the Thompson again, firing a long burst down the trench. Dirt sprayed all around the Germans and from them, as the heavy submachine gun rounds knived through them, tearing apart their field-gray uniforms, ripping into their bodies and cratering through their muscle tissue, their organs, funneling out of them along with globulous ribbons of blood.
Eight broken figures littered the floor of the trench once Wescott had ejected his spent magazine. A few of them were moaning, one wailing, and Wescott continued the assault against the trench, his men right behind him, paying no attention to the wounded Germans bleeding on the ground.
Around Wescott's team, the rest of 2nd Battalion had joined in the assault against the German battery. German machine gunners were opening up from hidden nests within the trench network, and soon the Pointe was filled with the staccato roar of automatic fire whipping back and forth.
The Germans opposite Wescott in the trench were pulling out, firing wildly down the trench and around it to keep the advancing Rangers down. He could hear their shouting, similar in tone and pitch to his own. They were heading into the other side of the battery, where a machine gun position would be able to give them more cover.
"Two men, watch the end of the trench, if any Germans try to come for us you shoot them," Wescott ordered. "The rest of you, put suppressive fire on the far machine gun and anything moving out on open ground."
Wescott peered over the edge of the trench. He could see German troops pulling away from the north end of the battery, where Rangers were advancing towards them. They were all moving deeper into the battery, away from the cliff. Three machine gun positions were sighted within the battery, all within camouflaged netting, so that only the flickering yellow-white of their muzzle flashes were visible. A few Germans were occupying the southern trench, firing with rifles and submachine guns at the advancing Americans a hundred fifty or so meters away, hoping to give their comrades some cover. The Germans out of the trenches, moving back, were crossing right in front of Wescott's team, perhaps a hundred meters away at most.
"There they are, a hundred meters, shoot them," a Ranger shouted, and then heavy rifle fire, supported by two BARs, ripped across the battery, into the ranks of a dozen or so Germans. Only two or three managed to hit the ground alive, the others had been hit multiple times and crumpled, dead and limp, one after another in rapid succession.
The far machine gun turned its fire onto Wescott's position, and the Ranger team huddled down and returned fire, though heavily suppressed, with bullets buzzing past them, ripping apart the air, stitching jagged patterns into the earth. They kept their heads low, limiting their vision and line-of-sight with the machine gun as it was now obscurred by the grass and the nest's camouflage netting.
"Spread out!" Wescott shouted over the stutter of fire. "Don't let them concentrate their fire! Spread it out!"
The German gunner in the nest re-aligned the MG-42, dusted in pieces of blackened earth, and now shredded sand and burlap, and unleashed a torrent of metal against the forms of American helmets before him. 1200 rounds per minute - the rate of fire of his tripod-mounted machine gun - sent the tremors of the weapon into his shoulder, and the trench seemed to quake with each burst he let loose. He saw tracer rounds cling like a waving arc of red string to the trench, sweeping lazily across it.
One Ranger platoon began a rush to a trench for cover, to the east. They rose up from the ground and sprinted directly across the machine gun nest's line-of-sight, and the machine gunner pivoted, opened up, firing rapid bursts in sequence, targetting the lead Rangers and hitting them with well-timed shots. The others hunkered down lower and pushed forward, their comrades continuing to fall around them, hit in their exposed arms and legs and flanks, and the platoon halted movement with ten of their men bleeding behind them.
"Machine gun, let's take it out!" Wescott's spoke sharply, quickly. "Three hit from the right! You, and you," he pointed out two Rangers with Thompsons in hand, "You'll come around with me to the left, lay down marching fire, the rest of you are base-of-fire, screen our movement down the center, understand? Let's shake a leg!"
The MG-42's assistant gunner shouted cursory adjustments - too high, too high, adjust a bit lower. The Americans in front of him - the Ranger platoon - were moving forward rapidly now, covered by a barbed wire barrier. They were attempting to put suppressive fire on him, but he had the team pinned. Two short bursts, followed by a long one. Invisible pieces of lead cratered into the barbed wire barrier, tearing through the wire and into the brown earth in which it was planted.
"Nach links, nach links!" from his assistant gunner - to the left, to the left!
The German machine gunner swiveled the MG-42 to his left, fired a burst, a short one, and saw the Americans charging his position, just a handful. Several with submachine guns drew away farther to the left, firing at their position, the German machine gun nest now taking fire from three sides, and one shouted to the other group. It was American, but recognizeable - "Grenades! Grenades!"
The MG-42 swept back right, its gunner shouting frantically now, "Hande granatten, dem gruppe rechts," his assistant gunner already tossing the "potato masher" grenades, and then an American grenade popped, loud, metallic, near the nest, a second farther off, then a German, its smoke enveloping the advancing Rangers.
Wescott heard someone shout "They killed him, he's dead," as he rushed forward, the NCOs abreast of him firing repeatedly into the machine gun nest. A grenade exploded just in front of them, ripping apart the MG-42, splintering the metal, which fragmented and shot into the machine gun team along with the grenade shrapnel. Wescott and his NCOs stomped against the sandbags of the nest and fired two bursts each into the prostrate Germans lying on the ground. The small team jumped down into the nest, perforated by submachine gun fire, and took cover from snipers tracking them from all around the battery.
"Jesus Christ," Wescott heard a Ranger mutter.
"You hit?" another asked.
"No," the Ranger shook his head, breathless. "No." One hand secured his helmet onto his head, the other tossing his shattered rifle - shot in the stock, made worthless - to the ground.
Around the nest, three Rangers lie dead, pierced by the furious MG-42 they had sought to dis-mantle.
F Company continued their push past the battery, forcing the Germans out of the trenches and into the hedgerows beyond. Resistance for now had been limited to the small company garrisoning the battery, and these the Rangers dealt with swiftly and skillfully, maneuvering against the 352nd troops and securing the 155mm gun positions behind. However, the concrete emplacements that a handful of D Company Rangers had stumbled upon were empty, occupied only by dummy telephone poles. The Germans, in anticipation of the air and sea bombardments, had re-positioned the guns in order to secure them against the high-explosive barrage that preceded the Allied invasion.
Those initial D Company Rangers immediately headed out of the battery, under constant fire from snipers, the 20mm AA gun further to the east, and stray machine guns. Their secondary objective, the coastal road linking Utah and Omaha beaches, lie south, deeper into the German lines. F Company, Wescott's unit, would widen the beachhead to link up with 5th Ranger Battalion, which had landed at Omaha with the 29th Infantry Division.
Into the Breach
Meanwhile, the 116th Rifle Regiment of the 29th lay at Omaha, a bloodied mass, ripped apart by heavy German fire. Wayne and his platoon huddled down at the sea wall, deafened by the constant treble of automatic fire, accompanied by the bass drums of 88mm and lighter caliber anti-tank guns. Lieutenant Wayne watched as an engineer team struggled desperately to blow part of the barbed wire that blocked Wayne's company from advancing further up the sea wall. They were on their knees, hands fuzing their explosives, close to their chests, and were almost completely exposed to enemy fire.
Wayne had counted six engineers who had fallen at that single spot.
Behind them, the more unfortunate elements of the 116th were burning and bleeding. Countless bodies littered the beach, all punctured by multiple bullet wounds, or shattered by point-blank field gun bursts. Tattered clothing, tainted a brownish-red, and bits of metal and steel ricocheted from vicious impacts against flesh, sprayed out in puffs along with the scarlet mist that now seemed to coat the beach.
Traffic entering Omaha had ceased, since 0830. General Omar Bradley, commander of 1st Army, had examined the landings, and saw that the pile-up of destroyed and inactive landing craft, and of destroyed material on the beach itself, would prevent any real progress to be made with more traffic put into the beachhead. The engineers would have to continue to clear the beach with the equipment they had, until traffic in the Channel had cleared and a path through the burning wreckage had been established.
The only reinforcements A Company had received on Dog Green were elements of B Company, part of the second wave.
"The goddamn brass has fucked it up somewhere," Wayne heard a private utter, "We are dying out here on the beach, dying like animals. The brass sent us out here to die like a bunch of goddamn animals."
"Quiet down, private," Wayne said over his shoulder. "We're not dead yet."
"That's right, lieutenant, we're not dead yet. We're just waiting to die."
Wayne turned now, rolled over on his back so he could see the speaking soldier. "You're under my responsibility and my command," he said, emphasizing that last part. "You're not going to die." Wayne turned back. "Not if you trust me and obey orders."
"I obeyed my orders, lieutenant," the private seethed. "I obeyed my orders and I jumped off that boat, and now I'm on this beach with the entire German Wehrmacht gunning for me."
"Hey, private," a coldly uncaring voice, sarcastic and with an urban taint, "Shut the hell up. The lieutenant's trying to find us a way off the beach and you're bitching and bitching and you're keeping him from doing his job. Shut your damn mouth and do your job so everyone else can do theirs."
It was the platoon sergeant, Burkeley. Wayne knew his men were uneasy, tense. They had just landed at perhaps the most violent point of the entire invasion, at least it certainly felt like it, and their comrades lay a crimson mass of lacerated flesh behind them. Wayne himself could feel his stomach, tight and twisted in his gut. Whether higher command was in error or not was irrelevant; they had a mission, and it was Wayne's responsibility that they accomplished that mission.
Another engineer pitched over, a clean shot clearing through his skull, tearing out bits of gray and red along with flecks of bone that tinkled across the bangalore torpedo his assistant handled. That last engineer, the eighth one, ignited the fuze, alerted, "Fire in the hole!" and then slumped to the ground as a bullet shot through his neck, severing his trachea and leaving him gurgling unintelligibly.
But the bangalore torpedo detonated, and the barbed wire next to it shot skyward, a post tumbling high and then thunking against the sand. German machine gun fire already began to sweep the corridor, anticipating the Americans to push through and attempt to occupy the draw, the ramp leading up onto the bluff.
It was 0853.
"All right, second platoon, let's get ready to move." Wayne shifted to his knees. "We've got a path through the barbed wire."
Wayne shuffled along the seawall, hunched down low, and approached the entry up to the draw. The bodies of the eight engineers, one writhing in agony, lay near the breach in the barbed wire barrier, and no one made any attempts to bring them out of the German's field of fire. The machine gunners positioned on either side of the draw continued to carpet the breach, inadvertently punching the last of the air from the engineers' lungs.
"Christ," a private muttered behind Wayne, and turned away. "Those fucking krauts ain't got any mercy."
"First squad leader!" Wayne called.
"Yes, sir!"
"I'll move up with your men. There's some cover, just a stone's throw past the barbed wire and far to the left. You see it?"
"Yes, sir, I see it."
"We'll move, fast, to that position, and proceed to lay down fire against those machine guns, there, and there." Wayne pointed out the two automatic weapons firing down from the bluff on either side of the draw.
"Understood, sir."
"Okay. Second squad, you give us some suppressing fire so we can clear this breach."
"Let's shake a leg, boys," Master Sergeant Burkeley quipped, and leaned against the sea wall, rifle propped up on one hand.
Wayne's second squad leader, a young sergeant who had lost four soldiers and gained eight, the survivors from fourth squad, chambered a round into his carbine. "Second squad, take up firing positions."
"First squad, on me!"
Second squad leader, Sergeant Brown, gave the order to open fire, and BAR and rifle fire reached out to ricochet against the concrete encasements that the Germans were protected in.
"Second squad," Wayne turned one last time to give one last order, shouting over the din of fire. "Once you see first squad take up their positions, move up! We'll provide covering fire! All right, let's go!" and he tapped his squad leader's shoulder.
First squad rose and dashed forward, pushing into the breach in the barbed wire and jumping over the mutilated bodies of the engineers. Machine gun fire tracked them and lapped at their boots. One soldier lost his footing and fell, and was lucky enough to get back on his feet to continue past the sea wall. Lieutenant Wayne pulled him forward, then turned and ran, zig zagging wildly to avoid the incoming fire. The cover provided by the concrete debris was perfect, enough to hold twelve men comfortably, and first squad's twenty men uncomfortably. They threw themselves against it, landing on bits of sharp rock and barbed wire, and drew their weapons.
"Covering fire!" Wayne roared, "Second squad move up! Spread out to our left!"
The two machine gun teams Wayne had drawn up with him fired against the nest opposite the breach, while the rifle men loosed a sheet of metal upward. MG-42 fire continued to pour down unabated, but the Germans were suppressed; they were shooting blindly.
Two men of second squad were hit, cut down by bursts at the hip and waist. Second squad immediately lined up behind Wayne's group. The men were panting, but they were moving on automatic now, moving and thinking solely on what they had learned in training.
Wayne could see Germans moving behind the draw, entering the trench network that overlooked the beaches.
"Okay, first squad!" Wayne called. "Move up this draw! We can get past the machine gun field-of-fire if we get in behind them, up this draw!"
"First squad, move out!"
And twenty men broke from the cover of fallen concrete and rushed back into the barrage of machine gun fire. Wayne charged right behind them, and watched as three men fell in rapid succession, the MG-42 burst having swept over them from the side. Dust and cloth ricocheted from their bodies and they went down, rolling over onto their sides and stomachs. But the rest of first squad managed to reach the top of the draw, and now the trench network lay ahead of them. Barbed wire and concrete emplacements dotted the entire cliff above Omaha, and Wayne wondered if it were possible at all to clear the beach.
"Silence those machine guns!" Wayne ordered. "Grenades first!"
"Hey, take the other pillbox, we'll handle this one!" first squad leader - Staff Sergeant Dunn - pointed out a handful of men.
Sergeant Brown continued to lay up heavy rifle fire against the machine gun situated just above them. The M1 Garands were powerful weapons, but no rifle bullet could penetrate concrete armor. Beside him, his men squeezed the triggers on their weapons ceaselessly, creating a cacophony of fire that challenged the German fire superiority.
The pillbox above them emitted a hollow, metallic whump, a grenade burst, and smoke poured outwards, laced with debris. It was silenced. Shortly after, the same explosion, the same smoke echoed from the second pillbox. The draw was clear.
"Move up, second squad," Wayne waved from the first pillbox. "Move up!"
Wayne's machine gunners had already set up their weapons, and were now exchanging fire with German rifle men advancing into the trenches. They cut them down rapidly, leaving only a handful to actually reach cover, the rest tripping onto their knees and bellies as .30 rounds punched through them brutally and tattered their trench coats.
"What do you count?" Wayne asked his platoon sergeant.
"Sixty Germans, sir, they've got all of Dog Green pinned down."
"Is this D-One?" Wayne asked, and pulled out his map. Behind him, second platoon laid down heavy rifle fire in a firefight with Germans in the trench network.
D-1 was the main draw that lead to Vierville. However, Wayne couldn't see any landmarks - church spires, towers - that indicated a village nearby past the German defenses. No, this wasn't D-1. Wayne looked westward and saw the dark spire of a Norman church tower rising above the hedgerow country. D-1 was farther west, they had landed too far east of their intended location. While they weren't where they were supposed to be, Wayne's platoon had done what they were supposed to have done; make a way through the German defenses.
"No, no, this isn't D-One," Wayne shook his head and stuffed the map back into his field jacket. "But we can take some pressure off of the beach now. Get the men together, let's hit those machine gun nests."
"Understood, sir." Burkeley turned about and headed down the trench. "Second platoon! Weapons at the ready!"
Wayne approached his men.
"Two teams from each squad! Team one will cover team two's movement, and once team two has established a forward base-of-fire, team one will become the maneuver element and flank the machine gun nest! Charge the gun, grenade it, then lay down heavy fire at point-blank range. Base-of-fire element, you need to be careful with the covering fire, once you see team one closing in on the objective you ease off on the triggers and move up. First squad, you handle the closer gun, second squad, advance past first squad's starting point and hit the second gun. This is team work, boys, you work together and you accomplish the mission. Shake a leg second platoon!"
Lieutenant Wayne cycled the action on his rifle and quick-stepped with first squad. "Sergeant First Class Burkeley, you stay with second squad and make sure they keep together."
"Understood, Lieutenant."
Second platoon made its way through the German trench, staying far behind the front German line, away from the defending troops. Sniper fire made its way to their position, and pelted into the earth and sides of the trench repeatedly. Wayne placed a hand on Staff Sergeant Dunn's shoulder and kept him moving. The first machine gun shot without pause, waving its spread of 7.92mm down onto the beach and sea wall. The team was commanded by a sergeant, who was equipped with a radio - he was issuing orders, it sounded like, fire orders to a gun nearby.
"Ein hundert meter - rechts...ziel vernichteten!"
First squad maneuvered directly behind the machine gun, with one .30 assigned to them. Staff Sergeant Dunn peered over the edge of the trench, breathing heavily inspite of himself. A mortar crashed on the beach somewhere to the left, showering the sky in black debris and burning earth. First squad's movement was labored, weighed down by their assault packs and heavy weapons. But they were in position now, and the machine gun lay just a hundred fifty meters ahead, with two walls of barbed wire that spanned no more than twenty feet each between first squad and the gun's position.
"First squad in position," Dunn whispered to the platoon sergeant, who nodded in return.
"First squad in position," Burkeley repeated to Wayne.
"Okay, hold position. Second squad, move out."
They were whispering now, with Germans within earshot. Their assault would come at a complete surprise, and both machine guns would be put out of action simultaneously.
A moment later, Sergeant Brown had his sixteen men in position, a hundred meters down. They were hunkered down in the reserve trench, rifles held tightly and close to their bodies. Their machine gunner had set up his .30 cal, and his weapon pointed down at the German machine gun.
Wayne held his hand up towards second squad. "First squad, prepare to assault."
Sergeant Brown gave him the thumbs up.
Wayne dropped his hand and pumped it towards the machine guns.
"First squad, assault!"
Staff Sergeant Dunn took the lead, scrambling out of the reserve trench as the .30 caliber opened up, releasing it's dat-dat-dat of fire, and waved first squad ahead. The Germans in the trench ahead shouted loudly, and the rifle team guarding the machine gun turned their weapons about and took aim. They fired, almost simultaneously, and Dunn heard bodies hitting the ground behind him. He raised his own rifle, returned fire, then continued to charge ahead. A German sergeant with a submachine gun opened up, and the machine pistol rounds tore across the trench, ripping into the barbed wire barrier that lay just ahead. Dunn hit the barrier and rolled, the MP-40 rounds continuing to flutter past into his squad.
First squad's BAR gunner reached the barrier with Dunn, and he immediately let loose a burst, full automatic, sweeping the German trench. It was almost ineffective, as the rifle team merely flinched and continued to shoot down on the approaching Americans.
Two more rifle soldiers reached the barrier, and they returned fire as best they could, but another MP-40 had opened up on them, now from the left.
"Team two, move up!" Dunn ordered. "Team two, move up to the next barrier!"
First squad's rifle element continued past Dunn and the BAR gunner, running at high port, the German rifle rounds buzzing past them furiously now. One took a hit in the neck as he crossed the first barrier, and he pitched forward, blood arcing out of his throat in a fountain, and the soldier was dead, in front of Dunn, eyes staring blankly.
"Fuck," Dunn muttered to himself. "Keep up that fire!"
The BAR gunner ejected his spent magazine and jammed in a new one, slammed the action shut, then pointed the weapon back at the German trench. A short burst, another burst, each squeeze of the trigger intended to cut a German down. They stubbornly survived the torrent of fire, though, and resisted the Browning Automatic Rifle's attempts at silencing them. The BAR kicked back violently with each burst, muzzle flashing wildly, and the gunner grit his teeth, to keep from shaking.
Two more soldiers from team two went down before they had all reached the second barrier, and they fell to either side, away from each other, the dirt puffing off of their bodies from MP-40 and rifle fire, red mist spraying a moment later, and then they were down, not alive enough to even bother to call for a medic. Not that the platoon had access to a medic, they were on their own behind the German beach defenses.
"Team two in position!" Dunn heard a corporal shout, and then he stood and dashed ahead of the first barrier, pulling the BAR gunner with him.
"Team one, establish a forward base-of-fire, team two, covering fire! Covering fire!"
Staff Sergeant Dunn ran ahead, directly into German fire, shaking like a leaf, it felt, but keeping his wits about him. There was a shell crater perhaps sixty meters from the German machine gun, and he and the BAR team could take cover there. The MG-42 had not turned its fire from the beach; the gunner was intent on stopping the Americans from getting a foothold on the beach.
But the twin MP-40 fire was more than enough to replace it. The machine pistol rounds buzzed past in a flurry, and Dunn felt a tearing pain in his left arm - he had been hit. He kept moving though, and shoved the BAR gunner into the shell hole with his good arm. He was down, taking cover a moment later, and shouting something about "open fire, goddamn it, shoot back."
"Let's go, Hearn, open up!"
The BAR gunner unleashed a long burst, pounding out the full automatic rounds and barely aiming, just pointing the business end of the weapon towards the Germans opposite him. The rifle troops took cover now, cowering against the close-range fire, but the sergeant kept his MP-40 working, returning fire to Hearn and his assistant with the same ferocity that the Americans were doling it out.
A German grenade went off near the shell hole, and Hearn was shoved against the side of the shell hole by the concussion, but a moment later his assistant had him upright and firing again.
"Let's go!" the corporal leading team two shouted. "Let's go!" and then the team had set off, rushing forward with rifles at the hip.
They fired wildly down at the Germans, and the two MP-40s shifted fire to their direction, against the seven Americans that advanced in the face of enemy fire as if they had no fear. But they were scared, some out of their wits, but a few were keeping their heads, and after emptying their rifles, they pulled their grenades from their assault jackets and continued to move forward.
Dunn watched the advance, saw team two closing to thirty, twenty, ten meters, and Hearn's BAR went silent, along with the four other rifles. Grenades detonated, one, two, three, four explosions, two in the German trench, two just around it, all emitting ominous black columns of smoke, and a German rifleman cartwheeled out of the position, riddled with shrapnel and bleeding from nearly every inch of his body. The corporal closed with the one MP-40 that had not been silenced, and smashed the butt of his rifle against the NCO's jaw as he attempted to reload. Then, as the German fell, the corporal bashed the M1 against the side of the NCO's head, again, and again, cracking open his skull, covered by a field cap, and then bashing the splintering bone into his gray brains.
The rest of team two advanced down upon the German machine gunner, who, upon seeing Americans in the trench, immediately through up his hands and shouted, "Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!"
"Yeah, 'don't shoot' my ass, you've been gunning down our boys for the the past hour without so much as giving us a chance to bring the wounded in," one of the soldiers growled angrily.
"Ich spreche nein Englisch, nicht schiessen!" The German gunner seemed to be about forty, too old to be an enlisted man, but there he was, shooting an MG-42 at invading American troops on Omaha. The angry soldier, a corporal, took hold of the gunner's collar and thrusted him against the sandbags.
Dunn and the rest of first squad joined the corporal then, and saw the corporal draw his sidearm and point it at the German's head.
"Hey," Dunn said testily, his arm throbbing, "What the hell's going on here? Why aren't you assisting second squad, you think the mission's over? One man take the prisoner down to the beach, turn him into the beach master. Two guys get our wounded over with the thirty-cal. Everyone else head up to second squad."
Sergeant Brown lie in the shell hole, the MG-42 just a few dozen meters away and muzzle blazing wildly. The flying metal it spit out buzzed overhead, whipping past and sweeping over second squad's position as a rushing wind. But none of the soldiers so much as even raised their hands up; they were pinned down, with an MP-40 firing down on them along with a handful of German K98s. The .30 Browning had continued to fire, but it was positioned too far away to suppress the Germans, who were obviously experienced troops. They didn't flinch against the weak return fire that second squad's rifle element put up.
"Sergeant Brown, get your squad in order!" Burkeley was shouting. "Get your men together, don't let them lie down to die!"
"We're pinned down, Sarge!" Brown replied, voice almost hysterical, "That machine gun's just a few meters away, we can't do anything! We're pinned down!"
Burkeley exploded. "So get unpinned, damn it, that machine gun's not just shooting for effect, they've got a bead on your squad!"
Just as Burkeley said this, a grenade went off in one of the shell holes that Brown's men had taken cover in. All three riflemen now lay dead and dying in the cover of the shell hole, bleeding their blood into the crater carved out of the earth. Smoke poured out of the pit, and one of the squad screamed in horror.
"Goddamn it," Burkeley roared, "Return fire! Shoot back, goddamn it, shoot back!"
A handful of second squad riflemen peeked over the edge of their shell hole cover and opened up with their M1s, delivering in-effective fire against the MG-42. .30 rifle rounds sung past the German gunner, and he ducked his head down, but kept the barrel pointed towards the American assault team. The MG-42's report was a rapid, metallic tear-paper sound, deafening and continuous, and it was freezing second squad with fear.
Burkeley rose from cover, still castigating second squad to return fire, and popped off an entire magazine from his carbine. Then, without going back down to protect himself from the incoming machine gun rounds, Burkeley snapped in a fresh magazine and resumed shooting.
"Someone grenade that machine gun!" Burkeley ordered, and resumed firing.
The carbine rounds piffed against the sandbag barrier protecting the MG-42 gunner, and its supporting rifle team took aim against the platoon sergeant trying to rouse the squad. The machine gunner's burst were buzzing past him, the weapon jolting violently each time the gunner's finger squeezed the trigger, but Burkeley didn't flinch. He knew he would die with the entire squad unless they made a decisive movement.
One soldier rose, grenade in hand, and tossed the munition. Both he and Burkeley went back down to cover as soon as the grenade was loosed, and Burkeley heard rifle shots cracking overhead as he huddled in the burned-out shell hole.
"Granatten!" came the German warning, and then the detonation.
Burkeley felt his bones rattle from the concussion, and then rose rapidly from the ground, pulling Sergeant Brown with him. Brown took a moment to regain his senses, and immediately drew his rifle up. He shouted for second squad to follow him, and Burkeley waved the men forward. They charged, three dropping to the dirt like rag dolls as the supporting rifle team hit them with clean shots, and fired on the move.
At the same moment, first squad came forward, shooting upon the German rifle team and forcing them to take cover in their trench as American soldiers closed in from two sides. A few moved down the trench and into a secondary communication trench, and first squad threw grenades after them, releasing a line of high explosive explosions to burst out of the communication trench. Dunn was unsure if they had gotten them, but fire from those Germans still in the trench called for his attention.
Second platoon closed in on the German position, thirty soldiers, knees bent and bodies leaning over close to the ground, K98 and MG-42 fire spraying against them, trying to stop them. Second platoon's squads met over the trench, firing rapidly into the Germans huddling there, cutting them down with the cold fury of one who has been butchered beyond recognition. The rifle team, or at least the part of it that had remained, was destroyed, their wooden K98s lying on the ground over their corpses, and the dust-caked machine gunner, dazed and stunned by the grenade, taken prisoner.
"Take the bastard down to the beachmaster," Dunn's disgusted corporal spat. "Fucking krauts should be shot where they stand, with that throwing up their hands business after shooting up our boys like that."
The corporal, hands and sleeves covered in a sticky coat of dull red, the blood of friends who had died in his arms, jerked his head back towards the ground second platoon had covered. It was littered haphazardly with the bodies of second platoon troops, lying face down, the exit wounds on their corpses clearly visible, highlighted in a splash of crimson and a black dot where the bullet had punched through their heavy assault jackets. Soldiers in field-gray overcoats lie at the bottom of trenches, dried blood sticking in ribbons to their ears and noses, the vessels in their skulls shattered from repeated grenade bursts. It had barely been two hours since Wayne and his men had landed at Omaha, and already they had created a graveyard.
Wayne addressed the platoon sergeant, still huffing from the assault on the second German machine gun. "Burkeley, take an ammo check. Squad leaders, I want a --"
Dunn's corporal suddenly collapsed, the crack of the rifle report disturbingly quiet after the cacophony of small arms fire, and he staggered, clutching at his gut in a shocked, suppressed agony.
"Mo-motherfucking krauts," the corporal spat again, and breathed heavily, trying to keep his wits through the pain.
Wayne ordered second platoon to take cover from the sniper, and with the assistance of a private, took the corporal down into the cover of the machine gun nest. The bullet had cut cleanly through the corporal's gut, without cratering through any internal organs, but he was bleeding profusely.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," one of the soldiers repeated over and over again, "Jesus, Jesus Christ."
"Hand me some bandages," Wayne called, "Get me some bandages." He didn't have scissors, but he ripped the corporal's assault jacket and over-shirt from the bullet entry.
"Jesus, oh Christ..."
"God-goddamn krauts, won't stop f-fighting even after they've lost half-half their unit."
"How bad is he hit?"
"Just a shot through the gut, nothing vital hit."
"Oh Christ, oh Jesus..."
"Hey, come on, damn it, don't crowd around him, give him some air."
"Okay, sterilize the wound, clean it out."
"Hey, Lieu-Lieutenant, don't send me back, don't send me back to the-the rear. Goddamn krauts aren't going to st-st-stop me like this," the corporal was sputtering a little, but he wasn't senseless and he knew exactly what he was saying.
"Sounds like you'll be okay," Wayne quipped. "Let me patch you up and we'll go after those goddamn krauts, right? Okay, roll him onto his side, let me get this bandage around him." Wayne's red-stained hands wrapped the starch white bandages around the corporal's middle. Crimson bled through the material slowly, but the wound had calmed down and the corporal hadn't gone too deep into shock.
"Keep him here for a minute," Wayne told the three other soldiers and the platoon sergeant. "Someone get me a runner."
"I'll go." A young private, probably didn't have to shave every morning. His blue-and-gray shoulder patch, the insignia of the 29th, had been torn, leaving only the blue half of the circle. He scratched at it, probably scraped his shoulder against barbed wire.
"Get back down the draw, get whatever officer you can find and tell him we've got a way open past the beach, but there's snipers and machine guns keeping us down. We have several wounded and we need a medic, at the very least, and we've got no thirty-cal ammunition left."
"Yes, sir."
The private hunched over and dashed out from the machine gun nest, heading towards the cover of the trench. Wayne watched him, saw him stumble, and then a rifle crack. The private went down, hit high in the side, in his arm, but the exit wound cleared the center of his back. His blue patch, tattered, fluttered to the ground, splotched with red.
The Coastal Road
Wescott and his squad exchanged fire with a German squad, moving through the treeline south of the battery. D Company had found the guns in an orchard nearby the coastal road, and had destroyed the 155mm weapons by tossing thermite grenades down their barrels and smashing their sights. A patrol by E Company had destroyed the guns' ammunition cache, and shortly after the D Company soldiers returned to their road block. A German counter-attack, from the under-strength company supporting the 155mm guns, would probably put pressure on the Rangers shortly.
"Continue pushing south!" an officer called to Wescott and his men. "We need to push the enemy back past the coastal road so Fifth Battalion can link up with us!"
Wescott heard the whine of incoming rifle rounds whip past him from behind, and wondered how F Company would push the perimeter out to the coastal road, with German snipers still shooting at them from within the battery and from strong points around it.
The German squad Wescott's men had been shooting at suddenly disappeared. There were no more muzzle flashes or rifle fire reports, and movement in the treeline had ceased. Weary of a German trick, Wescott kept his men quiet for a minute and waited. They were surrounded in green, with the treeline behind them, and a four-foot high hedgerow to their front and on the right side of the road. That hedgerow was relatively small, only three or four feet thick, and there was another adjacent to it, on the other side of the road, about six feet tall, and maybe six feet thick. They were huge chunks of bright summer green, with strips of brown earth just beneath them that sunk into the grown. Sunlight only came down in streams around Wescott's men; they were positioned at a cluster of trees, with the road towards their left and the treeline just past it. There was no action among the southern treeline, and Wescott took a last glance before rising to one knee.
"Everybody head towards the paved road," Wescott said, and the eight men remaining with him rose up from the earth and moved forward, bent double and with weapons held at the ready.
They could hear automatic fire stuttering ahead of them, past the hedgerow which ran perpendicular to the road, and rifle fire, M1, replying to the MG-42's report. The heavier chucka-chucka of a BAR echoed from another location, and shouting, both German and American, came from all around. An explosion, a grenade, and a sudden, tearing burst of gunfire. Combat on the road was isolated, fought between small bands of men, but it was fierce, bloody.
A machine pistol suddenly opened up from the hedgerow ahead of them, from the right, and Wescott's squad, out in the open, went down, a few managing to reach the cover of burned-out shell holes, others caught directly in the field between the treeline and hedgerow and simply lying on their bellies to avoid fire. Carbine fire, K98s, opened shortly after, and Wescott ordered his men to return fire. They did so, rising slightly from cover to empty their magazines into the hedgerow, and their one BAR shot short bursts against the partly-concealed muzzle flashes.
"Let's go!" Wescott shouted and dashed forward at a half-stumble, his Thompson snapping back into his shoulder as he squeezed the trigger and sent a spray of .45 caliber into the hedgerow. He and his men weren't much more than forty meters out; a burst from the Schmeisser sent a Ranger a few feet away tumbling to the ground, his rifle bouncing ahead of him, and Wescott found a shell crater nearby and dove in it. Quickly, urgently, he drew his last grenade, pulled the pin, snapped the arming mechanism, and threw it, overhand, into the hedgerow. An explosion, the concussion hitting simultaneously, torn leaves and branches tearing away and landing on top of him, and Wescott popped up, Thompson shouldered. He could see the Germans pulling away through the tattered hedgerow, and he opened fire, two short bursts, and the Germans went down, dropping to the paved road, one screaming, two others simply falling onto their faces.
The squad moved up to the hedgerow rapidly, crawling out of shell holes, and took a quick look around. An MG-42 was firing down the road, at some hidden Rangers, a hundred meters down the road to the right. Rifle fire crossed the road, from their side, into the opposite hedgerow.
"We're taking out the MG-42. Sneak down this hedgerow, keep on this side, and get in close-range. Once he has to change out his barrels, we'll hit him. Everybody understand? Move out."
The Rangers rushed along the sunken earth alongside their cover at first, then, when they had come within earshot of the machine gun, they crouched down low and continued forward. Tracers whipped past them, some close enough that they could hear the air buzz with the high-velocity projectile, and they crawled the next few paces. The MG-42's metallic "burp," its 1200 round-per-minute brrrt, was deafening now, thunderous.
Wescott kept his hand on the Ranger ahead of him, whispering, "That's close enough." Then, turning to the rest of the squad, "Weapons at the ready. On my signal."
Perhaps fifty rounds later, the German weapon halted its firing, whether it was reloading or changing out its barrels, Wescott couldn't tell but he nodded to his squad, waved his hand forward in the signal to assault, and the Rangers opened up, firing through the green of the plant growth in front of them, and they could see bodies dropping in front of them through the leaves.
"Fallen zurück, fallen zurück!" they heard through the hedgerow, and Wescott half-jumped, half-rolled over the heavy branches, feeling them poke at him unpleasantly.
He saw troops in field-gray pulling away, an MG-42 barrel waving in the air from one's shoulder, and he fired three rounds from his Thompson. He would have loosed off more, but his magazine was empty, and Wescott quickly switched out magazines, but the Germans were gone, disappeared in the hedgerow fields before he could raise his weapon again.
Rifle fire exploded not more than a few meters away, and Wescott stumbled back into the cover of the hedgerow, even though he could not hear bullets singing past him. It was a Ranger team, and they were shooting down the road, to the right. Wescott peered through the bullet-scarred branches of the hedgerow, and saw Germans crossing the road, a few falling to their knees as rifle fire cut through them. Their overcoats, pierced by .30 rounds, draped their fallen bodies, brightened to white in the sunlight glaring down on the paved road.
"Hey," Wescott called restrainedly to the Ranger team adjacent to him, not really seeing them due to the heavy brush of the hedgerow. "What company are you guys with?"
"F Company," came the low reply.
"Hey, we're F Company. What's the word from the CO?" Wescott strained to see through the dark green limbs of the brush, futilely.
"We don't have any orders," the hushed voice said. "The Colonel just saw us in the battery and said to push out to the coastal road."
"Got you. Coming through, don't shoot."
Wescott pushed through the hedgerow branches and nearly stumbled upon five Rangers, all young kids that couldn't have even been through college.
One of the kids, who seemed just about eighteen, tipped his helmet in greeting, a relieved grin on his face. "Corporal Gary Hill." He was apparently in command of the small team.
"Sergeant First Class John Wescott."
"Sounded like quite a firefight out here, Sergeant."
"A few Germans putting up a fight. I don't think they're with their main unit, though, just a couple of isolated patrols. We've got one machine gun team on the run, pushed them from the road, and I was planning on taking my boys after them. We could use another few rifles, though."
"All right, why not?" the corporal quipped. "We're the guys you're lookin' for." He was full of youthful enthusiasm, and arrogant. Wescott already knew him - he probably thought he was invincible, a hero waiting to happen.
"Sounds good. First squad, move in with Corporal Hill, here."
Wescott turned to the Ranger behind him and ordered the squad to cover him as he crossed the road. The Ranger relaying the message nodded in reply, and Wescott took a quick inspection of the opposite hedgerow before pushing out of the cover of the brush and rushing across the road. He made it to the sunken lane adjacent to the next line of thick brush, and looked through the tightly-woven branches, searching for Germans hidden on the other side. Rifle fire continued to pop from down the road, to the west, along with automatic fire, a BAR probably, so Wescott couldn't quite give an ear to his surroundings.
He turned then, signalled to his squad and the corporal - All clear. Move up.
There was a shuffle of underbrush, then, and the pounding of boots against earth, then pavement, as the eleven men moved forward, all staying low to the ground, all with weapons ready to fire.
They were nearby two dead Germans, the soldiers that Wescott and his men had killed in their ambush against the machine gun. A third lay on the other side of the opposite hedgerow, and Wescott stepped over the soldier's body gingerly as he pushed through a slight gap in the brush. Wescott was in an orchard, now, with apple trees looming, isolated, within the field created by the surrounding hedgerows. He estimated that the field was perhaps a hundred meters across, and guessed that the machine gun had probably taken up new positions in the hedgerow on the far side. That one was big, probably eight feet tall, with branches and vines that hung down low from the top and draped the earth. Wescott reckoned that if he and the squad snuck forward under cover of hedgerow on either side of the field, they could flank the machine gun and any supporting Germans and gun them down from the rear. However, with limited visiblity, they would need to send a patrol out to get the machine gun to reveal its location. Wescott and his rifle team would have to be it. They were the lightest armed, and so could maneuver the easiest once the shooting started.
He led the squad forward, motioning for the BAR element to spread out to the left and go around the hedgerow, and signalling Hill and his men to stick to the hedgerow on the right, moving along the sunken lane on the opposite side. They were stepping gingerly, weapons held low, muzzles pointing down, but ready to snap up in an instant to draw fire onto any German moving in the heavy brush.
The sunny, summer glaze was playing with the Rangers, toying with their senses. At any other time, in the same place, they would have been strolling along the roads on a picnic with friends and family. Now, however, they were searching for the black, oddly-squared muzzles of German machine guns, and the dull, wooden stocks of German carbines pointing out of the merry green leaves of Norman hedgerows.
And, as Wescott's center group stepped lightly past the first apple tree, the machine gun made its presence known. A steel treble, loud, piercing, from the far hedgerow, the gray-yellow muzzle flash of the German weapon barely visible against the emerald leaves, now waving and slashing wildly in the air as streams of metal shot through them. Wescott heard the whine of incoming rounds, two of his Rangers already crumpling, tilting very slowly to the ground, and he hugged the earth, the others following suit, one shouting there was no cover. The apple tree's trunk behind them seemed to explode in loud thwockthwockthwocks, as bark was torn away, splintering slivers of white wood sent skyborne.
The BAR team, four soldiers, immediately opened fire, from the left, from the kneeling position, aiming for the flare of 7.92mm. They were shooting through the left hedgerow, though, and so their aim and line-of-sight were severely restricted.
Corporal Hill's team dashed forward as soon as the shooting started, two with grenades in hand, the other three with rifles held tight at high port. They moved down the sunken lane rapidly, Hill trying to see where the machine gun was at, but spotting nothing, the gray-yellow winking invisible in the sunlight. Wescott's center team was pinned, and soon another casualty was incurred, as the gunner began to fire low, chopping up the dark, rich grass and sending a burst, invisible, no tracer, into a Ranger to Wescott's left, the moist thwip thwip thwip of the rounds striking him sickening, as usual. The automatic fire swept away from Wescott, however, and quickly pointed its way to Corporal Hill's team, bursting from the hedgerow in the next field, courageously, perhaps senselessly. Hill broke into a sprint, his men right behind him.
They zig-zagged, then, dodged and weaved, creeping to the left, and Wescott tapped the Ranger nearest to him and told him to open fire, covering fire, covering fire.
Rifle fire whistled forward, shattering the leaves around the ceaselessly winking muzzle of the MG-42. The grenade that detonated near the far hedgerow did not silence the machine gun, only caused a slight pause, but the close-range rifle fire of Corporal Hill did, as he shot up the three Germans around the machine gun rapidly, pivoting quickly and snapping the rifle's muzzle from target to target, the M1 cracking with each shot until the bandoleer was spent. The two privates behind him spotted Germans, two of them, running through the smoke and debris of the grenades, and went down to one knee to fire quickly, swiftly, into the retreating enemy soldiers. Six shots, the tinny ping of their dry bandoleers almost noiseless in the aftermath of the short firefight, and then cold, still quiet.
"Move up!" a Ranger said, and the half dozen remaining Rangers of Wescott's squad staggered forward, with the BAR team materializing through a break in the left hedgerow.
"Penn, Aster, we've got wounded," Wescott called, checking one of the downed Rangers himself. "Get them to the rear." He rose as the two Rangers approached, and headed back towards his squad.
The others trotted forward, peering through the thick hedgerow and seeing nothing, and Wescott called for Hill's team.
"We're here," Hill's quiet voice came.
The Ranger squad pushed through a small opening in the far hedgerow, and saw two of Hill's team, lying on the grass, one apparently dead, and the other breathing raggedly. Hill was pouring sulfa powder into the latter's wounds, two in the chest, and wiping the blood away with a tangle of bandages.
"They were grenading the machine gun," Hill spoke. "Got too far ahead, went in too fast."
"Get him back to the battery," Wescott said. "They'll patch him up there."
Hill nodded. "Sam, help me out here."
Wescott watched as the young corporal and a private picked their wounded comrade up carefully, and proceeded to carry him back to Pointe-du-Hoc. They walked down the sunken lane on the outside of the hedgerow, out of view from Wescott and the team of Rangers.
Hill listened to the wounded Ranger's labored breathing in a depressed state. What if's and should have been's wouldn't do much of anything, but there was always that unshakeable feeling at first, of wanting it to be you instead of the other guy.
And then a rifle shot cracked out, from several hundred meters down the sunken lane, and Hill felt his knees turn to jelly. He went down, gripping the branches of the hedgerow to keep from falling to his back, and Sam, in front of him, went down, too, and Hill saw the blood on the leaves of the hedgerow. The sniper shot had gone through both of them. Goddamn it, that was three wounded, how would F Company push past the coastal road now, with a casualty rate like this?
Hill's breaths were drawn short, and he realized now that he couldn't take deeper breaths because the rifle shot had pierced his left lung. He felt his head floating, eyes drawing shut despite his determined efforts to keep them open, to stay conscious, but the human body would never be able to overcome shock consciously.
He did manage to feel Wescott and his squad dragging him back into the field past the orchard, though, and heard his voice, muffled and tinny, "It's okay buddy, you're not hit too bad, we'll get you patched you up in no time."
John Wescott didn't smoke, but he allowed his men to if they wanted to. They had all lit up now, and were resting in the field, with one dead, and two wounded beside them. Hill and Sam could have gone back to HQ at the cliff so they could have been taken out of combat, but neither wanted to leave the fight at Pointe-du-Hoc. They could walk and breath all right; Corporal Hill's earlier respiratory difficulty had merely been the effects of shock, his body system shutting down to minimal operation in order to save energy.
There were eight Rangers remaining in the field alive. Wescott's three wounded had been taken back to the cliff, where the medics were working furiously, desperately, to keep the influx of casualties alive and well. The fighting was brutal, and snipers were still shooting in the battery itself. An F Company patrol had been dispatched to root the resisting Germans out, but snipers were concealed, covered; it would take a long while to silence them.
Wescott listened to the rifle and automatic fire from a few hedgerows down, from the left and right, from the road. It was constant. So was the shouting of sergeants and junior officers. The privates and privates, first class didn't shout much during combat, even when they were hit. The leaders made the most verbal noise.
"What do you think, Sergeant?" one of Wescott's squad spoke.
"Think about what."
"This. The invasion. D-Day. How do you think we're holding up?" The Ranger, Aster, waved a blunt cigarette around the field.
"Well," Wescott exhaled slowly, "We've destroyed the guns, and we've cut the coastal road. Those are our objectives for D-Day, and we've completed them."
"Lost a few guys while we were at it, too," another added.
"Yeah," Wescott said. "Yeah, we did."
Wescott knew these men. They were just in their twenties, older than most of the other guys in the company. They grew facial hair if they didn't save on a regular basis, went haggard and shaggy with dark beards. Like Wescott, thirty-four years old. But those other kids, they were smooth-faced and still had boyish grins. College kids, in some cases not even that.
"Some of these kids shouldn't be here," Wescott said softly, so that Hill, lying against the hedgerow, would not hear. "Some of these kids are just too goddamn young to be out fighting a war." He remembered the look on Hill's face after he had been shot, how it had suddenly lost that eagerness - how it had suddenly seemed as though Hill realized he was not invincible, as though he'd been stabbed in the heart.
"Shit, Sarge, a couple of the boys enlisted a year early. If they're old enough to rebel against their parents then they're old enough to decide what they do in life, right?" A few of the other Rangers grinned at the cynicism in Aster's voice. They had all known when they were smarter than their parents.
"Yeah, but you've had your first drink. Those other boys are still underage. Don't shave, haven't drunk, and they're out with us shooting rifles and throwing grenades at the fucking Boesch, the goddamn conquerors of Europe. They just don't belong here."
Aster exhaled, cigarette smoke swirling lazily from his lips. "Nobody belongs in Normandy. Just the farmers."
Another Ranger gave a coughing laugh. "Won't be much to farm if this keeps up."
Road to Vierville
1st Lieutenant Hughe Wayne had landed at Omaha with sixty-three men in second platoon. All assault units had their ranks filled over-strength, in anticipation of the extra manpower that would be needed for the invasion. If second platoon had been allowed to dig the graves of their fallen comrades, which they would have done of their own accord, there would have been twenty rifles posted into the ground, with standard-issue olive helmets capping the sand-filled weapons lazily. There were eleven others wounded, lying at the sea wall where a single medic sought to keep them all alive. For some, such as those hit with a single shot from German rifle fire, this was simple. For others, such as those soldiers struck by mortar shells or machine gun bursts, this was impossible.
Thirty-two soldiers remained with Wayne. Thirty-two out of sixty-three. Fifty percent casualties in several hours of combat, Wayne recited to himself. He was writing the names of the twenty dead soldiers onto a slip of curled paper, though he didn't need to. He had seen all of them die, on the beach, at the sea wall, in the charge through the breach, in the assaults against the German machine gun positions. He had seen their faces, lying open-mouthed at the sky, or with their foreheads to the ground, eyes dull and half-closed. Their names would be etched into his memory forever.
Wayne had not known the men who had died. He had not known how many of them were married, or how many had put their college education on hold in order to fight the war. When he wrote the letters back to the families of the dead, he would tell them that their son or father had been a good soldier. He would write that the company had liked Your son, Private, First Class Barry Witherspoon, and that the men had always gotten along well with Your husband, Sergeant Matthew McHynes. And he knew as much as the families would that his words were empty, meaningless, useless. He had never known that Barry Witherspoon had never sworn in anger in his entire life. He had never known that Matthew McHynes had been studying for a doctorate in theology, and would have become a minister just after the war started. Hughe Wayne did not know who the soldiers under him, the very same people who pledged duty and obedience to him on a regular basis, really were.
Hughe Wayne was only an officer in the US Army, and while he held a responsibility to his men, he could not safeguard their lives against an enemy such as the Germans. That is what the families would be told and would like to think, because the families were good, decent people, like their sons and fathers and husbands who had died. But both Hughe Wayne and the families of the deceased knew it was a crock of shit. 1st Lieutenant Wayne had gotten those men killed. He had lead them into military action and he had gotten men like Barry Witherspoon and Matthew McHynes killed. And he knew nothing about them, other than their names, first and last, and their middle initials.
Wayne jabbed the snubbed pencil back into his breast pocket, and folded the curled slip of paper - ragged and uneven - carefully, then dropped it in with the pencil.
His men did not move from the German trenches. The rifle teams they had repelled had now begun actively sniping any movement across the breach. One runner out of three had managed to exit the trenches above Omaha, Dog Green, and sprint down the barb-wired draw. If second platoon was lucky, the runner would find a captain and inform him of a breach in the beach defenses, who would then bring his company up to suppress the snipers and allow second platoon to move. If they weren't, the runner would die on the beach, and they would continue to take harassing fire from the seven or eight Germans who had taken up sniper positions past the trenches, near the hedgerows sited on the hills above.
Suddenly, the rifle fire increased, and Wayne peered over the sandbagged barrier lining his trench. It was the runner, and he was scrambling through the sniper fire desperately. Jesus Christ he was going to get hit, Wayne cursed, but the runner dove into the nearest trench and he was still alive.
Pfc Eric Williams sprinted down the German trench network, his helmet bobbing just above the lip of the trench so that the Germans continued to shoot at him all the way to Wayne's position at the former machine gun nest.
"Lieutenant," he said, breathlessly, "A Company's out-of-action." He shook his head. "The captain says half the company's gone. Dead and wounded. He can't spare a medic, or medical supplies, but he's bringing a squad up to bring us some ammunition. It's all he can send."
After a pause, Wayne nodded. "One squad of men and ammunition."
Half the entire company gone. Half of his platoon gone. Wayne looked down at the carnage on the beach and saw countless bodies, bloodied and lying grotesquely, across Dog Green sector. Had they already lost the war? Had the opposing Germans been dying in droves like A Company?
"Did he send any orders?"
"He said work our way past the draw. WN seventy-two is still standing, but we can by-pass that defense point and march down the road to Vierville-sur-Mur."
"What's the point of taking the Vierville road if there's no one behind us to enter the town?" Wayne exploded. After all this, they were still to take that goddamn town?
"He says that a company of Rangers are making their way up the bluffs west of here, in Charlie sector. He says that we've got to open the way for them so they can head down the coastal road to Pointe-du-Hoc, to relieve the rest of their battalion."
"Goddamn it." Wayne looked at the fields of dead second platoon men all around the trench network. We can't do it, he thought to himself, We can't make it all the way to Vierville. Those Rangers, they had to have faced the same resistance that A Company had at Dog Green. Maybe half their company was dead, too. And they wanted to march past Vierville, to relieve their battalion at Pointe-du-Hoc?
"Sir?" the pfc was waiting for something. "What are your orders?"
Wayne looked at the soldier kneeling before him. Orders. More words that had the power to make men die. His men.
"Platoon sergeant," Wayne muttered, "Gather the men together. Provide covering fire for that reinforcement squad the CO's sending up. Once they're here with their ammo, we'll lay down suppressing fire with the machine guns all along the hedgerow, and then we'll advance up the hill."
Burkeley sent the order down the skirmish line second platoon had formed in the trenches, and it was not long before the sniper fire erupted violently as targets - ten A Company riflemen - stumble up the draw, laden down with boxes of .30 belts and bandoleers.
"Hit the hedgerows," Burkeley shouted, pointing out specific sections, and the M1s cracked out heavy fire. Eric Williams centered his sights on what he thought was a muzzle flash, though it could have been a green-yellow leaf waving in the daylight. He squeezed the trigger, professionally, cleanly, no angry jerking like the corporal a few feet away, eight times, and the M1's action ejected the empty clip. The rifle squad dashed into the trench network, hands on their helmets, arms bent deep so that the ammunition boxes wouldn't block their knees while running. One of the soldiers spotted the sandbagged nest, and dove in among Wayne, Williams, and the corporal.
"Private first class Casey reporting! We've brought ammo!"
"Thank you, Casey," Wayne answered wryly, and then shouted over the sandbags, "Distribute that ammo! Get those belts to the machine gunners, second platoon, get ready to move out!"
Burkeley scooped up a belt of .30 ammunition and funneled it into an emptied ammo box. He motioned for another soldier to do the same.
"Machine gun assistants, grab this ammo, get it to your weapons. Place heavy fire down on those sniper positions. We'll be advancing through these trenches and up the hill, and we'll root them out from close-range, but we need your covering fire."
"Sarge, krauts are maneuvering against us."
A large group of Germans had appeared from a concrete shelter, probably alerted by one of the Germans first squad had missed earlier in the trench. A quick count saw twenty riflemen moving forward, taking up position in an opposing trench just fifty meters away. A few of the Americans had already opened fire, sending rifle shots whistling down the trench network, and the German sergeants were heard shouting out orders.
"Second squad, suppression fire, machine guns, too!" Wayne ordered rapidly.
"What about the snipers?" a first squad private asked.
"Can't worry about them now, we stop those Germans first. First squad, on me, five rifles shooting at any one point only, everyone else have grenades ready!"
Wayne rushed down into the trench network from the machine gun nest and past second squad's rifles. They were laying down a screen of fire, and the German platoon opposite them were following suit. Wayne could see them working the bolts on their carbines, firing shots at his platoon, and he continued to move forward, snapping his rifle up to cap off one or two shots every once in a while. He heard the .30 Brownings open up, then, and the Germans shouting - probably telling their men to spread out. A sniper round hit the soldier behind Wayne, in the spine, and he went down with a spray of blood.
Wayne found his assault position; it put a barbedwire barrier between the German platoon and his assaulting team. He jumped out of the trench and sprinted forward, M1 tight to his chest, and his squad followed. They were unsure if Wayne had gone insane or if he was just naturally brave, because this had been the fourth time he had led a charge directly against an enemy position. As German carbine fire cracked past them, and Wayne continued to move, to lead first squad in, second platoon all suspected that perhaps 1st Lieutenant Wayne was invincible.
He dove down against the ridge of earth that the barbed wire had been planted in, and Schmeisser rounds pelted the dirt a moment later. Staff Sergeant Dunn landed next to him, and the remainder of first squad took up position behind the edges of the wire, returning fire from close range, as second squad and the machine guns forced the Germans down into their trenches.
First squad flicked the pins from their last grenades, and snapped the arming mechanisms down. Wayne rose up from the earth again, and hurtled forward, around the barrier and directly into the German position, his men behind him, Wayne with rifle raised and firing into the trench rapidly, dropping six Germans and wounding another. The grenades went up in a volley behind him, and Wayne dove to the earth and covered his head, as the Germans in the trench scattered. Four pyres of smoke and debris rose from the trench a moment later, and Wayne could not hear, and he was a little dazed from the concussion, but he could see Germans running down the trench through the smoke. Quickly, deftly, he snapped in another clip, and jumped down into the trench. The reek of burning earth and flesh nearly choked him, but Wayne raised his M1 again and fired, one, two, three shots, hitting one of the Germans in the base of the skull and shattering the bone there, sending fragments of the splintered material deep into his brain.
First squad stumbled into the trench with him, just as an MG-42 opened somewhere from their left, back towards the hedgerow, closer to the snipers.
Wayne shouted over the machine gun's treble, pointed to the new enemy position, "Second squad, suppressing fire, suppressing fire," and then climbed out of the trench, his rifle muzzle still smoking. A few first squad soldiers attempted to follow him, but he shoved the first one back down and waved the others off as he sprinted forward again.
"No, no, stay down, stay down!"
Staff Sergeant Dunn and the others watched in ice-cold dismay as Wayne covered the forty meter dash to the MG-42, with his rifle at his hip, alone. The gunner pivoted and pointed the weapon at the lieutenant, but immediately recoiled in shock and pain - a shot, through his hand. His assistant drew his own carbine, worked the bolt, and was dead a moment later, a .30 bullet having driven itself through his skull, tearing apart his cerebellum. Dunn saw the gunner recover, attempt to shoulder the MG-42 again, but Wayne wasn't more then ten meters away now, and he stopped, rifle shouldered, and fired the M1. Wounded in the shoulder, the German gunner fell back in the shell hole, and Wayne jumped in a moment later, sniper fire singing at him now, the snipers probably as amazed himself that he had survived against the machine gun, and Wayne shot the gunner in the heart.
The spent bandoleer snapped out of the M1's action, and Wayne turned to second squad, a hundred meters away.
"Hit the hedgerow!" Then, to first squad, "Move up!"
Sergeant Brown directed fire into the hedgerow, lined up on the hill behind Omaha. There were two distinct muzzle flashes - two Germans who had unwisely given up their location. They were firing down into first squad's advance, but the two Brownings soon suppressed them back into cover. A hail of machine gun fire torrented against the hedgerow branches, piercing through the thick cover, and one of the bursts caught one of the snipers directly in the sternum, shattering his ribcage and cutting his lungs and heart into a meaty filet.
"Keep it up!" Burkeley shouted over second squad's fire. "Keep 'em pinned!"
Wayne's legs were straining. It was an uphill dash, perhaps another hundred meters to cover, and a few sniper rounds, though much more subdued than before, continued to pelt the dirt around first squad. No one had been hit. Looking left, Wayne could see the flicker of .30 tracers shooting towards the German-occupied hedgerow. He could also see stray winks of gray-yellow from within the hedgerow; the snipers shooting at them.
Dunn couldn't use his rifle, but he used his good arm to shove the others along.
"Spread out!" he ordered. "Get some distance between you!"
Wayne wasn't much farther from the hedgerow, now. He covered the last few meters in a desperate sprint, praying to a God that had not saved very many lives that day to save his. The heavy plant growth had been a little thicker than he anticipated, though, and he stumbled through two feet of rough branches and leaves, tripped on a heavy branch, and fell into a dirt road on the other side. He heard German shouting to his left, fifty meters out, and rifle shots cracked overhead. Wayne quickly rolled into a ditch, just adjacent to the opposite hedgerow, and took cover. The rest of first squad burst through after him, and Wayne's M1 was snapping off shots. The German snipers, five of them, dove into the ditch, as first squad sent heavy rifle fire their way. Three were shot in the back, the bullets ripping through their lungs and spines, and they slumped to the dirt road, stumbling and falling and dying.
First squad took up positions on either side of the road, waiting in silence, the .30 Browning fire from second squad still rustling furiously through the leaves of the hedgerow. They expected the remaining two Germans to take up sniper positions again, though it was a baseless fear. Two isolated riflemen wouldn't put up a fight at such close range.
After a moment, Wayne decided the situation was clear. He sent two men to reconnoitre the road to the west - it ran from the D-1 exit to Vierville-sur-Mur.
"Dunn, get second squad to cease fire and get up here, let's head to the road to Vierville."
First squad had lost one man in that last encounter, against the German platoon in the trench network above Omaha. That left thirty-one soldiers in second platoon, plus the reinforcement squad for forty-two. It was close to half of A Company's strength.
Wayne, marching in column with his ragged group of men, scribbled the soldier's name down onto the curled slip of paper, and looked ahead of him. The D-1-Vierville road was a high paved road, two lanes, and ditches and heavy hedgerow growth on either side. These hedgerows were thick, and their branches interlocked and tangled overhead, locking second platoon in a green-shadowed lane. The brown, smoked-over beach behind them disappeared over the hill-side, though the sounds of distant MG-42 chatter continued to rip back and forth.
The platoon trodded down the road heavily. Their packs, while unnoticeable during the action on the bluffs of Omaha, were again cumbersome nuisances, and they were exhausted. It was 1000, three and a half hours since D-Day had begun. Their accomplishments - primarily by-passing the German defenses on Omaha - had already made D-Day a success for the 21st Army Group. Omaha would still have to be mopped up, the remaining pockets of resistance on the bluffs to be rooted out by a few brave riflemen in order to secure the beach head for expansion, but, as soldiers that made it past the beach discovered, German resistance past those initial strongpoints on the beach was negligible. Those units that had by-passed the strongpoints on the beach marched across the hills over-looking Omaha and into hedgerow country.
But for the soldiers, their bloody introduction to combat, the intensity of the fighting on Omaha, and the emotional strain of watching half the unit die within hours of entering combat were all factors in making D-Day the worst day of their lives. The men were blank-faced, some only realizing what they had just fought through, and they shuffled forward in minor shock. The corporal looked down at his blood-stained hands, eyes perceiving an empty nothing. Sergeant Brown shivered, though the sun had broken through the clouds since morning, and jerked his head everytime an unfamiliar sound was made.
Jesus, Wayne lamented, the platoon is spooked. And why shouldn't they be? They had just been butchered beyond imagination, by a handful of Germans no stronger than their own company. They were scared as shit of the Hun.
Wayne, however, felt strangely relaxed. The sunlight shot through the hedgerow branches overhead in thin streams, reminding him of Romantic paintings he had seen as a kid, though the paintings, if he remembered correctly, were a little more pleasant than a scraggled platoon marching down a dirt road surrounded by Norman hedgerows.
"Good to see you, Lieutenant." Burkeley came astride of him, nodded in salutation.
Wayne blanked for a moment, unsure as to why Burkeley was greeting him, then grinned. It had been a long morning. They were the first human words either of them had spoken since D-Day had gone underway.
"You too, Sergeant."
"Quite a morning, Lieutenant." Burkeley's voice was off-hand, detached.
"Quite a morning," Wayne repeated in answer, though a little more subdued.
And Burkeley marched forward, snapping at a private who had fallen out of rank to look arbitrarily through a hedgerow. Burkeley had come into the platoon perhaps five weeks before the invasion. Word was that he had transferred in from the 1st Infantry Division, "The Big Red One," the veteran US infantry unit that had received so much publicity throughout the war. He was experienced and competent, and invaluable as a second-in-command, who often did as much work as or more than the unit commander. They just didn't get interviewed for the news stories.
Suddenly, the column halted, and one-by-one, in a domino effect, second platoon went down to one knee. The point man had spotted something.
Pausing for a moment, scanning the road in front of him, Wayne moved up, hunched down low. He couldn't see more than fifty meters ahead of him, the hedgerow was so thick. He spotted Burkeley again as he quietly stepped forward. Burkeley had apparently seen something as well, and was staring straight ahead, carbine shouldered but pointed down.
Wayne moved past the platoon sergeant, continuing past first squad leader, Dunn, still nursing his bandaged arm, and reached the head of the column. He tapped the point man, Williams.
"What's up," he asked.
"I see people up ahead," Williams answered, and pointed straight down the road. Through the leaves, Wescott could make out soldiers, marching in column, similar to his platoon. They were heading southward, and Wescott recognized the field brown of American uniforms.
"Not Krauts," Burkeley whispered from behind.
"Yeah, Americans," Wayne said. "Williams, I'll take point, you go back to your squad."
"Yessir."
"Second platoon, let's take a break over there."
The wearied faces of Wayne's men broke into grins and smiles. Live American faces, after Omaha. That, and now they felt as though they weren't lost; the hedgerows, long and winding, like prison walls barring the soldiers on the road, made them feel claustrophobic and as though they were always walking in the wrong direction, even though the only direction to go was straight forward.
Wayne trotted forward, his platoon plodding behind him, and stepped through the thin streams of sunlight breaking through the over-hanging branches. As he neared the American unit, Wayne could see the road open to a farmhouse in a field ahead, white and clean-looking. He also realized that the American soldiers were hunched down in the ditch on either side of the road, and their weapons seemed to be fixed on the farmhouse in the field.
A soldier, a sergeant, saw him coming, and waved him down. "Sniper in the farmhouse! He's got an MG supporting!"
Wayne turned, waved his platoon into the ditches, and dove to cover. He crawled up along the ditch, and tapped one of the soldiers in the neighboring unit.
"What unit is this?"
"B Company, sir, 29th Division."
"Who's in command?"
"Master Sergeant Ray."
"Where's your CO?"
"CO bought it on Dog Green."
Burkeley was up with Wayne a moment later. "What's up?"
"Sniper and machine gun in the farmhouse."
"Holding all of us up?"
"Hopefully not for long. Hey, soldier, where's Master Sergeant Ray, now?"
"He took a few guys on a recon of the surrounding area."
Wayne looked back at Burkeley. "What do you think? We help these boys out, clear the farmhouse?"
"Part of our objective, sir."
"Right." Then, turning to his platoon, Wayne said, "Second platoon, move up!"
Heavy boots thumped against grass as Wayne's thirty-three men pushed past over-hanging branches and leaves. Squad leaders Dunn and Brown were up front, their men just behind them. The weariness had left all their faces; now there was that grim expression, that serious intensity that matched those of the B Company soldiers ahead of them.
"Machine gunners with one rifle team each on either side of this road, provide covering fire. Brown, you'll jump off from the left and stick to the ditch while shooting at the machine gun. You'll be cover against the sniper once Dunn's out in the open. Dunn, take your squad around the right, and assault the building once the machine gun's fixed on Brown's movement. Right now, we wait for the sergeant to get back."
The machine gunners laid their weapons on the ground and loaded in 100-round belts, and the others in the platoon adjusted their ammo pouches. Marching down the road in column, the platoon had been sluggish and lazy. But now, as they prepared their weapons to kill, they were professional, sharp, precise.
"Do you men have a medic with you?" Wayne asked the B Company soldier ahead of him.
"No aidmen," he replied. "All of ours were killed."
The silence in the wait for the B Company sergeant was awkward. The men at the road fully expected a sniper round to drill through someone's heart, and then a burst of machine gun fire to rip through the hedgerow leaves into some unsuspecting private with his head too high. But no rifle shot came, no metallic tear-paper rip shot through the hedgerow. All eyes stared straight ahead, at the seemingly silent farmhouse that stood tauntingly in the field.
The branches a few meters behind second platoon rustled, and three men stumbled out onto the road, rolling into the ditch immediately after.
"Who are you guys?" a sergeant, presumably Ray, looked at the thirty-plus soldiers who had joined his group.
"A Company, second platoon," the corporal answered.
"You guys here to help us out?"
"Much as we can," Burkeley replied.
"You got machine guns?"
"Two of them," Burkeley pointed them out, one on either side of the road. "We'll put them on the hedgerows left and right of us, that should give us a good field-of-fire."
"Sounds good."
"What's your plan?" Wayne spoke then.
The sergeant crawled forward, moving past the second platoon soldiers to his own men. "Well, sir," he noted Wayne's rank insignia on his shoulders, "there are two more machine guns, both on the far corner of the right hedgerow. They've got rifle infantry stationed nearby, maybe ten men."
"About that run down the right, Lieutenant," Dunn said coyly, "I don't like it."
"A flanking mission, then," Wayne proposed. "I can divide my platoon into two teams, lay down suppressive fire with the machine guns, and hit those machine guns on the right."
"And once I see you assaulting them, I'll push into the field, take that farmhouse."
"Good plan."
Ray moved on to brief his men, and Wayne turned to his own platoon. Burkeley was dropping his pack, extracting ammunition and grenades only.
"Drop your packs," Wayne told the men, "Weapons and ammo only."
"Weapons and ammo only," Burkeley repeated, "We'll be moving fast, under machine gun fire. Carry only what you need."
"Rifle teams march down the field," Wayne looked at his squad leaders in turn. "We get out in the open, maneuver against them and take them down from the flank."
Ray shouldered his rifle, drew his legs underneath him in preparation to sprint out into the field, into the ditch lining the hedgerow. "I'm ready, sir."
"Let's roll, Sergeant."
Thirty meters away, the machine gun team positioned on the right side of the road watched for Burkeley to give them the go-ahead. He stood in the hedgerow, hand held out in the signal to hold, and a moment later he gave them the thumbs-up. Ahead of them, tracers tore forward into the far right corner of the field, the Browning between the two soldiers trembling with the recoil of its automatic fire. Almost immediately after they had fired their first burst, fire from the farmhouse opened up, from a shattered window, and the .30 Browning team saw Master Sergeant Ray sprinting out of the road, then take up positions all along the hedgerow. Machine guns far across the field opened shortly after, and hundreds of tracers criss-crossed off to the left, catching Ray's left rifle team and the other Browning in a concentrated barrage of flying metal.
"Fuck fuck fuck!" they heard behind them, and the assistant gunner turned to see the corporal stumbling through the hedgerow. Wayne and the others were already through the hedgerow, advancing past the Browning team and pushing through the next line of brush. The corporal limped after them, uttering another string of curses.
Wayne knew that visibility through the hedgerows was close to zero, and didn't bother trying to take a glance through their tightly-wedged branches. He headed south, now, turning towards the location that Ray had pointed out from his recon. Burkeley was just behind him, and Wayne broke through the next hedgerow almost with impunity, unafraid of the MG-42s and German infantry that might face him on the otherside.
Lined up along the left hedgerow, far in the corner of the field, were perhaps fifteen Germans, two with machine guns, muzzles flashing into the field where Ray was maneuvering and waiting for Wayne to silence the guns so he could assault the farmhouse and sniper. Another ten shouldered carbines and submachine guns, and these they operated with preciseness, extracting what sounded like a heavy toll on the American attack from the screams and shouts not more than a hundred meters away.
"There they are," Wayne pointed, and pushed his men through the hedgerow, warning them not to plug up around the gap.
The first few men took up position in the shallow ditch just past the hedgerow and began to fire down the field, the receiving German riflemen looking astonishedly at Wayne's team coming through the hedgerow before they turned about, shouted a warning, and sent accurate carbine fire into two of Wayne's men, sending one staggering uneasily, the other slumping stiffly into the earth.
"Get through the hedgerow!" Burkeley shouted. "The fuck are you men doing, jump through and take up your positions!"
"Brown, give us some covering fire!" Dunn requested over the buzz of incoming rounds. "I'll take first squad in to assault!"
"Okay! Okay!" Brown replied, nodding his head.
Wayne followed the last man into the ditch, and pulled in one of the wounded with him. Two chest wounds, the same type of wounds that many soldiers on Omaha beach had suffered. The soldier's lungs, punctured by carbine rounds, were drawing in air raggedly with each strained breath. He wasn't going to last; he was already fading, despite Burkeley's best efforts to keep him conscious. A BAR lit up, sweeping the far corner with automatic fire along with Brown's riflemen shooting frantically. A second joined it, and soon the American position was alive with the flash of rifles.
First squad pulled out of the ditch, then, and moved forward, straight down the open field. Dunn could not hear much besides the gunfire whistling all around him - BAR drumming reassuringly behind him, MG-42 humming metallically ahead of him - and the odd fpuifpuifpui of rounds hitting the ground, accompanied by the crescendo whine of bullets humming past.
"Get some distance!" Dunn shouted, but already two men had been hit by a machine pistol burst, and they collapsed under their own weight, coughing up a splotch of blood and snapping their heads back in shock and pain.
The others scattered in random directions, and Dunn leaned over ever lower to the ground, hearing automatic fire whip past him. The Germans, too, were taking cover, as Brown's squad kept up their determined fire into their flank, while the two .30 Brownings poured in suppressive fire to their front. A few of the riflemen were turning and taking cover in their ditch, while their NCO waved his MP-40 in first squad's direction, the black steel weapon pumping roughly in his hands.
At close range now, Dunn raised his M1 to his shoulder and snapped off shots on the run, his squad following suit, while another soldier fell from the loose skirmish line, a carbine round driving directly through his skull and shredding open a large portion of his brains as he dropped down into a lifeless mass of flesh, his helmet clattering, toy-like, to the grass.
The German NCO was waving his arm back and shouting, and soon the machine gunners were scrambling out of the hedgerow ditch, lifting their weapons expertly to their shoulders while the rifle team continued to fight behind them. .30 rounds from the Brownings shattered the leaves around the retreating machine gun teams as they disappeared behind the next hedgerow. Dunn fired his last few rounds at the machine gunners, and dropped one man, whose MG-42 slipped from his hands and bounced to the grass, and immediately after Dunn was suddenly on his back, head spinning wildly, ears filled with a rushing wind; the potato masher had exploded not more than ten meters away, but had not hit him with its limited shrapnel. The nine remaining men of first squad took cover from more German grenades, and as they staggered away from pyres of smoke bursting all around the field, the rifle team opposite them disappeared in the hedgerow.
Farther back, Wayne pushed past the leaves of the hedgerow on the left and waved his arm in the signal to cease fire, then pointed at the farmhouse in the field - give covering fire to Ray's men. Ray returned a thumbs-up to Wayne, shouted something, but his words were inaudible over the rattle of machine gun fire. He signalled to march around the field, and to continue on towards Vierville.
Wayne turned to Brown and his men. "Go back and get our packs. We'll be securing the road past the field - go around the next hedgerow." Then, to Dunn and his men peering through the far hedgerow, "Let's push through and get to the next road!"
Wayne's gunners kept up a steady torrent of fire against the farmhouse's two windows, inadvertently silencing both the machine gun and the German sniper at once. Ray's men, in three different positions in the field, sited left, right, and in front of the farmhouse, crawled forward, grenades in hand. The Browning guns were smoking, as they had emptied out perhaps three hundred rounds each in the engagement. A pfc centered his machine gun again, and let loose another burst, watching as the heavy projectiles pelted the farmhouse in random patterns. Ray's men rose, then, and charged forward, shouting as they did so, and the pfc eased off the trigger as three men crossed his line-of-fire. They threw their munitions threw the windows of the broken farmhouse, and shouts came from within, then the deafening thunder of high-explosive detonations.
Ray kicked the front door down and tossed a grenade in, the men behind him throwing their backs against the farmhouse, and smoke poured out of the entrance. They rushed in, and the machine gunners heard rifle shots crack back and forth.
Second squad came back from the adjacent field, and they called for the gunners as they hefted A Company's packs from the road.
"Let's go, around the field."
"Got it."
With rifle fire still whipping back and forth in the farmhouse, the machine gunners pulled the Brownings to their shoulders and moved out, leaving behind a shallow pile of empty .30 brass casings smoking in the summer sun.
Counter Attack
"Coming through, three o'clock!"
"Can't hold them here, they're centered on this point!"
Potato masher grenades burst in and around the far hedgerow, killing the three Rangers shooting from that position, and Wescott cursed and ordered his men to pull out of the field. MG-42 rounds were already streaming from the two hedgerows on the left and right, and Hill and his remaining men barely made it through as the automatic bursts ripped through the branches behind them.
A distant cry of "incoming" came from a neighboring field, and columns of smoke and debris shot up above the tops of the hedgerows. The Germans were bringing mortars with them in the assault; this was no simple patrol, but a concerted counter-attack. A few stray rounds plummeted down into the field in which Wescott and his men were in, crashing down into the grass and tearing out a gout of dark earth. Shrapnel spun away in invisible arcs, all around, stabbing into the hedgerows and dirt.
"Take up positions on the side hedgerows!" Wescott ordered. "We catch them in flanking fire once they push through here!"
A spray of MG-42 fire raked through the far hedgerow, and the Rangers sprinted to cover, hugging their weapons close to their bodies and keeping one hand on their helmets as more mortar rounds crashed into the field.
German riflemen were already pushing through the hedgerow, carbines raised and already firing. Wescott let loose a burst from his Thompson, and the four Germans already in position took cover, shouting at their comrades behind them. One last shot, however, dropped Aster, hit him near the center of his back, and he leaned forward awkwardly, giving a strained grunt. Wescott saw him falling, caught him, and pulled him forward. Aster's legs were already going limp, and Wescott dragged him the last few meters to the hedgerow ditch.
"Jesus Christ, Aster."
"Real sorry, Sarge, real, real sorry."
"Not your fault, Aster."
"No, Sarge, I shouldn't have fucking touched Normandy."
The Rangers opened fire, rifles and submachine guns and BAR snapping back into the weary shoulders of a handful of men as they cut down three Germans entering the field. Suddenly, the Germans already in the field pulled out, retreated through the hedgerow, and no more riflemen came through. Machine gun fire continued to wave back and forth all throughout the field, slapping into the branches and sending leaves and shattered limbs to drape the bloodied ground where the German squad had fallen.
Wescott and his men froze in silence for a moment, still flinching as periodic mortar rounds blasted shallow craters in the field, and they looked at Wescott.
"Are they retreating?" Hill asked softly, knowing he was too far away for Wescott to hear.
Wescott's response came swiftly. He pumped his arm back and forth in the signal to come up, and then motioned that they would circle around into the next field. Hill took his men and the other part of Wescott's team across the field, dodging through the blind machine gun fire and taking cover when the shrill whine of mortar rounds came overhead, and linked up with Wescott, who was already pushing through the branches of the hedgerow behind him.
He pointed to the hedgerow across the next field, and signalled a run back south, towards the Germans. It would be a flanking movement against the enemy's own out-flanking maneuver; Wescott anticipated that the Germans, seeing that the Rangers were continuing to stubbornly resist, would come around their firing position to catch them from a blind spot, as Wescott and his men had done to the machine gun on the coastal road.
One man stayed behind with Aster, and the other Rangers dashed across the field, keeping eyes and ears alert to movements from the next hedgerow. They were completely silent, moving and communicating solely by hand signals, almost as if they weren't part of the black explosions and red tracers of gunfire enveloping them. They reached the far hedgerow, then turned and ran down alongside it, towards the corner of the field. A German sergeant shouted not too far away, and Wescott snapped his hand up to halt the others. They took up firing positions from the ditch, and soon the German unit was pushing through stiff branches just sixty meters away.
Wescott knew his men were tightening their grip on their weapons, and he kept them silent. He exchanged glances with them - Don't fucking shoot without my signal. The Rangers counted the Germans creeping along the opposite hedgerow, eyes looking through it and attempting to spot the Rangers who had given them so much trouble in their advance. Several times a few of the Germans scanned the hedgerow where Wescott and his men were huddled, but the Rangers were experienced with cover. They weren't spotted.
With ten Germans in the field now, Wescott threw his hand forward in the signal to fire and raised his Thompson as rifle fire exploded around him. The Germans dropped almost immediately, most due to bullets punching through them in rapid succession, and Wescott sprayed them with his Thompson, rising as he did so.
"Get through the next hedgerow!" he shouted, even as German fire shot out from the next field. "Engage them in open combat!"
Martin led the first few men through, while Wescott kept the advancing Germans pinned, and dove into the next field in a roll. Martin landed in the ditch on the otherside, and saw Germans with machine pistols firing blindly through the hedgerow. They saw him jump through, however, and pointed their weapons at him to cut him down. MP-40 rounds fluttered around him, into the leaves of the hedgerow, and Martin, in a do-or-die state of mind, brought his rifle up and fired at each of the Germans in turn. Three rounds rammed into their field-gray coats, knocked them all to the ground, and Martin's magazine sprung out of the M1's action.
2nd Ranger's patrols were almost completely over-run when the German counter-attack had begun. Up to this point, combat had been limited to isolated patrol engagements with the 716th Coastal Defense Division. However, Allied intelligence had missed one German formation recently moved near Vierville. This was the 352nd Volksgrenadier Division, a veteran unit of the Russian front. 1st Battalion of its 916th Regiment had been ordered to deal with the Allied commandos at Pointe-du-Hoc.
A German half-track column motored down the coastal road, towards the crash and fire of mortar rounds churning up the orchards and fields around Pointe-du-Hoc. There were three vehicles, all loaded with infantry, and nearly every rifleman onboard the metal-gray machines wore the clasp of the Iron Cross around their necks. These men were not the farmboy conscripts and elderly draftees that Wayne and other men of the 116th RCT faced in and around Vierville. These were professional soldiers.
An officer stood up from the lead half-track and told the driver to stop. His men were to dismount and march the remainder of the trip. The platoon jumped off the motoring vehicles and slung their arms from their shoulders, and their officer, Leutnant Geissler - black boots shined, uniform immaculately creased and dressed, Ritterkreuz clasp glowing in the sunlight - gave a curt order and snapped off into a brisk step, heading down the coastal road, oblivious to the threat of enemy fire that chattered on either side of him and his platoon.
As Geissler lead the German reinforcements into the battle, they heard one of the half-tracks die out. Its driver cursed and talked to the vehicle as he stepped outside to tinker with the engine.
"Come on, girl, don't do this to me now," the driver muttered soothingly. "Don't be stubborn."
Gunfire sounded very near to Geissler's platoon. It was mostly machine gun fire - their MG-42s. The hedgerow on the side of the road rustled for a moment before a soldier staggered onto the pavement, a rifle clutched in his hands and helmet pushed low over his brow. It was an American. His comrades pushed through a moment later, before Schmeisser machine pistols raked their position and hit two of them with violent bursts of automatic fire.
Geissler did not need to tell his men to fire. "First squad, advance down the road!"
The Americans were firing back, not more than seventy or eighty meters down the road, but Geissler didn't bother to take cover. They were firing on full automatic, relying more on the shock effect of heavy fire rather than taking accurate, aimed shots. His men moved rapidly down into the ditch along the road, and a moment later they were exchanging fire with the remaining Americans. There were six of them, one with an automatic weapon, but a moment later, Geissler's third squad had advanced past first squad's position, and with the machine guns from second squad spraying down the road, they grenaded the opposite ditch. One, two, three bursts of smoke and shrapnel, showering debris onto the road, and the Americans were fleeing to cover, back into the hedgerow. However, third squad's proximity was such that the riflemen didn't have to aim; they snapped the bolts of their carbines forward, pointed their muzzles ahead, and squeezed the trigger.
The Americans twirled and tumbled into the hedgerow, limbs flopping limply about them as they bounced against the ditch.
"Jesus Christ!" an American shouted nearby, and Geissler sent one of his squads into the field where it had come from. Submachine gun fire held them back.
It was Martin, who had spotted Geissler's platoon after dispatching the Germans in the field with his men. Return fire, also from submachine guns, ripped through the hedgerow, and Martin dove into the ditch, covering his head. One of the men with him dove and landed beside Martin. Another Ranger asked the man for ammo - no reply. He was dead.
"Enemy platoon section, coming down the road!"
"Get your men out of the field!" Wescott replied. "Grenades at the hedgerow, cover our retreat!"
"No grenades!"
Goddamn it. "Martin, pull back into this field!" Wescott fired behind them, spraying the hedgerow with the Thompson, and heard Germans shouting beyond. An MG-42 opened from the far hedgerow; they were maneuvering hard and fast.
"Penn reporting!" a Ranger stumbled in from an adjacent field, dragging a limping Aster with him.
"Good, get into the next field."
But as Penn and a few other Rangers headed towards the far hedgerow, a stream of tracers burst from their left - the Germans were already on their flank. They weren't Geissler's men; the maneuver element from his platoon was still circling around Wescott's front. Wescott pulled away from the ditch as Martin and his team reached the other Rangers, and dashed towards Penn and Aster. Hill was with him, firing at the machine gun on the right, and Hill's men were crawling forward, to push the machine gun back.
"Move!" Wescott shouted, "Goddamn Germans are flanking us!" He sprayed a last burst into the hedgerow on the left. "Get out of here!"
A chorus of rifle fire came in from the right. This was Geissler's first squad. The Rangers in the field were caught in a deadly cross-fire, now. A black pillar of burning earth rose from the ground, showering Wescott's men in a mist of dirt. The German mortar had begun shelling again.
Penn pulled Aster to his feet and began to sprint across the field, with the BAR man and another rifleman following close behind. Aster jerked forward suddenly, twisting in Penn's grasp, but they continued to stagger forward, Aster cursing "goddamn it" in pain, Penn cursing, "goddamn it" as he strained to keep Aster moving, Westcott cursing "goddamn it" as he watched the Rangers fall back.
Wescott reached Hill, who continued to fire on the German machine gun to the left. Tracers had begun to swarm in from behind them, now - Geissler's second squad. Third squad was almost in position to hit them from the left, along with the machine gun. The thirty men of the German platoon filtered through the cracks and breaks in the hedgerow, lacing the green branches and brown roots with their field-gray uniforms and equipment. Leaves fell, shattered and torn, in their wake, and the soldiers stomped over them in well-polished boots.
Hill rose to his feet, his magazine empty, and Wescott wrenched Hill's team forward, under heavy fire from three sides. One of them took a shot in the leg, behind the knee. He went down. A submachine gun burst raked over him as he struggled back up, and he died. Hill, sprinting like a track runner ahead of Wescott, fell to the side as a carbine round tore through his skull. A second punched into his body. No cry of pain or shock, no shouted curses, not even a last, parting word to his fellow Rangers. He was dead. The last man in Hill's team suddenly tripped, but Wescott kept his hand on the soldier's collar, kept pulling him forward. A moment later the young Ranger shoved forward, and Wescott looked to see that the soldier had been shot in the back. He fell from Wescott's hands, lifeless and without a sound. Wescott was alone in the field now, his men ahead of him, shooting from a ditch into the left hedgerow to suppress the machine gun. He felt cold, metal daggers squeeze into his heart, a great fear stabbing in his chest. Now that Ranger deterimination left him. Now the cool, level-headedness was gone. He continued to run, small arms fire raking past him.
Wescott threw himself to the grass as he neared the ditch, with Penn and Martin and the others firing desperately to cover their sergeant, and told them to push through.
"Save your ammo and don't shoot back. We're not invincible."
Martin pulled Wescott into the ditch, and they both lay in the shallow cradle - or was it more like a grave? - in the earth, Martin with his rifle clutched close to his chest, Wescott jamming in a fresh magazine into his Thompson. Penn, Aster, and the BAR gunner, King, crawled through the hedgerow, rifle fire buffeting behind them against the branches and stone-hard roots they parted.
"Sergeant, are you sure we should be pulling back? If we let go of the perimeter, we'll lose the coastal road."
Wescott glared at Martin. "The hell are you talking about? The road's already lost. Didn't you see that platoon section? You want to try holding them off with five men? Perimeter's gone, Martin, we get back to the battery and link up with the rest of the battalion."
They heard King open fire, his BAR pumping out heavy fire in a long, loud cough.
"Let's go," Wescott grunted, and pulled himself out of the ditch.
Germans had entered the field, and they fired with impunity at the retreating Rangers. The Americans dragged themselves through the thick branches, and they saw King's BAR winking, its muzzle pointing past a farmhouse in the field. A few Germans were shooting from the road, and a machine gun pelted the farmhouse with fire. Three Rangers sprinted towards the cover of the farmhouse, away from the machine gun, spread out to minimize the effects of artillery fire. A mortar crashed into the field, just ahead of one of the Rangers, and he cartwheeled back, gutted by shrapnel, his intestines coiling out as he hit the grass, oozing and steaming as he screamed, head thrown back.
Wescott and his men would have to attempt the same run as the three Rangers. Geissler's platoon was closing behind them, and the farmhouse kept the last link between themselves and the battery open. He told the men to move fast, and took Aster from Penn. Penn must be fatigued. He would run on his own.
"You're going to carry Aster across?"
"Don't worry," Wescott replied. "I'm not planning on dying."
"I am," Aster quipped, half-jokingly.
"Go," Wescott ushered, and drew Aster onto his shoulder. "Fuck, you're heavy."
Wescott sprinted off just after King, who fired at the Germans coming in from the road with his BAR, from the hip. The Germans hit the ground, and drew their weapons up, firing rapidly at the five Americans crossing over to the occupied farmhouse. The buzz of incoming rounds fluttered past them, and they were united in the thought, "Goddamn it."
Martin, Penn, and King ran wildly, all of them nearly falling on their faces as they tore ahead, but staying on their feet, as they were terrified of falling to the earth, where a machine gun burst would strafe across them. Wescott heard Aster groan with each step, and he pulled harder on the man's shoulder.
"Come on, Aster, come on."
Martin threw himself against the farmhouse, then kicked down the door, shattering the wooden entrance on the floor. Penn staggered in behind him, and King emptied his magazine out by the corner of the building, aiming at the Germans shooting from the road. Wescott felt Aster go limp, beginning to slip out of consciousness, and he cursed "Jesus fucking Christ" before he lifted the blood-dampened soldier to his shoulder and carried him the last ten meters to cover, feeling warm liquid run down his chest with each step. Aster was bleeding bad.
"Thunder, thunder!" Martin was shouting, to notify the other Rangers of their presence.
From the next room, a strained voice acknowledged, "Flash!" in-between gun bursts.
Wescott lay an unconscious Aster on a wooden table, his shoulder covered with a red streak that faded into a dark brown. He prepared to treat Aster's wounds, but as he pulled his bandages from his pack, a bullet from the doorway buzzed past his head, whining loudly. A moment later, a burst thwocked into the wall ahead of him, and Wescott took Aster off of the table and found a spot on the floor. Martin, who had been taking cover just next to the entrance, snapped around and sighted in four Germans advancing towards the farmhouse. He fired rapidly, the M1 bouncing in recoil with each shot, and the Germans scattered, two of them dropping almost immediately, their pierced hearts breaking down with each pump.
"Sarge, we need to get out of here!"
In the next room, six Rangers fought desperately to hold the house, often shooting at near-point-blank range with rifles and BAR into advancing enemy bodies. German MG-42 fire streamed through the main window, facing the coastal road, and the Germans on that side of the farmhouse pressed forward. A mortar bomb detonated somewhere in the field - destroying the remaining windows in the farmhouse - but the Rangers could not tell if it was German or American.
"Automatic fire, on the coastal road!"
"They're closing in! Cover the door!"
"Cover the door!" Wescott repeated, hands working desperately as they became slick with Aster's blood. He had to finish the bandage, then he had to get the men out of there, back to the battery.
There was a purple-white flash from the next room, the grenade burst accompanied by the shouts of the Rangers, and a blanket of black streaked into the entire farmhouse, the whisper of falling debris joining the tinkle of more shattering glass and splintering wood in an odd symphony. Rifle fire cracked from the grenaded room, and two Rangers stumbled out, caked in dust. Boots crunched upon broken glass behind them, and more shouting rose up, though it was muffled to all the occupants of the farmhouse, because they had been deafened.
Penn slipped around into the doorway and fired twice, and a cry, German, answered him. Rifle fire from within the room trebled up, and bodies thumped against the wooden floor.
"All clear!" A Ranger's voice.
But Germans on the otherside had already begun their own charge, and an MP-40 appeared at the door, waving widely and sweeping its fire across the entire room. Penn and two other Rangers fell back against the wall, coughing and crying out, and the others crouched down low, then shot the MP-40-toting soldier as he stepped into the house. Another moved forward in his place, K98 cracking once, and he, too, was shot dead; two rifle rounds took him in the chest and stabbed through his lungs.
"Martin! Let's go!" Wescott nodded towards Aster.
"Hey, we're pulling back," Martin told the other Rangers, and they relayed the message to the next room. They ducked away as submachine gun fire coughed away, their comrade gunning down the Germans still pushing into the field from the road.
King emptied his last magazine out the door. Wescott looked through the window facing the battery and saw Germans sneaking along the banks of the hedgerow there, hoping to by-pass the farmhouse to enter straight into the battery. He centered his gunsights on the first soldier in the six-man column, then squeezed the trigger and drew the Thompson to the right, hitting the Germans with half his magazine, the dust on their fieldcoats bouncing off as the .45 bullets smashed into them and sent them spinning and falling against the ditch, their helmets slumping over their faces and covering their eyes from the sky as they crumpled to their backs.
"Let's go!"
Wescott and Martin, carrying Aster by arms and legs, cleared the door, almost immediately coming under sniper fire from the brush and cover ahead of them. King had dropped his BAR and taken Penn's M1, and he checked for Penn's pulse, who was still lying on the floor when the German had fired into the room with the MP-40. Penn was dead.
Outside, the mortar continued to bring 80mm shells into the field. Geissler's platoon had also begun to advance into the field, and King heard incoming rounds flush past nearby.
"Get the fuck out of there!" Wescott heard a voice ahead of him. An officer was waving them towards him, Thompson firing from one hand, more as an act of defiant resistance than an attempt to hit a German. "They're bringing in fire support! Get out of there!"
Behind Wescott, the remaining three Rangers of the six who had initially occupied the farmhouse had started to exit the tiny structure. A potato masher, tossed through the farmhouse window, ripped itself apart, and pieces of broken wood and chipped stone shot out in a cloud from the doorway, followed closely by a billow of smoke. Rifle rounds ripped through the screen of debris, and one Ranger went down, the base of his skull shattered and dropping the sliced part of his brain.
The leaves of the cover around the officer began to flash. Rangers lying against the banks of the hedgerow were shooting down the field, checking another German attempt to come through from the coastal road. Geissler's platoon, however, had already taken up flanking positions, and they began their assault now, rushing forward in organized teams, providing covering fire for each other in short, coordinated sprints. One, two, the last Rangers fell to the ground, hit by rifle and Schmeisser rounds. King sprinted ahead of Wescott and dove head-first into the friendly hedgerow, which was now roaring with the automatic fire of BARs. Martin took Aster onto his shoulder, and pushed Wescott over into cover, then joined him a short moment later. All of them were shaking.
"Ammo!" Wescott called after a pause. "I need some ammo!" he shouted over the other Rangers firing desperately into the field.
Freight trains screamed overhead, sending tremors through the ground and air, and a moment later the field erupted in buffeting clouds of black, burning earth and swirls of shrapnel and debris spiralling into the sky. The farmhouse had taken a direct hit from one of the five-inch guns of the destroyers off Pointe-du-Hoc. The shells exploded with a deafening boom, followed by a rushing wind that the Rangers could not discern between concussion or the popping of their ears. Two more shrieked down into the far hedgerow, and the Germans there cartwheeled out into the field, where a third five-inch shell swallowed several of them in its blast radius.
Geissler watched the Germans from the coastal road disintegrate as a shell burst just off the pavement. Branches from nearby trees showered down into the field, splintered wood, white and razor-sharp, fragmented away from the hedgerows.
"Assault!" Geissler ordered. They would not be stopped.
The Rangers had taken cover at the hedgerow banks, keeping their heads low, and Wescott heard Germans shouting in the field, in-between the deafening roar of incoming rounds and shell bursts. He rose only slightly, so his eyes came over the hedgerow, and saw the Germans continuing to move forward under the naval barrage. Their sergeants spoke gruffly, and one officer ordered the others ahead in a precise, calculating manner. The officer shielded his face when a five-inch shell broke through the hedgerow nearby, and nearly stumbled to the ground as the concussion wave smashed into him, but he recovered quickly, not even coughing from the dirt that had wrapped around him in a mist.
"Jesus Christ, they're still coming through," a Ranger lamented, and began to operate his BAR.
For a moment, the Rangers enjoyed a turkey-shoot as they fired from their positions, but Geissler's platoon had already closed to a dangerous proximity, and three of the Rangers were killed within moments as submachine gun fire raked across their hedgerow. Five-inch shells continued to rain down on the field, shattering the walls of the farmhouse and sending dismembered, dis-figured bodies tumbling into the sky. Geissler, however, pushed his men forward, he himself standing out in the field, dangerously exposed to fire.
A grenade went up, a potato masher, and exploded a few meters off from the American position. A second burst on top of their hedgerow, but there were no shouts. Two Rangers had been killed instantly, and the others were too busy shooting, covering from incoming German fire. One of the Rangers returned his own grenade; it went off not too far away, and caught two advancing Germans full-on. They were blown back, legs taken out from under them. Wescott lost sight of them as they dropped into the brush.
Wescott shouted for ammo again, wishing for something that would defend him against the Germans coming through the field, but one of the men told him that they were out.
"Don't need it, anyway."
Wescott realized that the shooting had stopped. The Rangers were lying against the hedgerow again, faces droopy and weary, though the shelling continued to rip the field apart. The farmhouse had been completely destroyed during the course of the fire fight, first riddled by Wescott's men as they engaged the Germans from within, then blasted to pieces by the guns of the destroyers off Pointe-du-Hoc. Wescott counted fewer Germans than he had thought had been killed in the field, though they had obviously lost very heavily.
"Ok," Wescott said after a moment, still looking into the field with the others. "Let's get Aster back to the rear."
Aster's reply was low, barely articulated. "Get me into the shade, will ya?"
End of 6 June
"Dunn, take your corporal and get yourselves to the aid station, get those wounds cleaned and patched up a little better."
"All right, Lieutenant."
Darkness had fallen on Vierville, though a few flecks of sunlight managed to claw their way through the branches and roots across the horizon. The sky had deepened to black, with the sunset burning the western edge, facing home, in a bright orange. Wayne marched second platoon, little more than twenty men strong, into the town, as a convoy drove past them, droning into the numbed ears of the men who had been fighting since morning.
Two under-strength squads remained of the four assault teams that had come in as second platoon. That was well over a 50% casualty rate, Wayne noted, in less than a day of combat.
A few German resistors remained in town, a few harassing snipers, but Vierville lay firmly in American hands. Relief units from the 115th RCT and 18th RCT had come ashore, and were now establishing "maneuvering room" out from the Omaha beaches. Wayne told the men to grab a bite to eat and to get a few hours of rest. For some of them, it would be the first nourishment they would take in 24 hours. They hobbled into town, entering the clogged street, where Army Jeeps and more deuce-and-a-half trucks chugged back and forth, ferrying wounded troops and their replacements back to the rear and up to the front. The Norman town was small, with a paved road running down the center, and French-style boulevards lining the main streets.
Wayne wasn't hungry. He was tired. His hands were caked in black and mud, as well as dried blood. He waved his stained hands at a jeep leaving town.
"Have you heard anything about A Company CP?"
"Shit," the driver scoffed, slowing down, "I heard that A Company never got off the beach. If you guys are Able boys, you're the first I've seen all day."
The jeep roared off, joining a line of convoy trucks leaving Vierville, with red crosses painted on their sides - severely wounded men who could not be helped by the local aid station, and would be shipped back to England.
Wayne did not find out until later that A Company's CO had been killed on the beach. The survivors from the morning carnage straggled in bit by bit, walking into Vierville while troop and supply convoys bused about them. Apparently, every A Company officer besides Wayne had been killed on Dog Green during the first hour. He was now technically in charge of A Company, which numbered no more than sixty men; the same number of men Wayne had brought ashore that morning. He set about finding what radio operators he could, and re-organized them amongst the remnants of the company, then reported to battalion CP. The battalion commander congratulated him on a "job well done, took guts getting off that damned beach," and assured him that he would receive adequate replacements the next morning. Wayne thanked him.
The night was cool, with a little bit of wind, and Wayne felt oddly out of place; he was from the south, and was used to being warm all day and all night. Clouds had gathered over the skies, crowding the clear blue that had managed to penetrate the overcast gray earlier. Wayne stepped out of the French office building, and looked into the glowing streets, where soldiers had set up small fires near the vehicle pool to heat their C-rations and warm themselves. Others, mostly A Company men, had clustered around the village square, lying lazily against a monument to an old French hero that the soldiers could not name.
Burkeley, cigarette in mouth, rose from across the street once he saw Wayne leave battalion CP. They headed back to the men at the village square.
"What's the Major say?"
"A Company's out-of-action," Wayne said detachedly. "Every officer dead except for me. Second platoon was marked down as KIA."
"Christ." Burkeley tossed his cigarette stub to the ground.
"Yeah."
"So what happens now?"
"We rest. We'll get a few replacements tomorrow, not enough to bring us back to strength, but enough to make us a fighting company again, and we'll go into the line."
Since Wayne would take over command of A Company, that put Burkeley next in line as platoon commander. For a while, atleast, Wayne would have to operate without an XO, an executive officer. He would be in command of perhaps a hundred men, a hundred men who would follow his orders to the letter. If this type of command kept up, there would be fifty dead men on the rosters by tomorrow night. There was no one else to do it. He wondered what he'd tell the men. They were exhausted, fatigued, and drained from the experience; that was already apparent in their eyes. Wayne patrolled into the village square, immediately causing several enlisted men to rise to their feet and salute, while squinting lazily into the dimly-lit street.
"No, no, take it easy," Wayne waved them down. "Get a good night's rest. We'll be taking on some replacements tomorrow, and battalion'll send us back into the line after some refitting. You boys did good today, I'm real proud of you. Just keep it up, fellas, you did good, real good."
Wayne walked ahead onto the other men of the company, thanking them and giving them a pat on the back. What else could he do? They smiled weakly in return.
"Thanks, Lieutenant."
It was a horrible thing, to be thanked by these men. He'd spent the entire day telling them to walk into machine gun fire, and now, as he interrupted their hard-earned sleep with a quick update on the next day's schedule, they smiled and thanked him. Wayne got the feeling that the men didn't believe his appreciation, but they did believe that he cared enough to fake it.
"Burkeley, did Dunn and that corporal ever get back?"
"Yes, sir, but Dunn says that the corporal's got to stay in the aid station overnight."
"Okay. You get some rest, Burkeley. Thanks."
"You, too, Lieutenant."
The aid station was set up in a disused building just next to the town's church. It was already moderately occupied with the casualties from the fighting past Vierville. Wayne walked past a running jeep, and saw streaks of blood in the back, along with a pile of dirty bandages. The iron-copper odor of blood mixed with the diesel fumes of the running motor, and Wayne felt a pang of nausea twinge at his stomach. Inside, the odor was just as bad, if not worse, though it was more because of the intensity of the scent of blood. Rows of stretchers had been laid out on the concrete floor, and the wounded were numerous enough that the building was filled with that background murmur of people conversing, though it was interspersed with coughs and moans of pain.
"Corporal from A Company?" Wayne asked a passing aidman. "Chest wound."
The aidman pointed him out, in the middle of one of the rows.
Wayne had walked over to the corporal's stretcher when he realized that he still did not know the young soldier's name. He was genuinely surprised at himself; the enlisted man had been under his command for almost half a year. The soldier looked up at him, and gave a nod of recognition.
"Corporal."
"Lieutenant."
"Just wanted to stop by, see how you were holding up."
"I'll be back with the platoon tomorrow."
"Good to hear, Corporal."
"I hear, sir, that you've got A Company now, not just second platoon."
"Yeah, CO was KIA on Dog Green, along with every other officer. I'm the only one in line for command." Wayne said it as though it were not yet set in stone, but it was, ever since the battalion CO had signed the order.
"Well, good luck, then, Lieutenant, with the company."
"Thank you, Corporal."
The soldier paused for a moment, looking at Wayne intently. "You know, sir, I've got a name."
Wayne was caught. "What?"
"It's Truttman. Hughe Truttman."
"Truttman," Wayne repeated, noting that the corporal - Truttman - shared the same given name. "Got it. Truttman."
"It's no problem, Lieutenant. You've got, what, sixty men you're responsible for? Tough job getting those names straight." There was a note of bitterness in that one.
Truttman shook his head. "You know, they've got beds in the church next door. They don't let enlisted in there, though. It's reserved for officers. So they stick them here, just next to it. I guess they figure it's close enough, right? Even if a lot of the guys here are lying on the floor. Officers have priority."
Wayne stayed silent. He looked at Truttman in the eye, unsure if the corporal was on the verge of snapping. He was calm, though; maybe Wayne just didn't like hearing these words.
"Let me ask you a question, Lieutenant."
"Sure."
"What made you do that this morning, sir? On the beach."
A machine gun flashed; Wayne heard tracers ripping past him, and his boots stomped hard on loose sand and struggled to gain some purchase. Then, he was in the machine gun nest. His rifle muzzle rested on the heart of the German gunner - or was he the loader? - who was fumbling with a grenade, and snapped back a moment later, the bullet instantly knocking him limp.
"I was afraid," Wayne started, then caught himself.
The corporal gave no answer, but continued to look at Wayne expectantly.
"Well, Truttman, I was afraid the entire squad would get hit, because we'd been losing men all day. I don't know what I was thinking at the time."
The corporal nodded, and looked away from the lieutenant. "You follow the rules, sir."
"What?"
"You read the history books at the academy and learned about the outstanding officers, and you really try to be like them, like the academy taught you. You follow the rules. Textbook perfect."
"I don't know any other way."
"That's why you're going to get killed. Because you want to be a hero."
"That may be so, Truttman."
"That's why you're going to get everyone else killed."
"I won't let that happen."
"Isn't that what all heroes say?"
Wayne left a little later. Corporal Hughe Truttman's words were hard to listen to, but Wayne could not dispute them. The jeep was still running outside the aid station, and the blood had been mopped up; the odor, however, remained. "I won't let that happen," Wayne recalled, and tabbed at the list of names in his pocket. He would have to add the dead from the other platoons tonight.
The rest of 1. Kompanie had marched up to Geissler's lead platoon a short time after they had been forced to pull back from the American positions. The naval barrage hadn't been particularly heavy, but it was enough to hold the Germans at bay. Geissler's lead platoon had suffered seven casualties.
They had received orders after their initial counter-attack to re-group and prepare for a second attempt in the night.
Geissler inspected the company, who had taken up positions along the outer rim of hedgerows surrounding the battery. Then men lay tensely against the hedgerow banks, shoulders hunched around their necks while they craned their heads around to check the Americans hiding in the battery. They could see nothing in the night.
"How're you men faring," Geissler clapped one soldier on the back and whispered, "What's your ammunition situation?"
"The squad is fine, Leutnant. Our ammunition supply is adequate, of course."
"Yes, sir, as usual - adequate," another rejoined in a hushed voice.
The company had learned long ago that their ammunition levels were always "adequate" - it was their rate of consumption that mattered, atleast to the quartermasters back at the supply depots. They had learned to work with what they were given. The determination of the men produced results, not the supplies of those men - or, that is what Geissler and many other officers had been told when they reported requirements for more ammunition and equipment.
"Good then," Geissler grimaced, "Just a while longer, boys. Maintain noise and light discipline."
He crept away from the seven men, who fell silent again and lie in wait, dead-quiet. Geissler suspected that the Americans were probably doing the same. He could not see the battery ahead of him, but there was no noise, besides the sound of the Channel washing against the beach. The waiting game was almost pointless - the Americans knew the Germans were lying in the shell-broken cover of the hedgerow, and the Germans knew the Americans were lying in the burned-out craters in the trench network. It was the fear of naval bombardment, which had destroyed the farmhouse, torn apart the paved road, and shattered the branches of the hedgerows that kept the tension from snapping immediately. Pieces of the dead farmhouse, white slabs of wood, littered the blackened and deformed field behind Geissler, some posted upright in the ground as though they were headstones in a graveyard.
He came to another squad of riflemen, this one supporting a nearby machine gun team. They broke into weary smiles as they saw Geissler patrolling towards them.
"Ah, Leutnant, when do we jump off?"
"Soon, we'll hit them soon," Geissler repeated this to several soldiers lying in a shallow ditch. "Do you have ammunition?"
"Yes, sir, we've got ammunition."
"Do you have enough?"
"We always have enough ammunition, sir," came the sardonic reply.
"You work with what you have, right?"
"Of course, Leutnant."
Communication was kept to a whisper. The pointe had almost become motionless in the dark, with the moon shrouded in the cloud cover. Geissler crept down next to a hedgerow bank, feeling the stone-hard roots push into his back as he leaned against them. He took his MP-40 from his shoulder and snapped the safety off, then let the black mass hang loosely from his shoulder strap, so that it lay against his chest. Geissler wasn't carrying that much ammunition, either. Just enough, he mused, to make it through this next firefight.
"I hate lugging this shit around," a soldier muttered nearby, and Geissler heard the rattle of ammunition belts in boxes, like bones tapping against each other. "Fucking ammo weighs so much."
"Yeah, but this is the shit that the boys need to fight. You should be happy anyway, Kempf, there are some companies around here that don't have any ammunition to ration out."
"Breaks my heart, it really does, that they don't have to kill themselves dragging this around."
Geissler watched two shadows shuffle away in the dark, the ammo boxes they carried rattling after them.
"Aster's dead."
"I know."
Wescott had known since they'd gotten him to the aid station. He had encouraged them with insults while they carried him on a stretcher, and then had called after them as they walked away, in his mocking tone, "Don't worry, boys! Nah-man-dee's going to fall in a week!"
He wasn't sure when the German counter-attack had started and ended; all he knew was that when it was over, his hands were shaking uncontrollably. Bodies, German and American, lay tattered and broken on the paved road, and from his defensive point just off the battery, Wescott could see the farmhouse which had been destroyed in the naval bombardment. No one had wanted to give up ground, so they had fought almost continuously at grenade range, right there on the road, in many cases tossing grenades just across it at enemy troops. There had been a few "shorts," 5-inch shells from the destroyers that had landed on Ranger positions, but that was to be expected. The Germans had come rather close.
"Did you see that kraut officer?" a Ranger spoke in low tones. "Shell burst just behind him. Doesn't even fall, not even a blink, just points out at us and shouts 'sturmst!' like nothing happened. How the hell are we going to hold this cliff against people determined like that?"
"Easy," Martin replied. "We're as determined as they are. We're not giving up this point. Plus, we're Rangers. This is what we were trained for."
"I don't know about you, brother," the Ranger scoffed, "but I wasn't trained to get beat around by a fucking regiment."
"And where the hell's our relief?" another Ranger joined. "Last I heard, Fifth Battalion was supposed to link up with us a few hours ago."
"Germans stopped our relief force cold. We're penned in."
"The hell with relief," Martin said. "Who needs the relief? You fellas planning on throwing in the towel now, after half the outfit's bought it for this?"
Wescott had reluctantly grown accustomed to Martin's sense of duty. He had always been a good one. He had an "orders were orders" mentality that dominated his every action. As far as Martin was concerned, winning the war was his personal responsibility. Most of 2nd Ranger Battalion was made up of volunteers who had not seen combat. A few, such as Wescott's team, had combat experience, and it was these few that the men looked up to for example. Martin was probably one of the best men to have around in that case. He was the type of soldier that the men had read about as youths; gung-ho and duty-bound.
Aster had been a little less enthusiastic of the war - not a slacker, just not a professional soldier. He was one of the few reasonable men he'd met since the war had started, not quite so enthusiastic as Martin, but then still spirited enough to be a good soldier. Wescott could tell that soldering wasn't Aster's life, though; he was a little more refined, had a streak of intelligence to him. That's right, he'd dropped college to fight the war.
Harsh white light exploded in the sky with a shrill hiss, German flares. Another attack. Wescott saw the younger Rangers ahead of him tense, their faces - smooth, like Hill's - drawn tight with anxiety. He shook his head. How many of them had even gotten the chance to think about starting some kind of career? And here they were, resting in a foxhole with rifles pointed ahead, waiting for the Germans. Some of the kids would smile, and Wescott had flashbacks back to high school - that same, goofy smile, that same, eager-to-please, eager-to-be-accepted expression on their face.
The cratered earth in the battery and the hedgerows beyond were glowing an eery phosphorescent green, and Wescott thought about how strange Pointe-du-Hoc suddenly looked. Shadows were starting to move, though in the darkness he couldn't tell if they were just the branches waving back and forth or German riflemen. A Browning Automatic Rifle from fifty meters away opened fire, sending streaks of fiery tracers into the hedgerow. What was it shooting at? More fire from the battery trebled up, and then came the muzzle flashes from the coastal road, from the surrounding cover. Wescott centered his sights on a cluster of dark grey, illuminated to white in the harsh glare. His Thompson suddenly felt too heavy; exhaustion had already begun to take its toll. A Ranger was shouting something, but his voice was drowned out by the BAR.
Aster had been right. Nobody belonged in Normandy.
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