On the Beaches: The Atlantic

by LIEUTENANT CHARLES S. STEVENSON, U.S.N.R.

1

I HAD taken part in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily as a Naval Beach Party Medical Officer. In this same role I was to go ashore in the fifth wave of boats tonight, once again to care for those wounded on the beach until our troops had fought their way inland and the Army could set up its own hospital facilities. I was not nearly so shaky as I had been just before going “over the side” at Fedula or Scoglitti, probably because we had been told that the beach we were to take was manned only by second-string troops.

At 2100 (9.00 P.M.), our anti-aircraft gun crews were alerted by the word that “many unidentified planes were approaching on our port beam, distance about eighteen miles.” We became a little tense at the thought of the oncoming air raid, only to find that the Nazi planes had stopped to bomb another British-American convoy of smaller boats. This convoy was going our way but lay about eight miles off our port beam. These boats are much more difficult to hit than ships our size, and we hoped that Jerry would waste all his bombs trying to hit them and would not see us sliding quietly by.

The anti-aircraft fire put up by that armada of invasion boats was a spectacle that defies adequate description. First of all, Jerry dropped half a dozen of his usual self-perpetuating chandelier flares, which turned night into day on our port beam horizon. Then we could see the brilliant white and yellow flashes as his bombs hit the water, followed a few seconds later by muffled booms. There was an immediate tirade of firing, and bright yellow lines curved upward into the sky. These were the machine-gun tracer bullets and the shells from the 20-millimeter Oerlikon guns. The amazingly intense high barrage of fire must surely have kept the enemy planes too high for accurate bombing. The moon was now up, and shining dangerously bright; so, for fear that Jerry would spot us, our escorting destroyers began to lay down a smoke screen. It proved effective, even blotting out most of our convoy from view, and it made a beautiful silver mist in the moonlight.

By midnight we had arrived at the “transport area” and the ship had gone into “condition four.” This is the name of the exercise in which the troops are called up methodically, combat team by combat team, from their living compartments below to certain prearranged “debarkation stations” on deck. There are five such stations on each side of the ship. At each station there is a wide chain net down which they climb, four at a time, into the waiting boat bobbing at the ship’s side below. The soldiers are called up wearing nearly one hundred pounds of gear, which consists of their full equipment, plus helmet, life jacket, and rifle or other firearms. It is quite a feat for these men to go “over the rail” and climb down the ladder without losing their balance. But they have had months of practice.

Each landing boat holds over thirty soldiers (this type is termed LCV-P, is made of wood, and is thirty-four feet long); so each combat team is made up of about this number. These teams are called up in turn by an officer speaking over the ship’s loud-speaker system, and all through the debarkation one hears the endless calls, “ Now team number

-, report to Blue Starboard.” The tenseness of

“condition four,” the silent efficiency of the debarkation, and the blackness of the night, unrelieved by the tiniest glimmer of a flashlight, are all preludes to the actual thrill of hoisting yourself up and over the rail. And then there is that seemingly bottomless climb down the swaying net into the boat below.

As I climbed down into the boat and saw that it was a Britisher, I can remember saying to myself, “Hell, it’s a Limey LCM.” (This type is made of steel and is a third again longer than an LCV-P.) I wished it were one of the boats from my own ship with a good old “strictly GI” U. S. Navy coxswain at the wheel. Not that I think the English Navy isn’t good, because it is unbeatable, but at a time like this a fellow feels a little more at home in one of his own boats. The Hospital Corpsmen of my Beach Party and I crawled away from the bottom of the ladder and huddled together in the darkness in the stern of the boat. Then an anti-aircraft gun was lowered into the boat and its Army gun crew climbed down after it. Now we were loaded, and we got the signal from the deck above to pull away to the assembly area. My watch showed that it was nearly 3.00 A.M.

2

WE WENT through the darkness in search of our particular wave, which was the fifth. We missed it, so as we passed each boat our Limey coxswain, in very British voice, shouted through the blackness, “I say, are you the fifth flight?” The American coxswains couldn’t understand anything that wasn’t strictly Brooklynese, and the inevitable “Whutcha-say, Mack?” repeatedly rasped back at our bewildered coxswain.

After several of these unsuccessful encounters we came up near a group of boats which was starting off for the beach in wave formation, and we joined them. It proved a long, cold ride, and in the dark we had many near-collisions, for there were literally hundreds of boats all around us. About halfway in to the beach we saw that some ships in the transport area behind us were being bombed.

The ride now consisted in trying to keep ourselves warm and in looking ahead at the little tracer bullets arching out from shore and falling far short of us. All of us in the boat were fairly tense now, but we could still laugh when one of the men, looking toward the firing on the beach, yelled out, “Somebody’s kiddin’ us, fellers. That don’t look like no Coney Island to me!”

We suddenly came upon a PC (Patrol Craft) which was acting as a control vessel for the landing boats. They showed us the direction to “Blue Beach,” which was our particular 800-yard length of the sandy shore. By now it was just light enough to make out the mountainous shoreline to the east of us. This was not comforting, for we had hoped to reach the beach under the protection of darkness. The tracers coming out at its did not look so slow and harmless now, and as we came into their range we could hear them whiz by us, plop into the water beside us, or occasionally rattle on the thick steel ramp in our bow.

All this firing at us seemed too intense and businesslike to be coming solely from second-string troops, and we began to feel that something had gone haywire and that the Germans were there on the beach giving our boys hell. Then Bo-o-om! and a shower of water covered us all as we threw ourselves face downward on the deck, “This is it!” we all thought. What must have been a German 88-millimeter shell had exploded in the water twenty feet off our starboard beam. Then two more came and bracketed us, then another and another; but, thank God, all were near misses. The machine-gun bullets rattled on our ramp.

Despite all this our Limey coxswain kept us headed right in toward the beach. One of the occupants of our boat yelled to him, “My God, man! Are you going to land us here in the face of all this fire?” The Limey was calm and game. He replied, without taking his eyes for a moment off the water just ahead of him, “I have orders for Blue Beach, and Blue Beach it is, sir! ” Regardless of the “ heat ” coming off it, he banged us aground on the beach at full speed. The boat grated to a sudden lurching stop and the ramp went down. We ran across the ramp, leaped into about two feet of water, galloped across a fifty-foot stretch of light surf, dashed across an equal span of beach, and took belly-whopper dives into the bed of a shallow little stream which was coursing diagonally across the beach into the bay. We did all this in a burst of energy equivalent to that of a fifty-yard dash; we dove into the stream bed because machine-gun bullets were whistling about our ears.

After about three minutes my heart stopped pounding enough to allow me sufficient breath to sing out to my men not to move a hair until I had had a chance to look around. I found that we were lying under the cover of a sandbank about three feet high, which formed the inland edge of the stream. The bullets continued to snipe harmlessly above us across this bank, only knocking a little spat of sand down on us now and then. I counted noses, saw that we were all present, and then we began to dig in next to the stream bed. So far, so good!

3

It WAS now daylight, or nearly so. I called over to an Army medico who was well dug in in a foxhole on our left, asking him, “What’s up?” He replied, “If any of us attempt to get up, we’ll be dead ducks!” He said that German snipers and 88’s had the beach entirely covered and that he had been pinned down there ever since the surviving troops of the first three waves had gone on inland about an hour and a half earlier. We asked him if this was Blue Beach, and he said that we were just about on the dividing line between Blue and Yellow— that the main part of Blue lay to the south. After lying under the protection of our sandbank for about an hour, and having seen no living person down all the sweep of Blue Beach to our right, we crawled on our bellies about a hundred yards or so up the beach to our left, hoping to find our Naval Beachmaster on Yellow. We could not find any of our Beach Party there, and an Army private told us that they were probably dug in, pinned down, and isolated on Blue. (They were, as we found out later.)

So we set up shop where we were, and dug slit trenches to lie in, because they give a bit more protection than foxholes. Instead of being a round hole about two feet deep, they are a trench about one and a half feet deep and six feet long, and are usually made about two feet wide. You can lie on your back or side or stomach, and you can change from one side to the other when the stiffness and aching in your joints tell you that some change must be made. The smaller open area at the top, with the protecting ridge of sand piled about a foot high around the rim, affords excellent sanctuary from flying fragments of shell and from bullets.

The trenches we dug were perfect except for one slight drawback — sea water seeped up from their bottoms very rapidly, because they had been dug, of necessity, so near to the water’s edge. At this point, however, we asked only for protection from the continuous shellfire that Jerry was laying down on our beach.

Jerry was also firing his 88-millimeter guns with deadly accuracy at any and all landing craft that might be so foolhardy as to try to land in our vicinity. In view of this, we sent out a warning message on our portable radio advising all landing craft to stay away from our beach. We know it was received because a wave of LCM’s which had been headed in toward our beach suddenly turned north in the direction of Yellow and Green. They kept just out of range of the 88’s and carried their guns, tanks, half-tracks, ammunition, gasoline, water, and food (the ubiquitous and basically essential supplies of modern amphibious invasions) up to a more hospitable section of the shore.

Soon another group of small boats started coming in toward our beach, and when they were within range the German guns opened up on them. A support boat sped along between them and the shore, laying down a smoke screen which hid them completely. No longer being able to see them, Jerry stopped firing, except for a few guns that tried unsuccessfully to hit the speedy support boat. We were very happy when we recognized this boat to be from our own ship. (Its officer was one of our most popular shipmates, and he was later awarded a Silver Star medal for his “bravery and intelligent initiative.”)

Peeping up over the top of the stream bank, I looked inland and saw eight German tanks about a block away. They were lined up, with their 88millimeter cannon pointing to seaward, like so many artillery pieces, and were taking damnably accurate potshots at any of the landing craft that dared to come within range in an attempt to speed in and land. There were several dozen of these boats milling around well off the beach, and a few tried to run the gauntlet of shellfire. In each case the story was the same. Jerry first dropped one shell a little short of them, apparently for range. Then two tanks fired simultaneously, dropping a bracket of shells which were placed so cleverly that one or the other sometimes hit the landing craft, despite its zigzagging. If the first bracket missed, it was followed by another and another until, in a number of cases, an effective hit was scored.

While I was spying at the tanks, I was surprised to see the lid of one open up slowly and a German soldier climb out. He walked calmly around his tank, surveying the immediate terrain, and then, as though he had suddenly remembered something, quickly climbed back in again. The cause of his disappearance may have been his realization that he was right on the edge of his own mine field. It apparently lay between us, and would prevent his coming out on our part of the beach. We knew that German mine fields were cleverly laid, and felt greatly protected by this one!

Even though I was unarmed, I had a crazy desire to throw something at him, but a package of sterile dressings is not an effective missile for military manslaughter, so I held my fire and lay low. For about two hundred feet on each side of us at this time there were only my three pharmacist’s mates and I, and a few Army Engineers who were well dug in and were, for the moment, out of ammunition. We still had the tanks at a slight disadvantage, however, because they could not depress their guns far enough to hit an object on the ground so close to them, and their machine-gun bullets succeeded only in throwing up sprays of sand around us.

The tanks started firing their 88’s over us out to sea. A Limey LCM was attempting to run the gauntlet of their fire and was heading in to our part of the beach. I waved frantically, trying to signal to him to turn north up the beach, but he came on in. Shells were landing to the right and left of him as he zigzagged in at top speed. Finally one shell hit the craft right in the center. There was a bright flash, a roar, and arms and heads and legs seemed to explode into the air. It was ghastly.

Some lucky men were blown overboard still in one piece, and these were picked up by an empty LCV-P landing craft from our ship. It had apparently been on its way from Yellow Beach out to sea, but had turned from its course and come to their assistance. The brave coxswain quickly jockeyed his boat back and forth while lowering his ramp about two thirds of the way, and his crew then fished the survivors out of the water and onto the ramp in a jiffy. And then, as quickly as it takes to tell it, he made a sharp turn under what appeared to be full power, raising his ramp as he did so, and headed out to sea, zigzagging like a water bug running berserk. The shells were bursting around him all the while, but he kept darting back and forth in such an unpredictable manner that Jerry just couldn’t hit him. It was the cleverest small boat maneuvering I have ever seen.

4

THEN occurred the bravest thing I saw in my fifteen days on the beach. Under full exposure to enemy snipers, machine-gun and cannon fire, one of our neighboring Army Engineer sergeants leaped out of his slit trench, peeled off his clothes, galloped through the slight surf, and swam out to the drifting Limey LCM. It was ablaze from stem to stern and had had its ramp blown off. He found a loose line in the water, secured it to a corner of the bow of the boat, and then in water up to his neck began to wade shoreward, pulling the boat behind him. When he got it in as far as the small beginning breakers, some of them seeped into the open bow of the boat and put out the fire.

The sergeant was in the act of climbing aboard when a Jerry gun, from down the beach, throw a crossfire shell which hit the side of the boat and spun it around. Then my boys and I ran to the water’s edge and swam out to help the sergeant. We scrambled aboard and found three badly wounded men lying in among a dozen or so scorched and mangled dead. We pulled the boat into the shallow surf, lifted the three wounded men from it, and carried them to the little stream bed which had afforded us protection when we first hit the beach. There was no sniping at us while we did this; possibly our Red Cross brassards meant something to Jerry after all.

We put three stretchers in the stream, with their flat metal legs placed on its hard sandy bottom, just like so many beds lined up in a hospital ward. It seemed a crazy idea, but the sandbank along the inland border of the stream bed afforded the sole protection from enemy sniper fire on this part of the beach. Working on our hands and knees so as to keep under cover, we lifted the three wounded men onto the stretchers, sprinkled sulfanilamide powder into their many wounds, and bandaged them. We also gave them their sulfa tablets by mouth and to each an injection of morphine. The morphine solution is contained in “syrettes,” which are like miniature toothpaste tubes with a hypodermic needle on the end. These are kept sterile and ready for use by means of a cap which fits over the needle.

One man, an Army private, was in bad condition. His entire lower jaw had been blown off, plus most of his tongue. After putting a whole container of sulfanilamide powder into the wound, we bandaged a remaining flap of skin from the front of his neck up over the stump of his tongue and the toothless upper jaw. We next stuck the bayoneted end of a rifle the sergeant had found for us into the sand beside the soldier and hung a unit bottle of plasma up on its stock. One of the corpsmen put the needle into his arm vein and the lifesaving plasma ran into him. This man was in severe shock, but after about ten minutes his wrist pulse became perceptible and he began to look a little better. Jerry snipers shot at the rifle butt, which was protruding a little above the bank, but they did not hit it. Perhaps they regretted letting us get away.

We now had a moment to look at the other two wounded, one of whom had compound fractures of both upper legs. All four of us turned to on him and in a few minutes we had Thomas splints on both legs. The other one had part of his shoulder blown off and the joint laid bare. We applied the usual sulfa powder, bandaged him up, and put on a snug Velpeau type of outer bandage to secure his arm in a favorable position. We didn’t have to do much in the way of cutting off their uniforms and clothes, because the explosion and the fire had destroyed most of them. A piece of shrapnel had caused a superficial wound in the brave sergeant’s shoulder, so we gave him a quick dressing and a congratulatory pat on the back. He certainly had saved the lives of these three soldiers at the unhesitating risk of his own.

All this time snipers’ bullets were whizzing overhead and we were kept pinned down in our stream bed. It was now about noon, but none of us were at all hungry. We weren’t even thirsty. To our surprise and gratification, an LCV-P suddenly braved the enemy fire and, despite the shells landing around it, zigzagged successfully in and landed on our beach, bringing the Engineers some ammunition and us some food. In crouching positions we were able to drag our wounded on their stretchers down to the boat and load them into it. The coxswain quickly backed it off the beach with a roar, had his crew raise his ramp as he did so, turned, and zigzagged back out to sea at full speed. In about thirty minutes he would be alongside one of our transports and the wounded would be hoisted aboard to receive full hospital care.

No shells had landed on our part of the beach for about a half hour; and since the sniper fire had decreased, we decided to venture from the security of our stream bed. Two corpsmen and I, with medical kits slung over our shoulders, crawled for several blocks down the beach looking for wounded. When we found a man we went to work on him, and usually fixed him up in about five minutes. One corpsman filled out a medical casualty slip and tied it to the man’s shirt. He then made a similar entry of the case in our own casualty record book. The other corpsman and I got most of the sand out of his wounds, shook the “magic powdecr” into them, and applied bandages. If the arms or legs were fractured, we put on the regular splints. Then we lifted him onto a stretcher and half-dragged and half-carried him back to our stream bed. One disconcerting thing was that some soldiers were always calling out, “Hey, Doc, there’s a dead man over here.” We were sorry, but we had all we could handle in taking care of the wounded.

A DUKW or “Duck” (a 2 1/2-ton, six-wheel truck which also goes in the water like a boat) was now seen heading in toward our section of the beach, and as it came closer we could see that it was loaded with casualties. When it was still about fifty yards off the beach a German shell hit its stern but did not explode. The DUKW was spun around but no one was hurt. It then headed in for us again and came up on the beach. We lifted the casualties out of the DUKW and treated them in our stream-bed station.

At this point we were very much amazed to see three German tanks on the beach down on Blue. They must, have known the exact location of their mines in order to have arrived there without blowing up. They were about two blocks away, and their guns were pointing in our direction. The dud that had hit the DUKW had apparently come from them.

5

SINCE Blue Beach was heavily mined, as was attested by a couple of wrecked jeeps lying down there, and since it was under more or less continuous enemy fire, it began to look as though we shouldn’t get to use it for some time. I made a trip up to Yellow and had a confab with the Beach Party Doctor there. We decided to join our parties together on Yellow at a point where we could serve both beaches.

We selected a site behind a ten-foot dune which afforded good cover, and dug a pit about two feet deep and six feet square, which could hold three stretchers side by side. In addition to our “sick bay,” we dug slit trenches parallel to three sides of the square pit. We placed them close enough to the pit to allow us to keep cover in them and lean over and treat the patients at the same time if necessary. After we had completed this job we were pretty thirsty, so we lay back, relaxed, and took some long pulls from our canteens. Then we realized that we were also hungry, so we broke open some K rations and ate them with relish.

About 1330 (1.30 P.M.) some of our destroyers and cruisers, and a British monitor ship, had apparently received word that there were tanks right behind our part of the beach and they opened fire on them. The first salvo of shells they sent in whooshed through the air a few feet above our heads and fell a little short of the tanks. The next salvo hit among the tanks, smashing three of them and disabling several more. The rest turned tail and, with motors roaring, raced inland in a cloud of dust.

We got hold of a portable radio and tried to establish contact with one of our ships. We couldn’t make it work over that long range, and when we extended the aerial pole to increase the range, some Jerry machine-gunner shot it off. However, we were able to make it work well enough to receive a message from Red Beach telling us, “Hold on, Yellow. Help is coming.”

Some Naval gunfire was now being directed at other tanks further inland and at the few SS’s there. These guns were evidently well dug in and camouflaged in some of the gulleys of the marshy and sandy three-mile-wide flats that lay between the foot of the mountains inland and the beach. We could also see many Naval shells going back into the mountains, where the Germans had more guns and large mortars. This fire of ours must have been accurate, because after about an hour of it the German shelling of our beach decreased sharply. This fire from our destroyers and cruisers, and that from the redoubtable Limey monitor ship, undoubtedly saved the day for us on our beachhead.

We heard cheering behind us on the beach and, looking around, we saw a big LST coming in. Our hopes soared because it would bring us our longneeded heavy equipment, such as artillery, tanks, and half-tracks with their 75’s. Until now we had been merely infantry, and without any means other than rifles and a few grenades and bazookas with which to combat the tanks and the 88-millimeter guns that had kept our beach unlivable and unworkable. Our best defense, as it incongruously turned out, was the Germans’ own mine field, since it had kept their tanks from overrunning our beach.

The LST was only about three hundred yards off the beach and she was coming in with her forward 40-millimeter gun blazing at the Jerry tanks. She had assembled and attached her causeway to her lowered ramp before coming in, and it floated out in front of her like a little dock. She ran aground about a hundred feet off the beach, her causeway grounding at the water’s edge. She had already swung wide her doors. Some Sea bees ran out through them to stake and secure the causeway just as a neatly placed shell dropped right on it, killing three or four of them.

Other Jerry shells from back inland made a lot of near misses around the LST, throwing up high geysers of sand and water and raining shell fragments around generally. The Seabees did not stop for an instant; they went quickly about their work and in short order had all in readiness for the vehicles to roll out of the ship. The first one to come out was a jeep, and Jerry held his fire until the jeep was in complete view, and then he hit it squarely with a shell, blowing it to bits. It was immediately followed by a string of tanks which quickly ran up across the beach, blazed away at the one remaining German tank (the other two had left), and completely wrecked it. “Pan-bloody-demonium” (an apt British term) broke loose on the beach as our men cheered and whistled at this dramatic display. A number of men carelessly exposed themselves, in their enthusiasm, and one was immediately plugged by a sniper.

All afternoon a well-concealed German sniper had been taking potshots at men on our beach from a hideaway which was apparently about a hundred yards inland beyond the dunes. Our infantrymen hadn’t been able to locate him, so we heard; but it was generally agreed that someone would have to sneak out and get him. A sergeant and a private picked up a bazooka and a couple of rockets for it, and, keeping under cover and worming along on their bellies, worked their way out toward where the sniper seemed to be.

After a while the Jerry took another shot toward the beach, and this, so the sergeant later said, disclosed the clump of fernlike scrub where he lay hidden. About thirty yards from him the sergeant propped up the bazooka on a little mound of sand, aimed it carefully, and then held it down securely while the private inserted and fired the rocket. The projectile whammed over and exploded within a few yards of the sniper, and he let out a yell. The sergeant and the private now carefully crawled back to the beach, being justifiably wary of other snipers farther inland.

An hour later, when most of the sniping had stopped, two stretcher bearers were sent over to bring the Jerry in. When we got him on the beach we found that the bazooka had literally “blown his tail off,” as his left buttock was completely gone and the hip joint was laid bare. He had bled profusely and was in deep shock; in fact he was almost dead. We put clamps on the bleeding vessels in the wound, scooped out the sand, sprinkled sulfa powder on liberally, and put on a tight bandage. Then we gave him several units of blood plasma and he began to regain consciousness and “pinked up” some.

We could not help, in a way, being impressed by his complete self-assurance and feeling of superiority. Lying there on his belly on a stretcher, with the plasma bringing hint back from near-death, he maintained a completely arrogant and cocky attitude toward us. He accepted our ministrations with a cool condescension and obviously hated us and thought us stupid for not shooting him. Seeing him made me believe that we had a long way to go before defeating the Germans.

6

WITH the landing of the big LST we, at last, had received tanks and artillery on our beach, and it made us feel a lot better about life in general. Nine hours earlier, just before daybreak, we had put our only artillery on Blue Beach. When the fourth wave, the last one able to land on Blue Beach, had landed, two half-track trucks mounting 75-millimeter guns had been brought ashore. One halftrack rolled out of its boat, pulled up on the beach, and was wheeling into a position to fire inland when it was hit indirectly by a shell from a partly hidden German tank about fifty yards away. (These tanks had apparently been lying there, in the pre-dawn half-light, waiting for point-blank shots at any “heavy stuff” we should attempt to land.) The crew were shot up, and those who could move crawled away from the gun.

The second 75 was then wheeling across the beach into position when it hit what must have been a compound Teller mine and blew up. Those of its crew who were relatively uninjured ran up to the partly wrecked first 75 and manned it. This remaining gun was next straddled by two German shells, and a second lieutenant and a private were badly wounded, the lieutenant having his face blown off. A lieutenant of Engineers ran out from cover and tried to give him first aid and also sent someone to look for a doctor. Another shell landed near them and blew all the muscle off one of the arms of the wounded officer and also wounded the Engineer lieutenant.

The remaining 75 was then completely demolished by a direct shell hit. This had been the tragic beginning and end of our sole artillery power, so you can see why the men went wild with joy over the arrival of the big LST. Of course our fifth and sixth waves had brought in most of our heavy stuff, but they had been forced to land it half a mile north, near the junction of Yellow and Green, where it had been kept well occupied.

All this time we had had no word from the surviving troops of the first three waves that had run inland, just as soon as they landed, to take the electric railroad, blow up a bridge or two, and block a highway. But we learned something of them from an injured sergeant whom an Army doctor had me see. The sergeant had been badly stunned. His face and nose and eyes were badly mashed and swollen, but he was now fully conscious. While he was waiting to be evacuated from the beach to a transport he told me this story: —

“I was in the first wave of infantry. We landed without any opposition, and the beach was as quiet as a graveyard. There was a lot of firin’ on the beaches to the north. We were sort of puzzled, but in a few minutes some yellow flares lit up the sky above us, and suddenly all hell turned loose. Jerry machine guns behind the beach opened up on us and mowed down a lot of our men. We all flopped, and two guys near me who hadn’t been killed started crawlin’ inland. So I went with them. After we had quietly made our way about three hundred yards we came upon a camouflaged German 88 gun lyin’ in a gulley.

“I couldn’t see it clearly at first because it was pretty dark, but I heard some voices. I crept up along a bank until I was about thirty-five yards from them, and after takin’ pretty good cover in another gulley, I fired on them with my good old Ml. I shot three of them I think, but I couldn’t be sure because they were pretty shadowy in the darkness. Anyhow, one of them yelled to us in English. I yelled back at them, ‘Do you guys want to surrender?’ They answered with a couple of rifle shots at me, but the bullets pinged over my head because I was in a little gulley. I turned around and found that the other two guys who had been with me had gone on, and since it was gettin’ a little too hot around there, I pulled out, by-passin’ the gun by a safe margin and goin’ very quietly, mostly on my belly.

“After I had crawled about two hundred yards I met up with the third platoon of my company. They were goin’ on in to capture the railroad track, so I went with them. We finally got to it and met some other American soldiers, who were divided up with one party on each side of the low track embankment. They were supposed to work their way south along it until they came to the bridge where it crossed the river. I went along with the party on the beach side of the track, and we made our way carefully toward the river.

“When we were about seventy-five yards from it some Jerry machine guns ahead of us, on the far side of the field we were in, opened up on us. We flopped, and through the very little light that was beginnin’ to come, I could see eight German tanks lined up ahead of us. They were backed up to the river bank and facin’ directly at us. Their engines weren’t running, and they must have been lyin’ there waitin’ for us and for daylight. Some of our men in the party across the track from us opened fire on them with all they had — which was only rifles.

“One of our officers started to crawl back to get some bazookas. Some of us crawled back about two hundred feet to the edge of this field, where, comin’ into it, we had passed a low rough stone wall, as we figured we could get some cover behind it. Others further forward tried to dig into little washout gullies in the field where they were. The officer got back quickly with the bazookas and they were shot at the tanks from behind the stone wall, which was a range of about two hundred yards, but the rockets didn’t seem to do any damage at all to the tanks.

A couple of guys shot grenades at them with their rifles, but that didn’t do any good either.

“By this time I had crawled back and behind the wall, and I dug in a little bit there. It was gettin’ lighter by the minute, and all of a sudden there’s a roar as all the tanks start their engines at once and start makin’ a break across the field. The guys in the middle of the field jumped up and started runnin’ toward the wall. The bloody tanks headed straight for them, ran some of them down and right over them, and chased some others until they ran them down too. Not satisfied with this, they chased some of the fellows along in front of the wall I was behind.

“ Not bein’ able to get away from the tanks, the fellows flopped on their bellies and quickly rolled up on their sides flat against the bottom of the wall. Damned if the Jerries didn’t drive their tanks down so close to the wall that they scraped it in places tryin’ to crush these men too. Several of the guys tossed grenades from behind the wall into the tracks of the tanks and stopped two of them this way. One fellow made a lucky shot with his rifle and set a tank on fire, and then as it stopped and the dirty Nazis climbed out, he just sat down, kept his rifle at his shoulder, and picked them off one by one. This made us all feel a little better, after seein’ about twenty of our boys crushed out there in the field.

“The rest of the tanks lit out to the north, runnin’ along the beach side of the track, and disappeared in the mist. We stayed there all mornin’, ate some K rations, and laid low, keepin’ a sharp eye out for the enemy.

“Along about 1400 my captain called me and told me to go back to the beach and tell the Army Beachmaster where we were, and to ask for reinforcements and ammunition, as we had only a few rounds left. We had lost our radioman and this was the only way we had of gettin’ word back to the beach. So I crawled back to the beach, which was about a mile and a half the way I had to go, because I gave a wide berth to the couple German machine-gun nests and hidden 88’s I thought I saw. Finally I came to some low sand dunes with some grass around the bottoms, and I held up a white handkerchief in one hand as I crawled through the grass onto the beach, and I kept yellin’, ‘Don’t you guys shoot at me! I’m an American!’ Everybody was dug in on this beach and I crawled up to a slit trench and found an Army medic, and he told me I’m on Blue Beach and that they are bein’ shelled and sniped. So I headed north up to Yellow Beach, where he said I’d find a beachmaster.

“As I was goin’ along Yellow I saw a couple of medics tryin’ to get a wounded soldier into a beached boat, so I gave them a hand. Next I met up with a man from my outfit and he tagged along with me. We could see an LST comin’ into the beach up ahead of us. As we got up close to it the shells were landin’ all around it, and my buddy started runnin’ up ahead of me. When he was about ten feet in front of me there was a terrific roar and it looked like a shell hit him right in the chest.

“Something hit me in the face and I don’t remember anything after that until I came to and found myself lyin’ on the beach sort of dazed, I looked over and saw, naturally, that my buddy had been killed, and that it was his head that had hit me in the face. Well, then this doctor comes up and looks me over, and has me lie down here. I don’t mind lyin’ down for a while because I’m sort of tired and I’ll need a little rest before I crawl all the way back to the bridge. . . . Gosh! I almost forgot. I got to deliver that message to the beachmaster! I guess I’ve had sort of a busy day.”

At this point the sergeant almost fainted as he tried to get up. We tagged him as a casualty and, very much against his wishes, shipped him out to a transport in the next boatload. His message, incidentally, was delivered.

It was now about 1800. Another LST came in and unloaded her artillery, tanks, and jeeps without incident. An occasional shell landed on our beach, but our tanks and half-tracks were cleaning the Jerries out of the fields behind us. About an hour later, still another LST came in and spilled her war machines on the beach, so we were sitting pretty. As the sun was setting at sea things began to quiet down. Later, as I crawled into my slit trench for some “shut-eye,” it seemed to me that we had been there at least a week. But it was only twenty-four hours!