In honor of the anniversary of D-Day, below is famed war correspondent and newspaper columnist Ernie Pyle’s column on the greatest invasion in history:
NORMANDY BEACHHEAD, June 12, 1944 – Due to a
last-minute alteration in the arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beachhead
until the morning after D-day, after our first wave of assault troops had hit
the shore.
By the time we got here the beaches had been
taken and the fighting had moved a couple of miles inland. All that remained on
the beach was some sniping and artillery fire, and the occasional startling
blast of a mine geysering brown sand into the air. That plus a gigantic and
pitiful litter of wreckage along miles of shoreline.
Submerged tanks and overturned boats and burned
trucks and shell-shattered jeeps and sad little personal belongings were strewn
all over these bitter sands. That plus the bodies of soldiers lying in rows
covered with blankets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in a line as though
on drill. And other bodies, uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in the
sand or half hidden by the high grass beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determination of
work-weary men to get this chaotic beach organized and get all the vital
supplies and the reinforcements moving more rapidly over it from the stacked-up
ships standing in droves out to sea.
Now that it is over it seems to me a pure
miracle that we ever took the beach at all. For some of our units it was easy,
but in this special sector where I am now our troops faced such odds that our
getting ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what the
opening of the second front in this one sector entailed, so that you can know
and appreciate and forever be humbly grateful to those both dead and alive who
did it for you.
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy troops than
we had in our assault waves. The advantages were all theirs, the disadvantages
all ours. The Germans were dug into positions that they had been working on for
months, although these were not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot bluff a
couple of hundred yards back from the beach had great concrete gun emplacements
built right into the hilltop. These opened to the sides instead of to the
front, thus making it very hard for naval fire from the sea to reach them. They
could shoot parallel with the beach and cover every foot of it for miles with
artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun nests on the
forward slopes, with crossfire taking in every inch of the beach. These nests
were connected by networks of trenches, so that the German gunners could move
about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach, running
zigzag a couple of hundred yards back from the shoreline, was an immense
V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing could cross it, not even men on foot,
until fills had been made. And in other places at the far end of the beach,
where the ground is flatter, they had great concrete walls. These were blasted
by our naval gunfire or by explosives set by hand after we got ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were several
swales or valleys, each about one hundred yards wide. The Germans made the most
of these funnel-like traps, sowing them with buried mines. They contained,
also, barbed-wire entanglements with mines attached, hidden ditches, and
machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But our men had
to go through a maze nearly as deadly as this before they even got ashore.
Underwater obstacles were terrific. The Germans had whole fields of evil
devices under the water to catch our boats. Even now, several days after the
landing, we have cleared only channels through them and cannot yet approach the
whole length of the beach with our ships. Even now some ship or boat hits one
of these mines every day and is knocked out of commission.
The Germans had masses of those great
six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron and standing shoulder-high, just
beneath the surface of the water for our landing craft to run into. They also
had huge logs buried in the sand, pointing upward and outward, their tops just
below the water. Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had floating
mines offshore, land mines buried in the sand of the beach, and more mines in
checkerboard rows in the tall grass beyond the sand. And the enemy had four men
on shore for every three men we had approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
Beach landings are planned to a schedule that is
set far ahead of time. They all have to be timed, in order for everything to
mesh and for the following waves of troops to be standing off the beach and
ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some elements of
the assault force are to break through quickly, push on inland, and attack the
most obvious enemy strong points. It is usually the plan for units to be
inland, attacking gun positions from behind, within a matter of minutes after
the first men hit the beach.
I have always been amazed at the speed called
for in these plans. You’ll have schedules calling for engineers to land at
H-hour plus two minutes, and service troops at H-hour plus thirty minutes, and
even for press censors to land at H-hour plus seventy-five minutes. But in the
attack on this special portion of the beach where I am – the worst we had,
incidentally – the schedule didn’t hold.
Our men simply could not get past the beach.
They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from
the bluff. Our first waves were on that beach for hours, instead of a few
minutes, before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug at the
very edge of the water, in the sand and the small, jumbled rocks that form
parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the wounded as best
they could. Men were killed as they stepped out of landing craft. An officer
whom I knew got a bullet through the head just as the door of his landing craft
was let down. Some men were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses was
finally accomplished by terrific and wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked out
the big emplacements. They tell epic stories of destroyers that ran right up
into shallow water and had it out point-blank with the big guns in those
concrete emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our men were
organized by their officers and pushed on inland, circling machine-gun nests
and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take a
beach is to face it and keep going. It is costly at first, but it’s the only
way. If the men are pinned down on the beach, dug in and out of action, they
might as well not be there at all. They hold up the waves behind them, and
nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while, but
finally they stood up and went through, and so we took that beach and
accomplished our landing. We did it with every advantage on the enemy’s side
and every disadvantage on ours. In the light of a couple of days of
retrospection, we sit and talk and call it a miracle that our men ever got on
at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name the
units that did it. Then you will know to whom this glory should go. They
suffered casualties. And yet if you take the entire beachhead assault,
including other units that had a much easier time, our total casualties in
driving this wedge into the continent of Europe were remarkably low – only a
fraction, in fact, of what our commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered and went
through such hell are still, right at this moment, pushing on inland without
rest, their spirits high, their egotism in victory almost reaching the
smart-alecky stage.
Their tails are up. "We’ve done it
again," they say. They figure that the rest of the army isn’t needed at
all. Which proves that, while their judgment in this regard is bad, they
certainly have the spirit that wins battles and eventually wars.
Note: Sadly, Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese sniper during the Battle of Okinawa.
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