June 6, 1944
Today, June 6, 2024, marks the 80th anniversary of Operation Overlord, D Day, the invasion of France in World War 2, by 73,000 Americans, 83,000 British, 14000 Canadians, 3200 Australians, and a handful of New Zealanders like radar specialist Ned Hitchcock.
An aspect of war that has always fascinated me is to look at who was first – first into battle, first to die, and what drove them to fight. With an operation as large as D Day, it’s difficult to pinpoint who was first to the battle. You could point to the British SAS paratroopers who parachuted into Normandy, far from the beaches, just after midnight on the morning of June 6. Their job was to create a diversion, with mechanical noisemakers named Ruperts, and draw German troops away from the main invasion sites. Ten brave SAS men scattered along the coast created the impression of a large invasion and drew the Wehrmacht 915th Infantry division away to chase them. It was rather like holding out steak in front of a grizzly bear and enticing it to follow you. Eight of the SAS men did not survive. https://www.paradata.org.uk/media/10692 All were volunteers since the command expected no survivors – Lieutenant Frederick “Chick” Fowles, Lieutenant Norman “Puddle” Poole with Troopers Dawson and “Chippy” Saunders from A Squadron along with Troopers W Hurst and Anthony Merryweather from B Sqn. Who knows how many lives they saved with their sacrifice?
The extreme amount of coordination between distant units was amazing – or a happy coincidence. Just minutes later, members of the American 101st Airborne and 81st Airborne jumped into the darkness of France from a thunderstorm of C47s, between 12:48 AM and 1 AM British time.
When the light flashed green the jumpmaster shouted “Go!” and the men pushed out the open door. Most men made it out without incident.
David Kenyon Webster, 101st Airborne Division: “I shuffled up, glancing down and stopped, dumbfounded. All I could see was water, miles and miles of water. But this was D-Day and nobody went back to England, and a lot of infantry riding in open barges seasick to the low-tide beaches were depending on us to draw the Germans off the causeways and gun batteries, and so … I grabbed both sides of the door and threw myself out.”
Elmo Bell, 82nd Airborne Division: “I turned to Zeitner to tell him that we were gaining altitude, and when I called his name, he went out the door. Well, realizing that my calling his name had triggered his jump, I jumped, too—and, of course, the rest of the stick followed me out.”
Ken Russell, 82nd: “As we left the plane we had flak, machine-gun fire and everything else all the way down, because we were sitting targets.”
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/ww2-paratrooper-first-hand-accounts-of-the-d-day-invasion/
Then there were the men in boats – thousands of them. 3817 LCVPs or Higgins boats pitched their way across the channel like bucking broncos, turning more than a few men green with sea sickness.
On June 6, 1944, under the command of Major General C. Ralph Huebner, the 16th regiment of infantry lands at 6:30 in Normandy in front of the locality of Colleville-sur-Mer. But the German resistance is extremely strong and the Americans are on the brink of disaster. The losses are huge, 95 per cent of the officers were killed and no one has landed where he should be.
Charles Noonan was the first to hit the beach with Big Red 1 at Omaha. His son says that Charles would rarely talk about his experience, but a few details came out. On the way over in the landing craft, when men were sick all around him Charles, who was an experienced sailor, felt great – or at least as well as you can when you know that you’re heading to your probable death. Each man carried over seventy pounds of equipment. Charles was a platoon leader, responsible for 31 men, and his assigned area was a section of beach named Dog Red – but like many other things that day, it didn’t go as planned. They landed 500 yards away from their assigned section, in an area heavy with German artillery, mortars, and machine guns. Charles was wounded twice, and many of his men died.
In a final letter to his wife, Charles said, “Sweetheart, the main and only reason I’m writing is to say once again that I love you with every breath I take. Gosh, Peggy, it’s so darn much, I can’t think straight. That’s why I’m so anxious to get on those beaches of France — the sooner there, the sooner we will be together. I know that you will be worrying, but please try not to. I’ll take good care of myself, honest.’’
D-Day at 80: Delaware native Charles Noonan led a platoon at Omaha Beach (delawareonline.com)
But nothing was as practiced, and all the landmarks were wrong. The beach didn’t have craters from Allied bombs to provide cover, the obstacles were still intact, and the farmhouse that was their objective was an impossible six hundred yards away, with Wehrmacht in between. And not just any unit of Wehrmact – the German 352nd Division, which wasn’t supposed to be there, was waiting for them, a battle-hardened unit that had fought for months on the Eastern front. The naval bombardment from the USS Texas wasn’t blowing up much except their eardrums, most of the shells falling behind the German fortifications. Then Charles’s I company got a break – there were no mines near shore, and the smoke was so thick that the Germans didn’t see them immediately. Colonel George Taylor of the nearby 16th Infantry yelled, “There are two kinds of people who are staying on this beach: those who are dead and those who are going to die. Now let’s get the hell out of here.“
The Germans had “hedgehogs”, iron girders welded together in the form of an X, on the beach to prevent gliders from landing and slow down tanks. Charles and others took cover behind them, but he quickly realized that was foolish – the machine gun fire became so intense that sparks from the iron hit his shirt and it started smoldering. He put out the little fires with his bare hands. There was only one way to do this – straight ahead into the teeth of the enemy. Charles led the way, standing up and rallying his men for the most dangerous 100-yard dash in history, to the cliffs. Most of I company made it, though few thought they would. Charles later recalled that they only made it half a mile off the beach the first day. When he reached that cliff, he finally let go and threw up. They were lost, exhausted, wounded, scared and drenched. The radio wasn’t working to get instructions. Some equipment was missing that was supposed to help them get through the barbed wire. After spending precious time getting through it, they encountered a German pill box with a machine gun. Charles said a prayer, and asked his sergeant, Ozias Ritter, if he could hit it with a bazooka rocket. The first shot missed, but on the second, Ozias sent a rocket right into the slot in the pill box.
It was a one-in-a-million shot from down below, aimed with just the right arc to go through the narrow slot from more than fifty yards away. Charles and his men kept moving. A few stepped on a mine. Resistance was still stiff. Then a group came marching toward them with hands in the air – Russians who had been forced to serve in the German army, only too willing to surrender. Though nominated for the Silver Star, there was no superior officer present to verify his actions, and Charles received the Bronze Star.
Another man who might lay claim to first on the beach was US Army Captain Leonard T. Schroeder Jr., on Utah beach. As Schoeder’s craft neared the beach, it hit a bomb crater, causing the gate to drop prematurely. There was nothing for it but to slog through the surf and machine gun fire to the shore. Schroeder was off first, the first American out of a landing craft onto Utah. He too discovered that his intended landing spot was 2000 yards away, and had to improvise under fire to get his men up and off the beach. He was shot in his left arm before reaching dry land. He never stopped, leading his 32 men forward. When he was shot again in the same arm, he woke up on a stretcher with a medic about to administer morphine and send him to a ship to have his arm amputated. Schroeder knocked the rag with the morphine away and wanted to go on fighting. Unable to avoid evacuation, he refused morphine all the way back to England and persuaded doctors to save his arm.
Ray Lambert was another D-Day hero. He landed on Omaha beach with his men, near the village of Colleville-sur-Mer. There was a boulder on the beach, where Ray and his men took cover. Ray was a medic, there to heal, but first he had to survive. Already a veteran of Sicily and North Africa, a recipient of the Silver Star, now he and his brother encountered the bloody beaches of Normandy. They heard the machine guns above the surrounding din and knew that the minute the ramp went down, some would die. Ray felt a blinding pain in his arm, and dove down into the water, crawling his way up to the beach. Once there, he was even more exposed. Looking right and left, he saw the boulder, now commemorated with a plaque as Ray’s Rock. He went back and forth, pulling men from the surf with his wounded arm, and getting them up behind the rock. He was shot again in the leg, but kept rescuing men. Lambert’s heroics only ended when a landing craft ramp weighing hundreds of pounds crashed down on him as he attempted to help a wounded soldier emerge from the surf. Unconscious, his back broken, Lambert was tended to by medics and soon found himself on a vessel heading back to England. Today Ray is 98 and has returned for what he says is the last time to the deadly beach of history. That day, he woke up in the hospital beside his brother, also wounded. In the opening minutes of battle, by one estimate, 90 percent of the frontline GIs in some companies were killed or wounded.
And then there were the women. Though male heroes were not lacking on D-Day, and women didn’t land with the first wave to fight, nevertheless there were women who came off the landing crafts and walked up the beaches to serve as nurses and support personnel. One of them was my cousin, Iris Painter, a member of the WACs. She started as a Rosie the Riveter building airplanes and graduated to flying them, training male pilots. Like the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPS), these women bravely served, trying out new aircraft, training men to fight, and in some cases died for their country when a plane malfunctioned. Twenty thousand women volunteered, and over 1000 women were accepted and trained as pilots. They in turn trained the men. Jackie Cochran, Shirley Slade (Life magazine cover), DeDe Johnson and Dora Dougherty (trained by Colonel Paul Tibbits, who later dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima), and Lucille Wise were just a few of the women who flew and served. The women flew everything the men did – B17, B29, P40, P51 and many others. “I loved it – I didn’t want to quit when the war ended,” said Lucille.
While all of these women risked their lives—and more than a few lost them—they were not perceived as equals. Because they were designated as civilians, they were denied military honors and compensation. Jackie Cochran and Nancy Harkness Love lobbied to create the WASP program, and overcame violent resistance from Dwight Eisenhower. The women volunteered, paid their own way to Texas to join, and proved that “anything you can do, I can do better”, including flying massive B29s. According to Life, the Air Force reported that the women were faster on instruments while the men “had better memory for details.” But in virtually every way that counted, the magazine wrote, there was no practical difference in ability.
Lucille Wise said, “We were trained the military way, just like the male cadets were trained.” “We lived in barracks, we slept on metal cots, and we learned to march, and we were under military discipline, under demerits — we had to make our beds a certain way, and we had inspections. It was very stressful because we had to meet the requirements.”
Women also served as spies, behind the lines, gathering useful information, and in some cases, performing sabotage. A marvelous book on this topic is D Day Girls, by Sarah Rose.
