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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