Beachhead Panorama: Going Ashore with the Troops at Utah Beach

Soldiers of 4th US Infantry Division make their way inland from Utah Beach.

by Ira Wolfert

Wolfert won the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches on the Battle for the Solomons. This article is largely based on a series of on-the-scene dispatches he wrote for the North American Newspaper Alliance.

This Normandy beachhead of ours is the fourth beachhead I have been on in the last two years. All beachheads are unlike anything else on earth. Thousands of things are going on at once, from life to death, from hysterical triumph to crushing failure. Night is different from day only because the light is poorer, the tracer bullets more lurid, the waves creamier and your particular task either harder or easier. You work until your job is done or your superior feels too exhausted to work you any longer. Then you sleep until prodded awake by explosions or bullets or some other urgency.

Our first view of France, from the U.S. Coast Guard troop transport that carried us across the Channel, was that reflected by anti-aircraft shells lighting up the night above Normandy. It was a little past 1 a.m. on D-Day, and paratroopers were beginning to land, their planes showered by whole buckets of blazing shells and golf-ball flak. One plane went down, then another and another, in plain sight of our ship, while our men stood silently in the darkness, their faces grim and their hearts sick.

The transport anchored about eleven miles offshore, and at dawn, after a terrific naval and air bombardment of the beaches, we transferred to small boats for the landing. The boats were being thrown five and ten feet into the air and digging deep into the troughs between the waves, and the leap from the slippery ladder to a greasy hatch had to be timed nicely.

To the right and left and ahead and behind, farther than a man could see, the scene was the same—a spreading mass of ships lying to, waiting patiently as cows to be unloaded, each deep laden and teeming with men and goods. The waters between them were teeming too, with small boats threading back and forth and hanging to the sides of the larger vessels like the metal spangles of a tambourine.

We passed under a sky full of airplanes laid layer upon layer on top of each other. We passed warships bombarding the enemy, and saw the splashes of enemy shells trying to hit the ships. An inferno was brewing on the beach; smoke was clotting up from it, and blinding white and orange blasts of explosions flickered hotly.

Then the war reached out a giant paw and struck dead ahead of us. There was a big explosion. Gray smoke and white water rose hundreds of feet into the air. Out of its center a mortally stricken minesweeper plunged and tilted, bleeding oil in spouts as if an artery had been severed. Then it righted itself and lay quietly, with the big gaseous-looking bubbling that ships make when they die.

Standing by to pick up survivors, we came first to those who had been blown farthest by the explosion. They were all dead. “Leave the dead and take the living first,” cried Lieutenant John Tripson.

And then, from all over the sea around us, sounding small and child-like in the wild world of waters, came cries of “Help! Help!” and one startling, pathetic cry of “Please help me!”

Big John Tripson is a Mississippi boy who used to play football for the Detroit Lions. His strength came in handy now. The wet boys in the sea with all they had on them weighed up to three hundred pounds. Big John reached out and scooped them up with one hand, holding onto the boat with the other. We fished six out of the water, two of them uninjured, taking only the living and leaving the dead awash like derelicts in the unheeding sea. One man was naked. Every stitch of clothing, including his shoes and socks, had been blown off and his body was welted all over as if he had been thrashed by a cat-o’-nine-tails.

Other rescue ships had come alongside the minesweeper now, and we stood out again on our mission. Close to us was the U.S. cruiser Tuscaloosa. A German battery had challenged her, and she and an American destroyer had taken up the challenge. The Germans were using a very fine smokeless powder that made it impossible to spot their gun sites unless one happened to be looking right there when the muzzle flash gave them away. They also had some kind of bellows arrangement that puffed out a billow of gun smoke from a position safely removed from the actual battery. This was to throw off the spotters. But their best protection was the casements of earth-and-concrete twelve-and-a-half feet thick.

The affair between the battery and the warships had the color of a duel to it. When the Germans threw down the gauntlet you could see the gauntlet splash in the water. It was a range-finding shell. Then the shells started walking toward our warship, in a straight line. If you followed them on back you would eventually get to the battery. This was what our warship commanders were trying to do. It was a race between skills. If the Germans landed on the ship before our gunners could plot the line of their shells, then they would win. If our gunners could calculate more rapidly, then we would win.

Captain Waller, in command of the Tuscaloosa, held his $15,000,000 warship steady, setting it up as bait to keep the Germans shooting while his gunners worked out their calculations.

The destroyer—I could not identify it—stuck right with our cruiser. The splashes kept coming closer. Our ships did not move. The splashes started at five hundred yards off and then went quickly to three hundred yards. Now, I thought, the warships would move. But they remained silent and motionless. The next salvo would do it, the next one would get them, I was thinking. The next salvo blotted out the sides of the vessels in a whip of white water, throwing a cascade across the deck of the Tuscaloosa.

Now in this final second the race was at its climax. The Germans knew our ships would move. They had to guess which way, they had to race to correct range and deflection for the next salvo. Our ships had to guess what the Germans would think, and do the opposite.

The destroyer had one little last trick up its sleeve. And that tipped the whole duel our way. Its black gang down below mixed rich on fuel, and a gust of black smoke poured out of the stacks. The ship had turned into the wind, so that the smoke was carried backward. The Germans could not tell whether it was the wind doing that or the destroyer’s forward speed. They decided that it was forward speed and swung their guns, and straddled perfectly the position the destroyer would have occupied had it gone forward. But the destroyer had reversed engines and gone backward.

Now the game was up for the Huns. The warships swung around in their new positions and brought their guns to bear; their shells scored direct hits, and the Germans lay silently and hopelessly in their earth.

On the first beach we touched the air smelled sweet and clean with the sea. Clouds of sea gulls swooped over­head, filling the air with a whole twitter of flute notes as they complained of the invasion by American troops. There was bleak strength here, and bare wild blowy beauty, and death over every inch of it.

The Germans had sown every single inch of the soil with mines. In twenty-four hours our men had cleared only narrow paths, losing seventeen wounded and one dead in doing so.

They walked, slept, ate, lived and worked along those paths. When they walked they put one foot carefully before the other. When they lay along the paths to sleep they put rocks alongside themselves to keep from turning over.

We had landed in the early afternoon. The wind was dying then, and the black and gray smoke stood up in spires wherever one looked and hung in the gentle wind. Smoke came from planes that had been shot down and from mines being set off by mine detectors and from American guns and German shells. Normandy seemed to be burning.

Men were coming out of the sea continually and starting to work—digging, hammering, bulldozing, truck­ing, planning, ordering, surveying, shooting and being shot at. Amid the artillery and machine gun fire, and the rush and smack of shells, you could hear typewriters making their patient clatter and telephones ringing with homey businesslike sounds.

German prisoners were coming down one side of the road while American assault infantry were going up the other side. The Americans had that odd preoccupied look of men going into battle; but they were a fine, bold, brawny sight as they swung along.

 “Where are you going?” I asked one of them. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’m following the man ahead.” The man ahead was following the man ahead, too. Finally I asked the head of the column. “I’m following the column ahead,” he said.

I laughed and he laughed, but he laughed with a jubilant sound. “Well,” he told me, “it’s not as bad as it sounds. We’ve all got the same idea in this army, and if you just follow the man ahead you’re bound to get to where the doing is to be done.” He looked very tan and healthy as he said this, walking along with a long-legged slouch, chewing a slab of cheese from a ration tin as if it were a cud of tobacco. He was a soldier to be proud of.

Our men would go along until fired upon. Then they would investigate what was firing on them. If they had enough force on hand to solve the problem, as the military saying goes, they solved it. If not, they contained the problem and sent for what force was needed—air, artillery or ground reinforcement.

The first French people I saw were a family of typical Norman farmers—tall, blue-eyed, sturdy and very red-cheeked. American soldiers going up to the front had left the mark of their passing on the household’s dining table—chewing gum, hard candy and some cigarettes. We talked about the bombardment, and I asked how they managed to live through it.

 “An act of God,” they said. “But the Germans, they were worse than the bombardment.”

I had forgotten what the French word for “run” is, and I asked if the German soldiers billeted in their house had “promenaded away quickly” from the bombardment. They all laughed heartily.

 “The Germans,” one of the men said, “promenaded from the bombardment—ZIP! The way an airplane promenades through the air.”

The Germans were tough veteran fighters. You never got a chance to make more than one mistake against them. Yet they were willing to surrender and seemed only to want sufficiently strong inducement. They were veterans of duty in Russia. The Russians seem to have made them very tired of the war. They fight while they think they are winning, but it is not hard to hammer them into believing they are losing. Then they give up.

When I returned to the beach more German prisoners were being brought down to await transportation to England. The bay and its immense weight of shipping was spread out before them. A German officer, when he saw that vast mass of ships, lifted his hand and let it drop in a gesture of utter despair, as if to say, “Who can win against this?”

But the thing I remember most clearly about this long day was a particular moment in the twilight. It is a picture frozen in my mind—the way a scream sometimes seems frozen in the air.

I was aboard an LCT moving both American and German wounded from the murderous beach. The Nazi prisoners sat silently slumped side by side with the silent Americans. We were a few hundred yards offshore when there was a low-swooping air raid which came close enough for me to feel the desperate heat of one Hun plane. It hit like a bundle of fists against my face.

Very few of the men aboard stirred. Most of them were immersed in the apathy that seizes a man when he knows he has done all he can possibly do.

A large, sooty cloud of smoke sprang up from the beach as abruptly as if prodded. Our LCT trembled all over. There was debris in that cloud—big, black, torn chunks of it—and sitting on top of the cloud, poised delicately there for a moment many feet in the air, was a truck, all intact. It was silhouetted so sharply in the twilight that I could make out its wheels. Then the blasting sound of the explosion came clapping like a huge hand against our ears.

A German officer told me the war would be over in October because the Americans and Russians could not fight longer than that. I told him that all the enlisted men among the Germans I had spoken to had agreed the war would be over in October because Germany could not hold out longer.

“Your men seem very tired of fighting,” I said. “Do you have trouble convincing them that Hitler will lead them to a happy end?”

“German soldiers,” he said, “fight for the Fatherland and there is no separation possible in any German mind between Der Führer and Das Vaterland.”

As the officer delivered his pronouncement about Hitler and the German mind an enlisted man sitting next to him winked at me. I smiled broadly back at him.

Suddenly I saw a German Hein­kel seemingly stuck in the air above me. I saw the first of its stick of bombs drop into the water. Then I threw myself against the iron deck. The German officer clamped down on his emotions and the pain of his wounds and stood erect to show that no German was afraid. He posed himself insolently against the rail, smoking a cigarette in a careful, graceful, stiff-handed way while one knee wilted slightly in the manner approved for gentlemen posing before a mantel. I looked away in disgust from this Nazi superman across the open deck where the brown-blanketed seriously wounded lay in silent rows.

As we made our way out into the darkening sea we could see fires springing up from the town of Montebourg. The fires were the work of the Tuscaloosa—or, as I found out later when I got aboard the vessel, more specifically the work of the Army’s Lieutenant Joe PuGash, of Tampa, serving as spotter with a naval shore fire control party; and Lieutenants Theral O’Bryant, of Tampa, and William Braybrook, of Ohio, sitting deep in the ship, in the plotting room. These boys had been talking to each other over the radio.

“German infantry is entrenching itself in the main square of the town,” Joe said. “Let’s ginger them up.” The guns fired.

“Cease firing; mission successful, old boy,” said Joe.

Two roads lead into Montebourg. The Germans were shoveling reinforcements down from Valognes. Joe was changing places to get a line on these roads when suddenly in a very abrupt way he gave a target and cried, “Open fire!”

Immediately afterward there was silence from him.

O’Bryant sat listening to the silence from Joe for a long time. A British voice from a plane overhead brought him back to work.

“There are transports coming into town, troops getting out of trucks and taking up positions near a cemetery there.” The voice was tranquil and most British. “Would you care for a go at them?”

After the Tuscaloosa had fired a salvo the British voice lost most of its tranquility. “Beautiful!” it cried. “Oh, beautiful! What a lovely shot!”

It seems that ten trucks full of Huns had been blown across acres of field by a single straddle. The British voice abruptly regained its calm. “I’m afraid I’ll have to be off now,” it said. “My covering plane has been shot down and a Jerry is shooting at me. Good-bye all.”

“The best to you and thanks,” shouted O’Bryant. But he never heard the British voice again.

Instead he heard from Joe. The boy was back overlooking Montebourg.

“I couldn’t keep on spotting for you,” he explained. He sounded very tired. “The Germans had us in a barrel for two hours and if I had lifted my head to see what was going on I’d have got it knocked off.” Joe began running around all over the place, spotting infantry positions, troop movements, observation posts and strong points. “You sure shot the hell out of them that time,” he kept saying in his tired voice.

About the time we were huffing and clanking past the Tuscaloosa, O’Bryant came out on deck for a breather. He helped us watch Montebourg burn. “That Joe is sure building himself up a hot time there,” he said.

The wounded to whom I talked gave some idea of what the day had been like. A paratrooper captain said, “When I landed I broke my leg. I had spent two years training, and four seconds after I go to work I’m out of it. I rolled into some kind of ditch. There the krautburgers were shooting at me but they didn’t hit me. I waited in the ditch and thought, ‘Well, your total contribution to the war effort is that you spared the time of a man in the burying detail by finding your own grave.’ A German started coming toward me. ‘What’s the German for Kamerad,’ I wondered and remembered that Kamerad is the German for Kamerad. Then I thought, the hell with that. I’m going to get at least one lick in in this war. So I killed the German. I waited till he got close and aimed for his groin and walked my tommygun right up the middle to his chin. Then I passed out. But I got one. My training wasn’t altogether wasted.”

A naval officer, suffering from exposure, said: “The whole stern blew up. You know, it’s a funny thing. There was a kid blown higher than the mast. I saw him in the air, arms flailing around, legs kicking, and recognized his face in the air. That kid was picked up later and all he had was a broken leg.”

A glider pilot, shot down behind German lines, said, “I walked all night. I went toward where the guns were shooting and then I met a Frenchman. I gave him my rations and he gave me wine.

“Boy, did I get drunk! I walked through the whole German lines—and our lines, too—drunk as a goat and singing.”

There is no way to record all the events that take place in a typical beachhead day, not even in a typical beachhead hour. There are hundreds of thousands of men in and around this beachhead, and if each made a record of what startling violent things he saw the records would differ in hundreds of thousands of ways.

Ira Wolfert.

 

USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37), off of the Philadelphia Navy Yard, on Nov. 10, 1944. She is wearing camouflage Measure 32, Design 13d.

Operation Neptune, June 6, 1944, coast of Normandy. Target near Ozeville. On 3 June, Tuscaloosa steamed in company with the rest of Task Force 125 (TF 125) bound for the Normandy beaches. At 0550, 6 June, she opened fire with her 8 in (200 mm) battery, and three minutes later her 5 in (130 mm) guns engaged Fort Ile de Tatihou, Baie de la Seine. For the remainder of D-Day, coast defense batteries, artillery positions, troop concentrations, and motor transport all came under the fire of Tuscaloosa's guns, which were aided by her air spotters and by fire control parties attached to Army units on shore. VCS-7, a US Navy spotter squadron flying Supermarine Spitfire VBs and Seafire IIIs, was one of the units which provided targeting coordinates and fire control. Initial enemy return fire was inaccurate, but it improved enough by the middle of the day to force the cruiser to take evasive action.

A landing craft carries US troops to Utah Beach on D-Day.

Soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division wade onto the beach.

An aerial photograph of US troops landing at Utah Beach.

American casualty on Utah Beach.

Troops land on Utah Beach, June 1944.

US troops land on Utah Beach on D-Day.

A German 88mm gun points seaward from a casemate at Les Dunes de Varreville, Utah Beach, shortly after D-Day (June 6, 1944).

U.S. soldiers protect themselves from enemy fire as an 88 mm shell explodes on Utah Beach.

Troops leave the shelter of a seawall at Utah Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

Army medics rendering first aid to troops on Utah Beach, June 1944.

Normandy Invasion, Utah Beach, June 1944. Members of the U.S. Navy 2nd Beach Battalion catch a “breather” at their new “home” on the French beach, after hot action on beachhead. Photograph released 11 June 1944.

Normandy Invasion, Utah Beach, June 1944. Members of the U.S. Navy 2nd Beach Battalion catch a “breather” at their new “home” on the French beach, after hot action on beachhead. Note, the walkie-talkie in the foreground. Photograph released 11 June 1944.

Normandy Invasion, Utah Beach, June 1944. Members of the U.S. Navy 2nd Beach Battalion catch a “breather” at their new “home” on the French beach, after hot action on beachhead. Lone magazine comprises the this sailor’s library. Photograph released 11 June 1944.

Normandy Invasion, Utah Beach, June 1944. A U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman writes a letter, in a Normandy beachhead bunker, 11 June 1944. Possibly at Utah Beach.

US Navy Communication Command Post on Utah Beach, June 1944.

This was the scene at the easternmost of the two American beaches (Utah Beach) at about 3 p.m. on D-Day. The fighting had moved inland, but all along the seawall, which extends a considerable length of the beach, men dug themselves in - hospital corpsmen, beach battalion members, Sea Bees, and anyone whose work was on the beach itself. The beach first aid station was a short way down from here, and the wounded and dead are in the sand in front of the sea wall. The tide was out at this time, and the wounded could not be evacuated back to the ships because of the difficulty in getting landing craft in and out. An enemy artillery battery, located some distance inland from the beach but still in range, sent shells steadily over the Americans, impeding work. An ammunition truck was hit and burned at the beach’s far end. A lone LCI unloaded her troops and the men filed across the beach and started inland. In this section beach obstacles were not as formidable as in other areas, and the demolition parties were able to clear the way for landing craft with few losses. Painting, watercolor on paper by Mitchell Jamieson, 1944.

First Aid Station on the Beach D-Day. Painting, watercolor on paper by Mitchell Jamieson, 1944.

Utah Beach, June 1944.