Posted on 06/11/2007 12:17:14 AM PDT by LibWhacker
FOR Hein Severloh the ‘Longest Day’ meant nine hours constantly machine-gunning American soldiers as they attempted to land on Omaha Beach.
One image still brings tears to his eyes. A young American had run from his landing craft and sought cover behind a concrete block. Severloh, then a young lance-corporal in the German army in Normandy, aimed his rifle at the GI. He fired and hit the enemy square in the forehead. The American’s helmet flew away and rolled into the sea, his chin sank to his chest and he collapsed dead on the beach.
Tormented by the memory, Severloh now weeps at the thought of the unknown soldier’s death.
Severloh was safe in an almost impregnable concrete bunker overlooking the beach. He had an unimpeded view of the oncoming Allied forces. He was the last German soldier firing, and may have accounted for about 3,000 American casualties, almost three-quarters of all the US losses at Omaha. The Americans came to know him as the Beast of Omaha.
He had been saved from the waves of Allied bombing by the poor weather. The US aircrews were worried that if they allowed their bombs to fall too soon they might destroy their own landing ships. As they flew over they lingered before releasing their weapons, meaning the bombs often landed far behind the Nazi bunkers.
The Germans joked that the ‘Amis’ - their slang for the US forces - had merely bombed French cows and farmers rather than the German installations.
Alerted by the bombers, Severloh and the 29 others in his bunker rushed to their firing holes and prepared for the onslaught. Severloh, then just 20, gasped when he saw the ocean. He was confronted by what seemed to be a wall of Allied ships. He said: "My God. How am I going to get out of this mess?"
The veteran explained: "What could I do? I just thought that I was never going to make it to the rear. I thought that I was going to shoot for my very life. It was them or me - that is what I thought."
As the landing ships neared the beach, Severloh listened to the final orders from his commander, Lieutenant Berhard Frerking. They wanted to stop the Americans while they were still in the water and could not move easily. But if he fired too soon - while the soldiers were still some way out in the water - he risked missing them.
Frerking explained: "You must open fire when the enemy is knee-deep in the water and is still unable to run quickly."
Severloh had seen little action before. His previous stint on the Eastern Front had been cut short by tonsillitis. But he was anything but enthusiastic. Severloh said: "I never wanted to be in the war. I never wanted to be in France. I never wanted to be in that bunker firing a machine gun.
"I saw how the water sprayed up where my machine gun bursts landed, and when the small fountains came closer to the GIs, they threw themselves down. Very soon the first bodies were drifting in the waves of the rising tide. In a short time, all the Americans down there were shot."
He fired for nine hours, using up all the 12,000 machine-gun rounds. The sea turned red with the blood from the bodies. When he had no more bullets for the machine-gun, he started firing on the US soldiers with his rifle, firing off another 400 rifle rounds at the terrified GIs.
A leading German historical expert of the Second World War, Helmut Konrad Freiherr von Keusgen, believes Severloh may have accounted for 3,000 of the 4,200 American casualties on the day.
Severloh is less sure about the number, but said: "It was definitely at least 1,000 men, most likely more than 2,000. But I do not know how many men I shot. It was awful. Thinking about it makes me want to throw up. I almost emptied an entire infantry landing craft. The sea was red around it and I could hear an American officer shouting hysterically in a loudspeaker."
Lt-col Stuart Crawford, formerly of the Royal Tank Regiment, and a defence consultant, said it was entirely possible that a single German soldier had killed so many GIs.
He said: "I have fired that machine-gun. I did it as part of my training, and it has an extremely high rate of fire. He was in a position which was almost impervious to the weapons which the Americans could bring to bear on him. The Americans made the mistake of not landing tanks with the first wave of troops, so they had no support or protection."
I agree. Looks like Utah.
From the Brits' D-Day Museum site:
"The breakdown of US casualties was 1465 dead, 3184 wounded, 1928 missing and 26 captured. Of the total US figure, 2499 casualties were from the US airborne troops (238 of them being deaths). The casualties at Utah Beach were relatively light: 197, including 60 missing. However, the US 1st and 29th Divisions together suffered around 2000 casualties at Omaha Beach."
There was a total of @ 2000 casualties on Omaha. This includes wounded. This guy would have had to be responsible for every single US KIA (ignoring drownings, artillery/mortars, every other German soldier and friendly fire) and even that number wouldn't come close to what is claimed in this article.
You are SOOOOO right about that. If I hear one more time on tv, radio, etc. about the 30,000 dead in one day at G-Burg, or Antietam, etc., I am going to scream. Especially irksome coming from conservative people who should know better and who continuously lecture us on how well they “know my history,” i.e., Hannity and Limbaugh.
I’ll join with the others who are suspicious. The biggest question I have is.... What the hell were the other Germans doing while this guy was single-handedly holding off all of America and England? If this story is to be believed, then every other kraut on the beach was so poorly positioned/visually impaired/drunk that they were scoring one US casualty per 10,000 Germans.
If I was to bet, I would bet that this bozo ran and made up the story. It does tell you something about mass psychology that so many people believe the story.
see # 60.
We did try to get tanks ashore. All of theses amphibious tanks sank as they came off of the transports because of the choppy water. I think one tank actually made it ashore.
Great post.
There was a TV show a few years ago which described how many of the tanks had been swamped when they became oriented perpendicular to the direction of the waves (parallel to the beach). The question was, why did this happen? Divers were able to map the orientation of all of the tanks. It was found that they all pointed to the location of a church steeple on shore. The crews had been told to aim for this landmark, but as the current pushed the tanks farther and farther down the beach this instruction proved fatal as it caused the tanks to turn away from the direction of the waves.
Wasn’t that one memory of the shot to the forehead captured in the movie, Saving Private Ryan?
The first time I ever saw pictures of these barriers, it seemed as though a giant had dropped a thousand jacks on the beach.
Look what they got when they did take Monty's advice - Operation Market Garden.
In this sense, we can drop the “l” from glory.
Mosier does not say that Monty was infallible - he did make mistakes. But unlike some other generals, Monty tended to learn something from his mistakes. You will not agree with everything in the “Blitzkrieg Myth”, but you will find it an interesting read. For example, I didn’t realize until I read the book that the French had better tanks than the Germans at the beginning of the war.
I can imagine a number of scenarios where one bullet may have accounted for several casualties/deaths in the packed quarters of the landing craft.
Montgomery's gloryhounding and Churchill's exhortations notwithstanding, it was an underlying reality that Great Britain could not take another bloodbath like that of WWI. They had lost nearly a million of their best and brightest and were still paying the price a score of years later. It was understood that if there was heavy slogging with high casualties to be done, it was the Americans who would have to do it. They fought valiantly but had their losses started to mount they were fully prepared to sue for whatever peace they could get.
yes, that is a hard situation to say the least. It is just a shame that a large group of Germany soldiers were not willing to turn on a manical Hitler seeing that he was taking over sovereign countries and leading them all to utter ruin. Just one platoon, division or whatever march on Hilters headquarters secretly and quickly. Easy for me to write, but a very good idea.
Wow. Just wow...
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