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Posted on 06/06/2003 5:21:10 AM PDT by SAMWolf
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FReeper Foxhole  are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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UNLIKE what happens to other great battles, the passing of the years and the retelling of the story have softened the horror of Omaha Beach on D Day.  How they fought and what they suffered were also determined in detail during the field research. As published today, the map data showing where the troops came ashore check exactly with the work done in the field; but the accompanying narrative describing their ordeal is a sanitized version of the original field notes. This happened because the Army historians who wrote the first official book about Omaha Beach, basing it on the field notes, did a calculated job of sifting and weighting the material. So saying does not imply that their judgment was wrong. Normandy was an American victory; it was their duty to trace the twists and turns of fortune by which success was won. But to follow that rule slights the story of Omaha as an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster. On this two-division front landing, only six rifle companies were relatively effective as units. They did better than others mainly because they had the luck to touch down on a less deadly section of the beach. Three times that number were shattered or foundered before they could start to fight. Several contributed not a man or bullet to the battle for the high ground. But their ordeal has gone unmarked because its detail was largely ignored by history in the first place. The worst-fated companies were overlooked, the more wretched personal experiences were toned down, and disproportionate attention was paid to the little element of courageous success in a situation which was largely characterized by tragic failure. The official accounts which came later took their cue from this secondary source instead of searching the original documents. Even such an otherwise splendid and popular book on the great adventure as Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day misses the essence of the Omaha story.  Men from Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division are in the initial wave to assult the beach at OMAHA. In everything that has been written about Omaha until now, there is less blood and iron than in the original field notes covering any battalion landing in the first wave. Doubt it? Then let's follow along with Able and Baker companies, 116th Infantry, 29th Division. Their story is lifted from my fading Normandy notebook, which covers the landing of every Omaha company. ABLE Company riding the tide in seven Higgins boats is still five thousand yards from the beach when first taken under artillery fire. The shells fall short. At one thousand yards, Boat No. 5 is hit dead on and foundered. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and twenty others paddle around until picked up by naval craft, thereby missing the fight at the shore line. It's their lucky day. The other six boats ride unscathed to within one hundred yards of the shore, where a shell into Boat No. 3 kills two men. Another dozen drown, taking to the water as the boat sinks. That leaves five boats. Lieutenant Edward Tidrick in Boat No. 2 cries out: "My God, we're coming in at the right spot, but look at it! No shingle, no wall, no shell holes, no cover. Nothing!"  At low tide, the assaulting troops had to cross more than 300 meters of completely exposed beach to gain entrance to the Vierville draw. His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of the target. They stare but say nothing. At exactly 6:36 A.M. ramps are dropped along the boat line and the men jump off in water anywhere from waist deep to higher than a man's head. This is the signal awaited by the Germans atop the bluff. Already pounded by mortars, the floundering line is instantly swept by crossing machine-gun fires from both ends of the beach. Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot. Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it. The less rugged or less clever seek the cover of enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are knocked off by machine-gun fire. Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: "Advance with the wire cutters!" It's futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.  American assault troops in a landing craft huddle behind the protective front of the craft as it nears a beachhead, on the Northern Coast of France. Smoke in the background is Naval gunfire supporting the land. 6 June 1944. Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea. Along the beach, only one Able Company officer still lives -- Lieutenant Elijah Nance, who is hit in the heel as he quits the boat and hit in the belly by a second bullet as he makes the sand. By the end of ten minutes, every sergeant is either dead or wounded. To the eyes of such men as Private Howard I. Grosser and Private First Class Gilbert G. Murdock, this clean sweep suggests that the Germans on the high ground have spotted all leaders and concentrated fire their way. Among the men who are still moving in with the tide, rifles, packs, and helmets have already been cast away in the interests of survival. To the right of where Tidrick's boat is drifting with the tide, its coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered wheel, the seventh craft, carrying a medical section with one officer and sixteen men, noses toward the beach. The ramp drops. In that instant, two machine guns concentrate their fire on the opening. Not a man is given time to jump. All aboard are cut down where they stand.  Members of an American landing party lend helping hands to other members of their organization whose landing craft was sunk be enemy action of the coast of France. These survivors reached Utah Beach, near Cherbourg, by using a life raft. Photographer: Weintraub, 6 June 1944 By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon. No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example. Above all others stands out the first-aid man, Thomas Breedin. Reaching the sands, he strips off pack, blouse, helmet, and boots. For a moment he stands there so that others on the strand will see him and get the same idea. Then he crawls into the water to pull in wounded men about to be overlapped by the tide. The deeper water is still spotted with tide walkers advancing at the same pace as the rising water. But now, owing to Breedin's example, the strongest among them become more conspicuous targets. Coming along, they pick up wounded comrades and float them to the shore raftwise. Machine-gun fire still rakes the water. Burst after burst spoils the rescue act, shooting the floating man from the hands of the walker or killing both together. But Breedin for this hour leads a charmed life and stays with his work indomitably. By the end of one half hour, approximately two thirds of the company is forever gone. There is no precise casualty figure for that moment. There is for the Normandy landing as a whole no accurate figure for the first hour or first day. The circumstances precluded it. Whether more Able Company riflemen died from water than from fire is known only to heaven. All earthly evidence so indicates, but cannot prove it.  OMAHA BEACH France Joseph Gary Sheahan, 1944 By the end of one hour, the survivors from the main body have crawled across the sand to the foot of the bluff, where there is a narrow sanctuary of defiladed space. There they lie all day, clean spent, unarmed, too shocked to feel hunger, incapable even of talking to one another. No one happens by to succor them, ask what has happened, provide water, or offer unwanted pity. D Day at Omaha afforded no time or space for such missions. Every landing company was overloaded by its own assault problems. By the end of one hour and forty-five minutes, six survivors from the boat section on the extreme right shake loose and work their way to a shelf a few rods up the cliff. Four fall exhausted from the short climb and advance no farther. They stay there through the day, seeing no one else from the company. The other two, Privates Jake Shefer and Thomas Lovejoy, join a group from the Second Ranger Battalion, which is assaulting Pointe du Hoc to the right of the company sector, and fight on with the Rangers through the day. Two men. Two rifles. Except for these, Able Company's contribution to the D Day fire fight is a cipher.
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Sleep well
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bentfeather
Here's to a tactical nuclear softening up for any future amphibious landing on contested ground.
29th Division Monument Camp Blanding, Florida
29th Division Monument Veirville, France
In September, 1943, when the United States Fifth Army landed at Salerno, Italy, and General Douglas MacArthur's forces captured Salamaua in New Guinea, the American navy totaled 14,072 vessels. Of these boats, 12,964, or 92% of the entire U.S. Navy, were designed by Higgins Industries, Incorporated; 8,865 were built at the Higgins plants in New Orleans, La.
Founder and president of this remarkable company was Andrew Jackson Higgins, an outspoken, rough-cut, hot-tempered Irishman with an incredible imagination and the ability to turn wild ideas into reality. He hated bureaucratic red tape, loved bourbon, and was the sort who tended to knock down anything that got in his way. To the Navy's Bureau of Ships, which favored the big Eastern-seaboard shipyards, Higgins was an arrogant small boat builder from the South - a thorn in its side. To the Marine Corps, which desperately needed an effective amphibious assault craft, he was a savior.
Higgins rose to international prominence during World War II for his design and mass production of naval combat motorboats - boats that forever changed the strategy of modern warfare. Thanks to Higgins, the Allies no longer had to batter coastal forts into submission, sweep harbors of mines, and take over enemy-held ports before they could land an assault force. "Higgins boats" gave them the ability to transport thousands of men and hundreds of tons of equipment swiftly through the surf to less-fortified beaches, eliminating the need for established harbors.
Higgins designed and produced two basic classes of military craft. The first class consisted of high-speed PT boats, which carried antiaircraft machine guns, smoke-screen devices, depth charges, and Higgins-designed compressed-air-fired torpedo tubes. Also in this class were the antisubmarine boats, dispatch boats, 170-foot freight supply vessels, and other specialized patrol craft produced for the Army, Navy and Maritime Commission.
The second class consisted of various types of Higgins landing craft (LCPs, LCPLs, LCVPs, LCMs) constructed of wood and steel that were used in transporting fully armed troops, light tanks, field artillery, and other mechanized equipment and supplies essential to amphibious operations. It was these boats that made the D-Day landings at Normandy, Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, Leyte and Guam and hundreds of lesser-known assaults possible. Without Higgins' uniquely designed craft there could not have been a mass landing of troops and material on European shores or on the beaches of the Pacific islands, at least not without a tremendously higher rate of Allied casualties.
As late as 1930 Higgins was involved in the lumber importing and exporting business. By 1940 he was producing workboats and prototype landing craft in a small warehouse located behind his St. Charles Avenue showroom. When the government began ordering his craft for military purposes, Higgins expanded into eight separate plants in the city, employing more than 20,000 workers. At the peak of production, the combined output of his plants exceeded 700 boats a month. His total output for the Allies during World War II was 20,094 boats, a production record for which Higgins Industries several times received the Army-Navy "E", the highest award that the armed forces could bestow upon a company.
Higgins was the ideal person for the needs of the time. In World War II, with its massive contracts, his strengths - design and rapid production - were all-important. Administrative weaknesses were suddenly irrelevant - the war offered him opportunity. Had the Japanese not bombed Pearl Harbor, Higgins probably would have remained a successful, but small, southern boat builder. Because of the war, he rapidly became an internationally known figure (even Hitler was aware of Higgins, calling him the "new Noah").
In his 1944 Thanksgiving Day address to the nation, General Dwight D. Eisenhower said "Let us thank God for Higgins Industries, management, and labor which has given us the landing boats with which to conduct our campaign." Andrew Jackson Higgins' influence on amphibious warfare and his contribution toward the Allied victory in World War II cannot be overstressed.
The PA33-21 Higgins boat (LCVP) on display in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion of the National D-Day Museum.
The Higgins Boat was a 36 foot wooden boat designated as a Landing Craft Vehicle, Personnel (LCVP). The LCVP was used to ferry troops, small vehicles and supplies from an anchored transport ship to the beach and back. The design by Andrew J. Higgins was awarded US Patent # 2,341,866 on 15 February 1944.
On a typical run to the beach, an LCVP could carry 36 combat troops or about 8,000 pounds of supplies. They were 36 feet 3 inches in length and 10 feet 10 inches in width (the "beam" in nautical talk). Their displacement was about 9 tons and they could make about 12 knots under load. They were powered by a six cylinder, water cooled Gray Marine Diesel engine generating 225 HP turning a single propeller.
One of the more interesting aspects of the LCVP was their shallow draft. For a boat as large as the LCVP, they only drew 3 feet of water at the stern, 2 feet midships, and an incredible 2 inches at the bow. The standard crew compliment was a coxswain (the "driver"), a motor mechanic, and two other crewmen, one for the bow hook and one for the stern hook (these hooks were used to raise and lower the boat into the ship and for other purposes.)
[Editor's note: This photograph is courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library. It was originally published by Higgins Company in their "The Eureka News Bulletin" in the spring of 1944. Click on the photo for a link to their feature page on the Higgins Boats.]
The boats were carried on the deck of their transport and were lowered into the water by the ship's cranes. Once in the water, the boats were filled with troops via nets hung over the side of the ship or the cranes were used to fill them with other supplies. On command, the boats headed for their designated landing spots on the beach.
The LCVP had a large ramp in the bow that dropped as the boat approached the shore. In theory, the ramp would drop onto a sandy beach and allow the troops to disembark rapidly. In practice, the coral reefs of the Pacific often meant that the troops would have to leave the boat as much as 100 yards from the shore. Due to the weight of their combat gear, the depth of the water, and the proximity of hostile forces, many died before reaching the beach.
On leaving the beach, now loaded with returning troops, or wounded, the two crewmen would manually crank the ramp up, sometimes under fire from the shore. The boat would back out, turn and head for the ship.
The boats were lightly armored on the ramp and from the ramp back to the coxswain's position. The armor plating was typically quarter inch steel which was only effective against small arms fire. The boats also carried two .30 caliber machine guns for self defense.
Higgins Industries produced the majority of the LCVPs used during WWII but the design was licensed to 21 other manufacturers who produced a total of 23,398 of these remarkable boats during the course of the war.
God Bless
Thank you Gator, "to a form of independent duty", I really like that.
Well said SAM and this is just one of the reasons you are appreciated so much.
I'll drink to that!
HAPPY 6 MONTH ANNIVERSARY SAMwolf AND THE FREEPER FOXHOLE!!
Thanx for the heads up, snippy! *giggle* This definitely deserved bringing up.
Thank you for your tireless efforts in bringing the Foxhole to life and keeping it running, SAM. I know it takes a lot of time to put these threads together each day. Well done!!
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