Able Company, riding the tide in seven Higgins boats
(personnel landing craft), is still 5000 yards from the beach when it first
comes under enemy artillery fire. The shells fall short. Soon, however, Boat
NU. 5 reaches 1000 yards (within enemy range) and takes a direct hit; she
founders. Six men drown before help arrives. Second Lieutenant Edward Gearing and
twenty others paddle around until picked up by Naval craft, thus missing the
fight at the shoreline. The other six boats ride unscathed to within 100 yards
of the shore, until a shell into Boat No. 3 kills two men. Another dozen, taking
to the water as their boat sinks, are drowned. 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!" His men are at the sides of the boat, straining for a view of
the target. At 6:36 a.m. ramps are dropped along the line of boats, and the men
jump off into water anywhere from waist-deep to higher than a man's head. This
is the signal awaited by the Germans on top of the bluff.
Already pounded by mortars, the floundering assault line is
now swept by crossing machine-gun fire from both ends of the beach. Able
Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each landing craft, the center
file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men
out try to do this, but they are ripped apart before they can make five yards.
The mortally wounded sink at once, and even the lightly wounded—doomed by
overloaded and waterlogged packs—are drowned. From Boat No. 1 all hands jump
off in water over their heads, and most of them are instantly carried down. Ten
or so manage to clutch at the sides of the boat in an effort to stay afloat.
The same thing happens to the men in Boat No. 4. Half of them are lost to gunfire
or tide before anyone can get ashore.
All order has vanished from Able Company before it has
touched ground or fired a shot. Already the churning sea runs red. Most of those
who jump into shallow water are quickly knocked down by a German bullet.
Weakened by fear and shock, they cannot rise again and drown in a few feet of
water. Some drag themselves ashore and collapse from total exhaustion, only to
be overtaken by the tide’s waves and drowned. A few move safely through the
rain of bullets to the beach, realize that they cannot hold there and retreat
to the water for cover. With faces turned upward to keep their nostrils out of
the water, they creep toward the land as the tide rises. That is how most of
the survivors make it. The less rugged or less resourceful seek the cover of
enemy obstacles moored along the upper half of the beach and are finished off
by ceaseless 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 into the
water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Pfc. Leo J. Nash.
The Private hears the words gasped by the dying Lieutenant: "Advance with
the wire cutters!" The order is futile—Nash has no cutters. To speak, Tidrick
has raised himself up on his hands for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the
sand, sees him ripped by bullets. From the cliff above, German machine-gunners
are shooting into the survivors as from a rooftop. Captain Taylor N. Fellers
and Lt. Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They are loaded with a section of
thirty men in Boat No. 6. No one saw the craft go down. How each man on board
met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along
the beach and it is assumed that the others, too, were claimed by the sea.
Along the beach only one Able Company officer still lives: Lt.
Elijah Nance. He is hit in the heel as he quits his boat and hit again in the
belly as he reaches the sand. By the end of ten minutes every sergeant is
either dead or wounded. To the eyes of some survivors, this clean sweep
suggests that the Germans have spotted all the leaders and concentrated fire on
them. 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 adrift (it’s coxswain lying dead next to the shell-shattered
wheel), the seventh landing craft noses toward the beach. It carries a medical
section of one officer and sixteen men. The ramp is dropped. In that moment,
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. By the end of fifteen
minutes, Able Company still has not fired a weapon. No one gives any orders.
The few able-bodied survivors move or not, as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. Yet a few men are remembered for their valor.
The first-aid man, Thomas Breedin, stands out among all
others in Able Company. Reaching the sands, he strips off pack, blouse, helmet
and boots. For a moment he stands there, so that others on the beach will see what
he's about to do and follow suit. Then he crawls back into the water to pull in
wounded men before they can be drowned by the tide. The deeper water is still
spotted with "tide walkers" advancing at the same slow rate as the
rising water. But now, moved by Breedin's example, the stronger among them risk
making themselves more conspicuous targets—they pick up fallen comrades and
float them to the shore, pulling them and their life vests like a raft.
Machine-gun fire is raking the water. Burst after burst wrecks the rescue attempts,
shooting the floating soldier from the hands of the walker, or killing both of
them. But Breedin, for this hour, leads a charmed life and stays with his work
indomitably. By the end of half an hour, approximately two thirds of the
company is gone forever. There are no precise casualty figures for this first
half hour or for the first day. Whether more Able Company riflemen died from
enemy fire than from water was never ascertained.
By the end of the first hour, a number of survivors have
crawled across the sand to the foot of the bluff, into a narrow sanctuary out
of the line of fire. There they lie all day, some wounded, all exhausted and
unarmed, too shocked even to talk to one another. No one happens by to offer
water or succor. D-Day at Omaha Beach provides neither time nor space for such
missions—every landing group is overwhelmed 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 have worked their way to a shelf some yards up the face of the
cliff. Four fall, exhausted from the short climb. They stay there through the
day, seeing no one else from their company. The other two, Pvts. Jake Shefer
and Thomas Lovejoy, join a group from the 2d Ranger Battalion, which is
attacking Pointe du Hoe to the right of the company sector, and fight with the
Rangers throughout the day. Two men, two rifles— the sum total of Able
Company's firepower on D-Day. Baker Company is scheduled to land twenty-six
minutes after Able, on the same sector, to bring support and reinforcement. A full
load of trouble on the way in destroys the schedule.
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