German Guns Pinned Every Man to the Sand at Omaha, Then the Destroyers Came In Almost Aground

By mid-morning on June 6, 1944, the German rifleman on the bluff above Omaha Beach was certain that the invasion before him had already failed. From the concrete surface he stood on, the sandy strip 60 meters below was covered with people who could not move. He had a word for what he was looking at, and it was a good word for a soldier.

Before the end of the day, he sent a message on the field phone that contained a completely different word.  He meant every word.  This is the story of the strongpoints that held two American divisions at the waterline at Omas .  This is also the story of nine US Navy destroyers .  They came so close that their pits dragged along the bottom, and then opened fire on these bunkers from a distance of several hundred yards from the beach.

Men in concrete were told for two years that the sea was their strongest place.  In the end, you will find out exactly what one German command post put on the wire that day.  And why the officers above him stopped answering phone calls. It was the land that made Omaha what it was.  The beach stretches for about 4 miles in a gentle curve.

Flat sand at low tide, then pebble beach, seawall in places .  And behind all this is a line of cliffs from 100 to 170 feet high.  There are only a few ways from the beach . Planners called them gaps.  Everyone climbs inland to the village.  There were five of them in Omas. If you wanted to get vehicles out of the sand, you had to go through gaps.

The Germans knew this as well as the people who went ashore .  So they built their defenses around the gaps.  They built it for side fire.    The strongholds were called Widerstandsnest, resistance nests.  Each of them was marked with a number on the map. The nest of the 62 support was located on a spur above the Colville Gap at the eastern end.

And it was the largest and deadliest position on the entire beach.  62 was the worst of them.  61 covered the Fox Green sector next to it.  At the western end, above the Vierville Strait, were the 71st and 72nd positions.  Their guns were not pointed out to sea where a warship would expect them. They were aimed along the sand so that a person going ashore would never find themselves in front of the muzzle.

He was nearby, and the fire was coming at him from the flank along the beach.  The thick concrete walls faced the water.  The open mouths of the casemates were directed sideways towards the people.  There were about 40 men in Resistance Nest 62, most from the 716th Infantry Division and a smaller group from the 352nd. One of them was a soldier named Hein Severloch, and he was standing behind an MG 42 machine gun on a hill overlooking the beach.

His task, and the task of the entire position, was also to call for fire for the artillery further behind.  About 3 miles inland, at Houttuynia, there was a battery of 10.5 cm field howitzers, and the men of the 62nd Battalion had telephone lines and sighting stakes to fire at any part of the sand they chose. The machine gun makes the beach dangerous.

Tie him to a howitzer battery and the beach becomes a trap. Severloch led the fire for most of the morning. He later said that over 2,000 men fell before his cannon that day, and he fired 12,000 machine-gun rounds and a considerable amount of rifle ammunition before he was forced to retreat. Historians disagree with this figure.

The total number of American casualties along the entire 6 miles of Omaha, killed, wounded, and missing combined, is approximately 2,400. So, the fact that one gunner accounted for most of them is not credible.  There was no doubt that from where he sat, and from other guns firing along the same beach, the sand below looked like a defeat the enemy was suffering in real time.

It was confidence in concrete.    The German command believed for the first hours that its wall was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.  They had reason to believe so. The people on the beach were in a worse situation than almost anyone above them could understand.  The two divisions that landed at Omaha were the 1st Infantry Division, Big Red, in the eastern half and the 29th Infantry Division in the western half.

By mid-morning, both were stuck at the waterline.  The plan promised them an already broken beach.  Heavy bombers were to break through the defenses. Naval bombardment was supposed to destroy the strongholds.  A wave of armored vehicles, floating tanks, was to come up ahead of the infantry and fire on it.

Almost none of this went as planned. The bombers, fearing to hit their own people, took a long time to land and placed their cargo deep inland on an empty field.    The naval bombardment before the landings was brief, only 40 minutes, and it lifted off the beach and moved inland just as the first waves touched land, just as the strongpoints came back to life.

Many amphibious tanks went too far into the rough sea and sank before reaching the sand. People who were supposed to land on a destroyed shore instead ended up on a intact one.  Captain Harry Sanders, who commanded the destroyer squadron on the high seas, made this clear in a letter written about 2 weeks later.  “ The landing,” he said, “was hampered by the inability of the Air Force to destroy mortars, light guns, and machine gun nests.

So imagine the problem at 9:00 AM as it would be felt by a soldier on a pebble.  The infantry lies behind a low stone rampart, because standing on their feet means flanking fire. The tide is approaching .  Every hour the water rises and the strip of dry sand behind them becomes narrower, forcing more people to crowd onto the same trampled ground.

The engineers, whose job it is to blow up the wire and clear the piles from the beach, are destroyed before they can set their charges.  The few tanks that reached the shore were stuck at the foot of the embankments, unable to climb, taking hits from guns they could not see.  And the artillery that should have supported them all is still standing in landing craft on the shore, because there is no safe piece of beach to land on .

The people at Omas had almost no heavy firepower of their own that they could apply to the bluff.  Every gun that could have breached the bunker was either at the bottom of the bunker… strait or still afloat.  There was firepower on the high seas , and very great, but the plan tied their hands.  The heavy ships were there.

The battleship Texas was standing in the western fire support lane.  At 10:50 that morning, he opened fire on the German battery at Pointe du Occidental, firing 255 14- inch shells in 34 minutes.  It was the longest continuous shelling of her war.  A battleship firing a shell weighing almost a ton can destroy a stationary battery from a distance of several miles.

What he can’t do is pick off one machine gun nest on a cliff without risking those lying a hundred yards below. Big guns were built for big targets, and the targets that pressed the infantry were small, scattered, and close.  Another problem was the order. To avoid dropping shells on their own troops, the fire support ships were ordered to cease fire as soon as the first waves approached the shore, and at 6:20 a.m.

a general ceasefire was declared.  So throughout the worst of the morning, the guns that could have helped stood silently as their crews watched.  The beach was filling up and stopping.  The captains of destroyers on the high seas were becoming less and less willing to obey. Opinions differ as to who violated the ceasefire first: “Karmik” or ” McCook”.

Maybe it does n’t matter. Both of them did this on their own orders , even before the squadron gave the order to approach. It was this gap that was filled by destroyers.  And it’s worth pinpointing why the ship could do what people on the sand couldn’t.  The destroyer carried 5-inch guns, rapid-fire and flat-jet, and she carried plenty of ammunition for them.

More importantly, the ship could move.  The bunker is stationary.  Its walls are angled to deflect fire from one direction, and its cannons are aimed along fixed paths.  The destroyer, which came close from the seaward side, was in the only place the position was built to ignore, and it could have been hit by a shell into the open mouth of the casemate that jutted out along the beach.

The concrete was thick with water. It was as thin as sand.  A ship that was close enough could fire at the thin part. The squadron on the high seas was the 18th Destroyer Squadron , a fire support group for Omaha under the command of Captain Harry Sanders, a man known to his sailors as “Sevvy.”  He carried his flag on the destroyer Frankford.

That morning, he had nine American destroyers under his command: Frankford , Carmick, Doyle, McCook, Emmons, Baldwin , Harding, Satterlee, and Thompson, working alongside several British destroyers in the same line.  They spent the early morning shelling coordinates on the map from a greater distance, which is a cautious way of fighting and almost useless when you can’t see if you’re hitting anything.

Around 9:00 a.m., watching the shore crumble, Sanders made a decision that would matter.  He ordered his destroyers to approach.  To cease shelling according to plan, close the shore, advance as far as possible across the water, find the guns holding back the infantry, and destroy them on sight .

These were ocean-going warships with a draft that required deep water, and they would go straight to shore until the depth below them ended.  They approached within 800-1000 yards and several of them touched bottom and continued to fire. anyway, sitting with their holes dragging on the sand of France.  Sanders described his own day in the same banal terms as everything else.

His destroyers, he wrote, “ came within 800 to 1,000 yards of the beach and spent the day knocking out these guns.” “A newspaper correspondent , watching from the shore, wrote that the Germans were close enough to hit the ships with rifle bullets , and they did.    An army engineer who had landed in the first wave at the eastern end of the beach looked out and saw the Frankfurt sailing straight out to sea, so close that he was sure she had been sunk, and he ran aground to save the crew.

Instead, he turned and sailed parallel to the sand, pressing tightly against the shoal, his guns firing all the way west.  Once they got that close, the destroyers stopped being artillery and turned into snipers with 5- inch guns. Near the western shoals, the Carmick, under Commander Robert Beer, discovered a group of American tanks stuck at the base of the Vierville exit, unable to advance and firing at something on the bluff above them.

Beer couldn’t talk to the tankers, so he watched them instead. Her action report describes exactly how it worked.  A tacit cooperation was established, it says, during which they fired at a target on the cliff above them, and then we fired several volleys at the same location.  The tanks were moving. The ship was moving in partnership, the tank…

» The destroyer’s guidance and fire punched the first real hole in Vierville’s defenses. Frankford did the same to the lone tank on the eastern beach, aligning fire with the tank’s shell landings , as the tank crew could see targets that the ship could not .  The McCook, under the command of Lieutenant Commander Ralph Raimi, worked the rocks at the western end and left an entry about it in her logbook, which is almost obtuse.

He opened fire on the pillbox, which, according to her own words, was firing on the beach, and fired until the pillbox was destroyed by a direct hit.  She reported knocking one enemy gun off the edge of a cliff and watching another one being hit and thrown into the air.  He came so close that dozens of landing craft huddled behind his hull to take cover from the fire coming from the cliff.

Later, he destroyed a 75mm gun position in one of the resistance nests, and around noon, he threw a heavy artillery gun from a cliff ledge near Sector Charlie.  3 miles west of the main beach at Pointe du Occ, a separate battle took place in the same manner. Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder led the 2nd Ranger Battalion up a 30-meter cliff to destroy a battery of heavy guns.

The guns were moved.  So Rudders spent the day holding a piece of the clifftop from counterattacks with dwindling men and almost no ammunition. The Rangers had a Marine fire control team with them, which called for assistance.  The officer in charge of this sector recorded his answer as the only solution.  I immediately ordered Satterley to close the point and fire on the cliff tops.

His report stated: ” Sutterly”, followed by ” Thompson” and “Harding”, repelled several German counterattacks that would otherwise have killed a battalion of Rangers.  During the day, the destroyers of the 18th Squadron fired about 5,000 rounds of 5-inch caliber, most of which were from a distance of 1,000 yards. For the men lying on the sand, the arrival of the ships was something they felt before they understood.

James Knight, an engineer with the 299th Engineer Battalion, was pinned down on the shoreline late that morning, sandwiched between fire from the bluffs and the tide behind him.  He looked up and saw a destroyer standing in the shallow water behind him, firing over his head at the German strongpoints.  Shortly thereafter, he and the people around him rose from the beach and moved inland.

The ships paid for being so close.  The Baldwin received two hits in quick succession from a shore battery, one of which blew a hole in the main deck about 8 inches and a foot wide, although the shells exploded on impact and no one on board was injured.    A destroyer standing motionless in shallow water within rifleshot of a protected coast is an easy target, and the captains knew it.

They stayed anyway.  They agreed among themselves that Omaha was an emergency , worth spending more than half of the ammunition on , no matter what the order said about conserving it.  Now go back to the cliff to the confidence in the concrete and watch it fall apart.  The men at the strongpoints built their war around a fixed wall of fire along the fortified beach, and for the first few hours it worked.

What they didn’t plan for was a warship standing a few hundred yards off the sand, motionless and firing straight into the only side of the bunker that was never supposed to be hit.  The guns shelling the beach began to shoot down one by one the enemy from the side and from the sea, from which their concrete was directed.

Somewhere beyond the beach, a German regimental command post called and reported: “The ships’ guns,” it said, “ are pounding our strong points, and we are running out of ammunition .”  “There was no answer.” The line has already been cut. That’s the verdict, and it came from the people who were winning. Try to believe in morning confidence.

At dawn, the German command believed that the wall had stopped the landing, and the report up the chain indicated this.  By the end of the day, the commander of the 352nd Division, General Dietrich Kreiss, was reporting to his core that his coastal positions were lost and that he could hold off the enemy for at most one more day.

Those who had a good word for what they saw on the beach at 9:00 a.m. were reporting over their own radio network by evening that they couldn’t hold back.  One thing has changed in the meantime. The ships arrived.  This is where honesty is important, because the destroyers did not capture Omaha Beach, and no serious information claims that they did.

The beach was occupied by a large number of people who were simultaneously doing heavy work. Take, for example, Resistance Nest 61, a strongpoint with an 88mm gun in the Fox Green sector.  It was penetrated mostly by American Sherman tanks, which took out its main gun within the first half hour. The rest was the work of a staff sergeant named Stroyny, who took a bazooka against an anti-tank gun and fired shell after shell until the ammunition depot exploded.

Gaps in the wire and obstacles were blown up by combat sappers, who suffered huge losses to do so .  Those who actually climbed the cliffs and penetrated the strongpoints were the infantry, who moved in small groups up the slopes between the ledges, led by junior officers and sergeants who simply got up and walked.

The destroyers tipped the scales, which were very close to tipping in the wrong direction at the very hour they were closest to.  Around 9:00 a.m., Omaha was failing. The infantry could not stand.  The sappers couldn’t clear, and the tanks couldn’t go up.  No artillery reached the shore to help them.  At this hour, the destroyers almost ran aground and began dismantling the strongpoints .

They held it for over an hour. The pressure on the sand eased enough for people to stand up and move.  The destroyer couldn’t climb the cliff or clear… the minefield.  What it could do was fire a cannon that stopped those who could, and it did so over and over again from a greater distance than any warship of its size had any right to do.

The people on the sand knew where the help came from.  When the commander of the First Infantry Division, General Clarence Huebner, went ashore late in the afternoon and surveyed what the beach was like, he sent a message to General Omar Bradley that contained nothing cautious.  “ Thank God,” it said , “for the United States Navy.”  ” He wasn’t the only one who put it on paper.

”  Colonel Mason, the division chief of staff, wrote to the admiral in charge of fire support that he was firmly convinced that their supporting fire from the ships had helped them get there, and that without this artillery fire they would certainly not have crossed those beaches.    The beachhead, who spent the morning watching the destroyers work the rocks, said the same thing, but in simpler terms.

The few naval destroyers that were there, he believed, probably saved the invasion .  Bradley himself spent part of the morning on a cruiser off the coast, all but ordering the entire landing at Omaha to be abandoned and its follow-on troops sent to another beach.  He was denied this report of movement from the sand, a movement aided by destroyer fire.

Changes on the ground can be measured by what movement caused it.  During the morning nothing came out of Omaha except people on foot, who crept up the slopes in ones and twos.  During the day, passages began to open.  Engineers and infantry cleared the exit from Colville, and then others, destroyers and tanks, knocked out the last guns covering them.

And for the first time, the technique collided with the ground.” from the sand and inland.  By dark, the beachhead had become thin, only about a mile deep in places, and far from where he had planned to place it. But he was solid .  The old man, he held on .  The following divisions, which Bradley had almost turned away, advanced behind him.

The battleship Texas , which had spent the morning on heavy batteries, spent part of the day firing her 14-inch shells at the Vierville Shoal to help open it.  Heavy ships, destroyers, and men on the slopes turned the beach, which was crumbling at 9:00 a.m. , into a beachhead that could not be pushed back into the sea.  The German gunner on the cliff was sure of everything he saw.

By dusk it was gone.  He started the day with 2 years of training behind him, a concrete wall built just for this, a beach full of people who couldn’t move, and a kind word for what he had observed. He ended it with his guns falling off a cliff out to sea, his command post shouting into a broken telephone about ship fire and empty ammunition , and his division commander telling Cole that the coast was lost.

The Omas verdict was not written by an American.  It was spoken into a German field telephone by people who, an hour ago, were sure that they had already won.  The wall on Omas was real.  People who went ashore and paid a high price for it.  What shattered the confidence behind that wall at the one hour when it mattered most was a line of destroyers that came to the edge of the sand and refused to go.

If your father or grandfather served in Omaha on the beach or on one of the ships on the high seas, leave his name and his unit below, for these names are a chronicle that continues. And if you’ve ever served aboard a destroyer or know the guns these ships carried, tell us what you know.    The number of men who fought on this beach is decreasing every year, and this is one of the places where their history still lives on.