roanoke.com

"THE FOXHOLE SHAKES"

By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994

Around 50 Company H men had been killed or wounded on the beach, but Murphy Scot and others - including his two friends, Joe Cowan and Leo Rychleski - made it safely to the German trenches and pillboxes being built along the base of the bluffs. They waited, trying to decide what to do next. Somehow, Scott's squad hadn't lost one piece of equipment or round of ammunition on its way in.

AP Photo

They weren't there long when Gen. Norman "Dutch" Cota, the 29th's assistant commander, and Col. Charles Canham, commander of the 116th Infantry, came along. Canham had been wounded in the hand and his arm was in a sling. He held a pistol in the other hand.

"If you're going to get killed, let's get killed inland," Cota told the men.

The naval bombardment had set the grass along the beach on fire and the smoke offered protection from the gunners. With two machine guns and two mortars and about 50 riflemen from B, C, and G companies and the 5th Rangers, the men began to move off the beach. They put on gas masks to get through the smoke from the fires.

During the trip up the bluff, Leo Rychleski disappeared. He was later found dead. Scott thinks he may have been killed when he entered a German bunker to check it out.

Scott spent the night of D-Day in Vierville. The next morning he was sent back to the beach to see if he could pick up some more men. He walked to the Moulin Draw over a mile to the east.

"There had been two high tides since we came over. The bodies of those who had been killed had washed up. They looked like logs that had washed up on shore." Scott realized then how much things had gone wrong on Omaha Beach.

The weather was little better on June 7, and those fighting on the ground got better cover from the air, Scott said. "They had knocked out some of the [German] artillery and mortar positions.

The objective of Scott's group the second day was to capture the little town of Les Moulins.

Scott, his friend Joe Cowan and another soldier were standing along the top of the bluff when Cowan fell, hit in the leg by a sniper's bullet. Cowan was a joker, and when he first fell Scott thought he was kidding. Scott watched helplessly as his friend died within five minutes.

Someone killed the sniper before he could get anyone else. To this day, Scott carries pictures of his dead buddies in his wallet.

.....

Under the ramp, John Talton, Leo Dombroski and the German soldier huddled together until the falling mortar moved down the beach. Dombroski, who was from Pennsylvania and knew a little Polish, said something in Polish to the German. Talton doesn't know what he said.

The soldier didn't answer and they left him there.

Later, they saw his dead body.

Talton and Dombroski crawled up the beach. They passed bombed-out landing boats that had been hit by mortar, their crews "burned in position." Talton looked out to sea, and saw the legs of drowned soldiers sticking out of the water like victory signs. Their life belts had turned them upside-down.

It looked like hundreds to Talton, but he's not sure.

"Horror makes you exaggerate things like that."

Talton started shaking violently and asked a medic for help. The medic told him he had the foxhole shakes. He said: "Buddy, there ain't no pill for that." After awhile, the shakes stopped.

Morning passed, and afternoon.

Talton and Dombroski kept moving. They found another man from their demolition team who had dragged a large-caliber machine gun from a landing boat. Together, the three of them set the gun up in the sand and fired on a pillbox in the bluffs.

"And I joined the war," Talton said.

It was four days before Roy Stevens of Bedford was sent back from England to rejoin his unit. He began to search for his twin, Ray, and his other buddies from Bedford.

"When I came back, the beach was secure," Roy Stevens said. He brought more men with him from England than A Company had left after the landing.

While resting by the beach, Stevens walked over to one of the new graveyards, looking for - but hoping not to find- the graves of people he knew.

The graves were marked by white wooden crosses with dog tags nailed to each for identification. Stevens scraped the mud off one of the tags; it was Ray's "I found all my buddies, and him, too," Stevens said.

A little later, Stevens got a letter from home wondering why he and Ray hadn't written. "I didn't want to write home," he said. He didn't believe the grave was really his brother's. "I thought he might show up," he said.

"You know," he said recently as he sat on the porch of his home near Thaxton, "it doesn't seem like 50 years ago."