"WE'LL ALL BE KILLED"
By Greg Edwards & Mark Morrison
The Roanoke Times
June 4, 1994
Roy Stevens of Bedford was, in a sense, lucky. Fate kept him off Omaha Beach that day.
Stevens and his twin brother, Ray, had joined the National Guard a week apart in 1939. For nearly five years, they had trained together in America and England. Now, the two technical sergeants were in separate landing craft racing toward the French coast.
"We were going right in at Vierville-sur-Mer," Stevens said. The small village, distinguishable by its tall church steeple, sat on the western end of the six-mile-long, bow-shaped beach. A small ravine led from the beach to the village. "We were to take that."
Many of the 30 soldiers on board were so sea-sick they didn't care if they were killed or not. Stevens, standing in the back of the boat, could see the coast moving closer.
The fragile craft was 500 yards from the sand when a soldier hollered to Stevens that the boat had a hole in it. It had apparently hit one of the metal pipes the Germans had placed in the water to block a landing. Water poured in.
The soldiers bailed frantically with their helmets, but it didn't do any good. The landing craft sank within 20 minutes. "That thing went just right out from under me."
Floating in the troughs of six-foot waves, Stevens could see nothing but water around him; but when he rose to the crest of each wave he watched as the other boats of Company A moved on.
He could see glowing tracer bullets, shells going off and what appeared to be A flame thrower. "The beach was lit up like a little town. I knew something terrible was happening on that beach."
Stevens thought about his twin Ray on the beach. "I almost knew he wasn't going to make it. I don't know why, because he told me, I guess." Before they had left Virginia, Ray had told Roy to run the farm they had bought together because he didn't expect to survive the war.
Aboard an English troop ship a few hours earlier as they, had prepared to load onto the landing craft, Stevens had run into his brother, who offered his hand. Roy Stevens turned him down, telling him he'd shake his hand later in the day on the streets of Vierville.
.....
Willard Norfleet arrived 40 minutes behind Stevens and the Bedford company, part of the third wave of soldiers to hit Omaha Beach. Norfleet thought the beach would be secure and the Germans on the run.
Two-hundred yards from shore, he realized he was wrong.
Artillery shells rained down, exploding and sending plumes of water skyward. Tracer bullets skipped and bounced off one of the landing boats just ahead of his.
On the beach, burning tanks and boats lined the water's edge.
There was the sound of screaming and agony.
Dead bodies rolled in the surf.
The Germans obviously were not on the run, and the British sailor guiding Norfleet's landing boat turned chicken the scene ahead. He said it would be too dangerous to take the boat any closer to shore. He would have to drop the ramp where they were.
They were 150 yards from the beach, in deep water, Norfleet was scared of the water, and he knew the men, in their 60-pound packs would drown as soon as they hit the tumbling sea.
Norfleet was the highest ranking man on the boat.
"You're going all the way in," he order the sailor.
The sailor refused.
"We'll all be killed," the sailor said.
Drowning in the ocean scared Norfleet more than dying in battle. He pulled his pistol and held it to the sailor's head, as his fellow soldiers looked on in stunned silence.
"All the way in."
.....
What had gone wrong?
On Omaha Beach, it seemed like everything had.
Clouds over the beach prevented the Air Corps from bombing the German coastal defenses. Afraid of bombing their own troops, the planes dropped their loads farther inland. Rockets that were fired from ships off shore to crater the beach landed in the water. The holes that the infantry had hoped to take cover in when they reached the beach were not there.
This combination -- having no place to hide and failing to knock out concrete fortifications built in the cliffs -- proved deadly. It was compounded by the German infantry division that had moved in unexpectedly. Many of the defenders were unenthusiastic Poles and Russians forced into service by the Germans. But the troops landing on Omaha ran into the German 352nd Division, a relatively new unit but one with battled-hardened veterans in its ranks. The presence of this opposition had been kept a secret from Allied commanders.
The invading troops also had been told that few of the concrete fortifications -- known as pillboxes -- would be manned. Instead, nearly all of them were manned, and they numbered in the dozens.
There were other problems.
First, there was the bad weather in the channel. High seas swamped some landing craft on the 12-mile run in. Amphibious tanks, fitted with canvas water wings, sank. Some tank crews were rescued. Other drowned.
Because of the intense artillery, machine gun and small-arms fire, sailors dropped the steel ramps at the front of the plywood landing crafts too early. Men stepped into deep water and drowned.
Enemy gunfire kept the demolition teams from blowing paths through the beach obstacles so the landing boats could go ashore.
Inland, many of the paratroopers missed their targets. One group dropped into the center of Sainte-Mere-Eglise, where the Germans killed them as they fell from the sky. more...
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