With many of their officers and non-coms among the first casualties, soldiers recovering from the shock of their reception realized that they had to get across the beach, if only to survive. A soldier from Minnesota in the 1st Division wrote home later describing how he had dashed forward in thirty-yard sprints: ‘I’ve never in all my life prayed so much.’ He looked back at the remnants of his squad. ‘It was awful. People dying all over the place — the wounded unable to move and being drowned by the incoming tide and boats burning madly as succeeding waves tried to get in… I’ve never seen so many brave men who did so much — many would go way back and try to gather in the wounded and themselves got killed.’ Those who had made it were not even able to help with covering fire. ‘At least 80% of our weapons did not work because of sand and sea water.’ In their desire to be able to fire back as soon as they landed, most soldiers had made the mistake of stripping the waterproof covering from their gun before reaching the shore. Almost all the radios failed to work as a result of sea water, and this contributed greatly to the chaos.
The better organized ran in squad columns to minimize their exposure to the arc of machine-gun fire. A lieutenant in the 121st Combat Engineer Battalion ran back with a sergeant to fetch a man with a shattered leg. It was difficult to drag him, so the sergeant picked him up. He was then mortally wounded and the lieutenant was hit in the shoulder. Other soldiers ran out and pulled them up to the relative shelter of the low sea wall. The first combat engineers to arrive had to act as infantry. They had lost almost all their demolition stores on landing. Enemy fire was far too intense to do anything until armoured bulldozers arrived.
As the follow-up wave approached, survivors from the first wave watched with a sick sensation from the bank of stones under the sea wall. ‘Some men were crying, others were cursing,’ recalled a young officer in the 116th Infantry. ‘I felt more like a spectator than an actual participant in this operation.’ He had a dry mouth from fear yet still wanted a cigarette. As the ramps dropped and the machine guns opened fire, wrote a sergeant from Wisconsin, ‘men were tumbling just like corn cobs off of a conveyor belt’. A few men at the back of the craft tried to seek shelter and several in the water tried to climb back on to escape. Shells exploding in the water made ‘large geysers’.
An officer in that second wave recorded that, at 300 yards off the beach, there was too much smoke to see what was happening, but they could hear all the firing. They too had assumed that Allied air power had done its job. ‘Some of our boys said: “The 29th is on the balclass="underline" they are really going to town”. But when they reached the beach, they realised that it was the Germans who were firing.’
Another officer in the 116th Infantry said that in some ways it felt like just one more landing exercise, ‘another miserable two day job with a hot shower at the end’. Unsure whether they had come to the right beach, his company commander said to the naval officer of their landing craft, ‘Take us on in, there’s a fight there anyway.’ But as they came closer, they recognized the draw by the hamlet of Les Moulins and knew they were hitting the right beach. ‘We kept the men’s heads down so that they would not see it and lose heart. The tanks were still at the water’s edge, some still firing and some were on fire. Men from the assault companies were taking shelter around these tanks and in the water. The majority of these were wounded and many dead were floating in with the tide.’
Captain McGrath of the 116th Infantry, when he arrived at 07.45 hours, saw that the tide was coming in very fast and that the base of the sea wall was crowded with men. He and other officers attempted to get them moving. ‘We talked to them and tried to get them to follow us. None of them however would come along. Many of them seemed to be paralyzed by fear.’ A ranger saw a lieutenant from the 116th Infantry stand up and turn his back to the firing. He ‘yelled down at the troops that were huddled up against the seawall, cowering, frightened, doing nothing and accomplishing nothing, “You guys think you’re soldiers?!” He did everything he could, trying to organize the troops of the 116th [sheltering behind] the seawall, but to no avail.’ An artillery officer, Captain Richard Bush, who had landed ahead of the 111th Field Artillery, described the soldiers he saw: ‘They were beat up and shocked. Many of them had forgotten that they had firearms to use.’ Battalion and company officers ordered their men to clean their weapons and told those without them to collect them from the dead. Some of the wounded were also put to work making weapons serviceable.
Captain Hall, an assistant surgeon with the 1st Division, observed the different reactions of men under extreme stress: ‘I saw a man coming to the boat in a “Fugue” state — screaming and yelling, waving his arms. He had thrown all his equipment away… Many were hit in the water and the wounded were drowned by the rising tide. I yelled to some and urged them to crawl in and some of them did. Many did not seem to be functioning at all mentally. Just sitting and sprawling around. [They] could move their limbs, but would not answer or do anything. Several officers started to go and get them, but [more senior] officers yelled at them to come back.’ A few of the wounded clasped on to the end of a beached landing craft as the water rose. ‘They toppled off one by one and drowned. [I] saw one with a chest wound and water eventually covered his face… One boy waded casually up the sand — strolling. Some one yelled to him to get down as a burst of machinegun fire made a circle of sand bursts all around him, but he came in safely.’ But a young engineer driven crazy by terror ‘started running up and down the beach’ until ‘a bullet killed him’.
The doctor, who was wounded by the time he reached the bank of shingle, wrote that they ‘lay on wet pebbles, shaking with cold and fear’. With astonished admiration, he watched one of his medical orderlies: ‘Corporal A. E. Jones, who was always puny — 105 lbs and 5’ 5” high — was the last one to expect anything spectacular of. In all this fire when one would hardly have a chance to go down the beach and back to live, he went out six times and brought men in.’ On one occasion, he went to examine one of the wounded, came back to Captain Hall to describe the wound and asked what he should do.
The infantry were not the only ones to be traumatized. Landing on the Fox Green sector of the beach, one tank commander, a sergeant, suffered a nervous breakdown and ordered the crew to abandon the tank. A private took command. The sergeant disappeared into a foxhole and cowered there the whole day. A major later asked the private why he had not shot him. Another Sherman, hit on landing and immobilized, continued to fire at targets until the rising tide forced the crew to abandon the tank. German artillery concentrated its fire on the Shermans, especially tanks with dozer blades. No fewer than twenty-one of the 743rd Tank Battalion’s fifty-one Shermans were knocked out. Those tanks that ran out of ammunition moved up and down the beach in relays to give shelter to infantrymen crossing the killing ground. ‘What saved us were the tanks,’ a private in the 1st Division acknowledged.