Today, tide and wind have almost healed those shore battlefields, burying the debris of war, filling craters and dugouts, washing away blood, and covering bones under sand and saltgrass. These days visitors to the beaches pick through the dross of battle, discarding some, carrying some away. Even the most permanent reminders of that day, the concrete battlements, will not last, as moss has begun its work on them.
Memories are more persistent than the waste of war. Bodo Moelders, an infantrymen with a motorized infantry regiment attached to the Wehrmacht’s 7th Division, had never before been in a boat. Even his training had been from a shiplike structure built on dry land. And—he would have laughed at this that morning had he the strength—he had been trained against seasickness on a mechanism resembling a rope bridge, bouncing and rolling as his comrades shook the ends of it. It had not worked. In his youth, Moelders had suffered pneumonia and cholera. He had never been this sick.
He had started vomiting before the ship left Boulogne, and continued to shudder and heave the entire journey. When the whistle sounded to disembark, his legs were too weak to carry his weight. He was left behind on the ship. He told me after the war that he “will carry that shame to my grave” and would brook no argument from me that seasickness was as disabling as any wound and could not be helped.
Oberschutze (private first class) Rudolf Richter made it a little farther, but not much. Richter was a signalman in a Jaeger (light infantry) battalion with the 28th Division. With his pack radio on his back, he climbed down the net of rope from his ship. The Marinefahrprahme bounced against the ship’s hull below him. Richter kept stepping on the soldier’s hands below him as he descended.
Finally, three feet above the bobbing landing craft, Richter jumped. One leg landed on the craft, the other slipped between the ship and the craft just as the vessels rolled together. Richter’s leg was crushed. A moment later, silently weeping from the pain, he was raised to the ship deck in a sling.
Manufacture of specialized craft for opposed landings was new in warfare, “and we Germans didn’t really get it right,” Max Staubwasser said during an interview after the war. Other than those on the new Marinefärprähme and a number of Sturmboots, most of the invaders were transported on canal barges, which had no means of self-propulsion and could accurately be called lighters. The barges were towed by tugs and other vessels, usually in pairs, an unwieldy maneuver fraught with risk, particularly when the vessels reached the range of shore fire, when the tug released the tow line and motored to the aft of the barges and pushed them toward land. This arrangement was clearly inferior to landing crafts, the LCIs and LCMs developed by Americans for use in the Pacific later in the war. But then, as General Clay said, Germans are landsmen.
Staubwasser was with the 17th Panzerjaegerabteilung (antitank battalion) posted to the 17th Division. Slung over his shoulder were a 2cm Solothurn antitank rifle and his carbine. Half his battalion was being ferried to shore on a barge pushed by a canal tug. The barge had undergone few modifications other than a forward sheet of steel passing as armor. “Even to my farmer’s eyes, I could tell that barge wasn’t seaworthy,” he said. “But the channel’s calm water that morning was our great stroke of luck.”
Morning was breaking, revealing the hills behind the English shore, which drew ever nearer. Staubwasser heard the steady pinging of bullets bouncing off the steel plate. The luck ended when the lieutenant colonel ordered the battalion into the surf.
“Six fellow soldiers were ahead of me in line on the barge,” Staubwasser recalled. “They jumped in, one after another, and drowned, one after another. We were too deep. Finally the colonel called a stop to it, and let the barge be pushed further inland. I was the first one off the barge who didn’t drown. Even so, the water came to my chest before my feet found the bottom. I thought my weapons would pull me under, but slowly I made my way up the shore, for all the good it did me. My right foot was blown off by a mine a few minutes later, so my war ended on the beach.”
Not all injuries came from enemy explosives. Matrosen-Gefreiter (Able Seaman) Rolf Deecke was a loader deep inside a battleship turret below a battery of fifteen-inch guns. He was naked to the waist, except for his cap, across which was the name of his ship, Tirpitz. Sweat rolling off his arms and back had soaked his trousers. Deecke’s team handled the block and tackle and sleds necessary to cart the two-thousand-pound shells from the ammunition room into the turret, then into the breech. Some of this maneuver was hydraulically assisted, but much of it depended on back-breaking labor.
“The noise in the turret was paralyzing,” he told me after the war. “The geared turbines, the high pressure water-tube boilers, the turret engines and the gun engines, and of course the blasts of the guns. And everybody yelling. And then there was the suffocating smell of cordite and oil and grease and sweat. And no place could I stand completely upright. I had no idea what was going on topside or anywhere else in the world, only that somebody was being badly punished with our shells. Add to that the certain knowledge among us turretmen that we are never told when our ship is sinking, and the first we’ll learn of it is when the sea water gets to our ankles, because what a Kriegsmarine captain wants to see just before he puts his pistol to his temple is his big guns still firing as the ocean water reaches them and the barrels begin to sizzle steam. That turret was hell on earth.”
Deecke was injured by what Americans call a come-along, a chain-tightener. After an hour of steady firing, a link on a come-along around a shell popped, and the handle snapped up and broke Deecke’s jaw and cheekbone. He collapsed to the deck, was pushed by his fellow sailors to a bulkhead, and remained there, ignored, for three hours until a spare hand could help him to the surgery.
Explosives were blameless in other injuries, such as those suffered by Aloysius Meyer. The rifleman with the 2nd Company, Hindenburg Regiment, 34th Division, waded toward shore, the surf bucking him left and right, bullets splitting the air above him. Courtesy of the German navy, a walking barrage plowed up mountains of sand ahead of him, moving inland at a speed equivalent to seventy paces a minute. He had been told he could safely get to within twenty-five yards of the barrage. He didn’t believe it. He planned to follow it at a hundred yards, close enough.
Meyer heard a warning shout above the bedlam of surf and explosives. He glanced over his shoulder just as one of the newly designed landing boats, a Marinefahrprahme, hit him in the back, thrusting him into the surf, scraping him along the rocky bottom, then sledding over him.
“I rolled and rolled under the hull of the craft, taking in huge mouthfuls of water. My pack was torn off, and I lost my helmet and rifle. I was going to be crushed or drowned, I was sure of it. Then the propeller whirled into me, digging out gouges. Later I saw the wounds in a mirror. My back resembled a plowed field.”
Meyer was spat out the aft end of the landing craft, bleeding but floating. Waves sent him to shore near the landing craft. He crawled onto dry sand and lay there until a medic found him.
Chief Petty Officer Helmuth Goerlitz was at the wheel of a tug, guiding two barges in front of him as the waves nudged the crafts to shore. “I had endlessly trained for this, how to guide the barges to land, how to keep them from jackknifing on me, and I was doing a fair job of it, but I just did not see the dragon’s tooth.”