Hidden from Obermaat Goerlitz’s view by the barges’ armored gunwales and by the Wehrmacht soldiers readying themselves to leap into the surf, a sharpened iron post the size of a man’s leg ripped into the belly of the port barge, cleaving open its underside like a can opener.
“Water shot up from the tear like a geyser, and the barge immediately began to sink. My men, my charges…” Goerlitz turned away as he recalled that day, and could continue only after a moment, “began leaping out of the barge. We were still too deep for walking. Many drowned. I can still hear them cry out as they were pulled down by their jackboots and packs and ammunition belts.”
Crewmen on Goerlitz’s other barge cut the disabled vessel free, and the chief petty officer was able to push it to shore, leaving the damaged craft tossing in the surf, “a hulk, doing nothing but clogging up those who came after.”
Unterfeldwebel (Staff Sergeant) Waldemar Rasch had jumped into the surf from a Sturmboot, a powered raft launched by cradle skids. from an auxiliary minesweeper. Rasch’s most vivid memory of that morning was of his exultation when he reached dry sand with his entire squad of ten soldiers.
“Our boots sank with every step, as if the sea was trying to reclaim us, but I was overjoyed we made it out of the water,” the sergeant told me after the war. “And then it seemed some terrible, silent, swift disease, a plague, hit my squad. One after another they pitched forward onto the sand and lay still. All ten of my men. Not one of them made a sound that I could hear, all down within the course of fifty yards of beach, hit by enemy rifle fire.”
Suddenly a leader without followers, Rasch waited a few minutes behind a concrete cone until the remnants of another Wehrmacht squad passed by on its way inland, and he joined it.
Corporal Lonnie Linder may have caused the demise of Rasch’s squad. The corporal was with the 138th Regiment, 35th Infantry Division, overlooking St. Mary’s Bay. He was from Kansas, “born with a deer rifle in my hand,” he said. “By age four, I was already a better shooter than anybody in my company would ever be, which ain’t saying a whole hell of a lot.”
Linder went on, “The service-issue M1 was a pretty good weapon, I have to admit, but I brought with me my Winchester Model 70, a 30-06 bolt action repeater, outfitted with a five-power sight, the same rifle I’d been hunting and plinking with for years. I’d worn the wood shiny. Our lieutenant, a goddamn ninety-day wonder, didn’t like me bringing my own rifle much, but he shut his trap soon enough.”
Linder began loosing off bullets when the Germans were still three hundred yards away, far out of effective range for other riflemen in his company. The invaders began to fall, one per shot. “I started out with five shells in the rifle, and a cardboard box of fifty more on the sandbag next to me. I emptied the cardboard box before we were taken. And I think I missed four shots.”
Astonished, I asked this latter-day Sergeant York, “You mean you brought down fifty-one Germans?”
“Those krauts didn’t have the sense God gave a goose, because the more of them I killed, the closer the rest of them got. Easier than the target shoot at the county fair. And a lot easier than recovering from the fourteen assorted bullet and shrapnel wounds that put me out of action a few minutes later. So the krauts, they kind of evened things out, don’t you see?”
Rushing up the beach, Dieter Wolff felt betrayed when he saw the coils of barbed wire ahead of him. “Miles of it, rows of it, intact and waiting for us.”
Captain Wolff felt he had been double-crossed by the Kriegsmarine, which had promised it would cut apart the wire before his company reached it. “We were told that so much antiwire explosive would be thrown at the British beach that no piece of wire would be larger than a forearm, and we’d be able to run right over it.”
Wolff was trapped. With machine gun and rifle fire pouring down at him, he pushed ahead, right into the coils. “It seems stupid now, looking back,” he told me. “But I surely was not going to retreat, and I had nowhere else to go.”
The captain continued, “That wire must have been alive, like an octopus. It reached for me and pulled me in, suspending me above the sand. And there I stayed for two hours, helpless. I did not have anything else to do with S-Day, other than to blunt those wire barbs with my skin—I had over two hundred punctures and cuts—and stop two bullets, one with a thigh and one with my shoulder.”
The captain also felt betrayed by Goethe, who had witnessed the famed barrage at Valmy during the French Revolutionary Wars. “Goethe described the cannonade as ‘the humming of tops, the gurgling of water, and the whistling of birds.’ Nothing of the sort. Artillery sounds like men screaming.”
Corporal Alfred Junger’s Bergepanther may have been the first Wehrmacht vehicle to reach the beach. Junger was a driver, and the Bergepanther was a refitted Panther ausf D, with the turret replaced by a two-foot-high steel box across the width of the hull and along its length. Most Bergepanthers were tank recovery vehicles, outfitted with winches or earth spades, but Junger’s tank chassis was equipped with a mine flail.
“I was first in line,” he remembered. “And when the barge hit the sand, the plank was lowered, and I rolled my Bergepanther right onto English soil. I engaged the accessory gear, and the drum out front began to whip the chains around, beating the sand, throwing a cloud of it into the air.”
A Wehrmacht lieutenant crouching behind a dragon’s tooth fifty feet inland motioned to Junger. “I could see some of his soldiers lying on the beach, horribly injured by mines. I pressed the clutch and turned my Bergepanther toward him. I passed him—trying to dodge the wounded, but I’ve never been sure how well I did—and immediately the flails detonated mines, one after another, blast after blast under the drum. I drove toward the enemy redoubt at the top of the beach. Behind me the lieutenant set out green smoke canisters to signal a pathway through the mines.”
A bullet entered the Bergepanther’s viewing portal, missing Junger by the width of a hair. “The bullet bounced around inside the driver’s box. I still remember it pinging and whistling, and then it punched into my neck hard enough to bruise my spinal cord.”
Junger instantly collapsed, his feet slipping forward on the dual clutches, bringing the flail to a stop. The Wehrmacht lieutenant ran forward, climbed into the driver’s compartment, and pushed Junger aside. “The officer, I’d never seen him before, was bleeding along his left arm, but he got the Bergepanther going again, and we didn’t stop until we got to a grassy hill behind the beach, where an antiarmor mine blew the tread off the flail.”
The lieutenant was killed as he tried to climb out of the Bergepanther. Junger remained inside, slowly regaining sensation in his arms and legs as the lieutenant’s blood cascaded down onto him. His disabled flail was ignored for the rest of the battle.
Gefreiter (Lance Corporal) Hans Langangke remembers the charge as an eerie dream. Langangke carried his submachine gun across his chest as he sprinted up the sand. “I looked down at my boots as I ran,” he told me when I interviewed him, “and one lace was undone, was flapping against my ankles. It was the oddest thing—I was oblivious to everything else for a while except the unfairness that my boot lace had to be undone now of all times. Then I noticed as I ran that I could hear nothing but my own breath, loud inhales and exhales that oddly drowned out the shouts and the explosives. I saw my sergeant yell right at me, and I simply could not hear him.” It was like a dream, Langangke recalled, with some sensations muted and others amplified, much of it nonsensical.