The soldier in front of Langangke fell, so Langangke took a few side steps to run with a friend of his, who immediately was shot. “Right through the neck, and down he went. This was the worst place in the world to be alone, so I moved a little further left to run with my sergeant. And just then he took a bullet in the chest and collapsed. I knew then that I had the power of life or death over my comrades. Anyone I neared would die. God alone should have this authority.”
He went on, “All the way up the beach to the American dugouts, any Wehrmacht soldier I neared was killed. And then I got to the Americans, and they started to die, but this time I had something directly to do with it, my Schmeisser and I.”
God was with the Wehrmacht soldiers that day, many of them agreed. Wolfgang Kleber felt a presence beside him, guiding him, as he struggled up the beach. He looked left and right. No one was there, other than his fellow infantrymen. But when Kleber stumbled over a wounded soldier, he felt the presence again, lifting him by the arm and helping him on.
Berndt Klein also claims to have been visited by God. Klein’s head was grazed by shrapnel, knocking him to the sand. He felt a spirit next to him, nothing but a soft light, lifting him to his feet. “I saw nothing, but knew it was there anyway.” The spirit put a hand on Klein’s back, moving him up the shore safely through the still life of the dead and dying.
Franz Eberbach tripped when a bullet tore into the leather heel of his boot. He lay face down on pebbles and seaweed for a moment, unable to rise, uninjured but terrified. Fellow soldiers passed him, dashing up the beach. He tried to rise to his knees, but fear had frozen him. Then a warm gust of air brushed him and lifted him to his feet.
“I know it will not make sense to you,” he said, “but I was escorted across the minefield and through the streams of machine gun bullets. The spirit held my arm, guiding me.”
I asked Eberbach if he was talking about intuition.
He fiercely shook his head. “A force, something as tangible as my helmet or rifle. I’m telling you, it was the embodiment of a merciful God.”
As part of their feint, the Wehrmacht had landed at low tide. It may be presumed OKW knew the price that would be paid, and Private Douglas Stubbs extracted that price. Crouching behind sandbags and his Browning machine gun, he fired until his barrel jacket was glowing, until Rupert Mitchum’s hands were bleeding from ammo belts coursing through them.
An area receiving machine gun fire is called the beaten zone. “When they first got off the boats, they must have been three or four hundred yards away. I fired at a steep elevation, so my bullets fell over a wide area, pretty much randomly on the beaten zone. Then when the enemy got closer, I fired at fixed points, compact cones of fire, coordinating with other Third Platoon gunners. But, son of a bitch, there were still some left, marching up the beach as if they didn’t give a damn what I did to them, so I switched to short-range tactics, traversing bullets in an arc across the line of attacking troops.”
“And they still came?” I asked.
He pointed out an angry crease behind his ear and another along his leg. “A stick grenade got us first. Knocked me cold, then I think some kraut, likely mad as hell, stood over me and fired into me three times.”
Stubbs and I were sitting in a restaurant in St. Louis, but that didn’t prevent him from standing and pulling up his shirt to show me three scars from puncture wounds. “I have no idea how I lived through it, none whatsoever. My next memory is of lying on a narrow litter in a German hospital ship. Rupert never made it, though. He was seventeen years old, and he’ll remain seventeen forever.”
Arnie Fowler, the Cincinatti pitcher, waited for the Germans with two dozen grenades. “I was so accurate with the grenades, I thought the Germans would never get within fifty yards of me. I was ready and able to put those babies right down their shirt fronts.”
Fowler saw his first German, raised his arm to launch the grenade, and felt a searing heat in his hand. Shrapnel from a Wehrmacht mortar round had severed tendons in his throwing hand. He was taken prisoner moments later. “I never threw a grenade, and I never pitched in the bigs again, either.”
Corporal Allen Wilkes, of the 38th Field Artillery Battalion, to whom General Clay had lectured about German radio propaganda, remembers his arm tiring from pulling the howitzer’s lanyard. “We loaded grapeshot canisters, one after another, and I’d yank the cord, time and again. Hardly bothered to aim the gun. I just don’t know how the enemy made it up that beach. General Clay was right, the Germans were sitting ducks. It’s just that there were a lot of ducks.”
Wilkes’ pillbox was wild with smoke and thunder, with too many soldiers crowding each other and a weapon that bucked dangerously with each round. Orders were given by pantomime, as all had lost their hearing. “Open, eject, load, slam, yank, open, eject, load, slam, yank, endlessly.”
Then a grenade came through the gun aperture and landed near the howitzer’s spokes. A loader calmly scooped it up and punched it back through the portal. Outside the pillbox, the grenade’s blast did no damage.
Wilkes told me, “I had this insane idea, kneeling next to the howitzer with the cord in my hand, that that potato-masher must be the best the goddamn Third Reich could do, and we were home free. That was the Germans’ one shot at us, and they failed.”
But next came the nozzle of a Flammenwerfer 41, and the pillbox filled with an evil hiss and rushing fire. The stream shot over Wilkes, with only drops of flame splashing onto his back and arms. “My throat burned, as if I’d inhaled the flame. The loaders were covered in fire. They ran around, human torches, until a couple of the poor bastards found their way out the back of the pillbox, where they were shot down. The others just toppled over, scratching blindly at the ground, and died.”
Among his howitzer team, only Wilkes survived. He spent much of the next two years in and out of hospitals, fighting pneumonia and infection in his scalded lungs.
Ray Chase won his race to the parapet. The instant the barrage ended, he scrambled to the top of the trench. There, arrayed before him, was the German infantry scurrying his way. “The enemy was pouring through gaps in the barbed wire. Somehow the Germans had even gotten tanks to the beach. Behind all this, the channel was so filled with German ships it looked like a city skyline.”
The barrage had ended, but the strafing had not. Just as Chase swung his M2’s barrel toward the invaders, a tracer lashed into a nearby sandbag, spraying dirt and wood splinters into Chase’s eyes, instantly blinding him. Screaming in pain, both hands to his eyes, he slid back down the trench, where he sat until captured. “I didn’t fire a shot.” He regained the sight of one eye several weeks later, but one eye remains blind.
Private Karl-Heinze Brennecke was a machine gunner aboard a Leichter Panzerspahwagen, a four-wheeled light armored car. The car resembled a beetle, riding high on its chassis, with its steel body at seemingly disjointed angles to deflect antiarmor shells. The 2cm KwK gun had been replaced by a machine gun. The armored car followed a flail up the beach, with Brennecke not bothering to answer the small-arms fire that smacked into the car, sounding like a spoon beating a pan.
Brennecke braced himself behind his machine gun, an MG 42, waiting, feeling almost safe as they rolled up the beach. The true danger to armored cars comes from rolling over at high speeds. And Brennecke’s driver, Padewski, was a madman, straight from Wolkenkuckucksheim (cuckoo cloud-land), who liked to accelerate the Horch engine until it sang soprano. Here on the beach, what could Padewski do, tucked behind the Bergepanther flail and in low gear?