At the top of the beach, with so many bullets glancing off the car’s armor Brennecke was reminded of a ringing telephone, Padewski turned the Panzerspahwagen parallel to the first trench. Brennecke raised his grip and fired the weapon into the trench.
“Padewski zigged and zagged, following the trench, and every time he turned, another bunch of Americans who hadn’t seen us coming were surprised into fits. I’d fire and fire. I wore a reinforced glove, because after five belts of fifty rounds each, I’d have to change barrels. I’d release the catch, toss aside the hot barrel, put a new one on. I could do it in five seconds. I don’t think I missed any of the Amies. I was good with a machine gun, I assure you.”
What had finally stopped his car?
“Padewski was a goddamn Pole from Danzig, although he liked to pretend he was a German. He zigged when he should have zagged, and the Panzerspahwagen’s right wheels fell over the side of a trench. The car toppled into the ditch. I wasn’t hurt, but fuel began pouring on me, and I feared my barrel would ignite it. So I scrambled out of the car, which was standing on its nose.”
An American charged from the rear, and a bayonet blade popped out the front of Brennecke’s uniform blouse. He lay in his own blood at the bottom of the trench until Wehrmacht corpsmen reached him. He does not know what happened to Padewski.
Brennecke laughed. “Can you imagine? I was probably the only soldier in the entire battle to be undone by a bayonet, something out of the Franco-Prussian War.”
Father Rafael Rodriquez knew better. “I gave final offices to hundreds of soldiers. On a number of bodies, broken bayonet blades were still protruding from chests or stomachs, the result of savage hand-to-hand fighting. I spent the entire day saying last rites, hardly had time to catch my breath between them.”
Captain Ross Walton knew that his command, Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 38th Infantry Regiment, was slipping away from him. He ran forward from his post along a communication trench to the first dugout, then along the trench, stepping over some bodies, slipping on others, feeling like a tightrope walker.
Under a machine gun post that was still operating, he yelled into the ear of one of his lieutenants, “You making it?”
The lieutenant flinched as a grenade detonated nearby. “Half my men are down, sir. Same with Brown down the line.”
“Let’s get out of here. Tell the machine guns to give you three minutes, and we’ll cover their retreat from the rear.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. We’re pulling out.”
Overhead, the gunner groaned and slipped sideways on his platform. He clung to the weapon’s grip, and the barrel swung across the sky, firing in a useless arc. Blood splattered onto Walton, dripping off his helmet onto his shoulders. Then the gunner fell, bouncing at the captain’s feet.
“Get going, Lieutenant.”
Captain Walton told me after the war, “I should have accounted for all my men. I should have carried away our equipment or destroyed it. I should have waited for orders to pull back. A dozen other things I should have done. But only ten minutes elapsed between when we saw the first Wehrmacht infantryman and when we were overwhelmed. No time for any of it. Sometime during those few minutes a bullet passed through my right biceps, and I didn’t know it. I didn’t have time to notice it.”
Nor was there time anywhere else along the English Channel. Thousands of little dramas, explosive and bloody, fearful and appalling, were being played out. And it was quick work, taking only the few minutes before dawn. The sun had not even risen on S-Day, and our Allied beach defenses had already been overrun.
14
Winston Churchill later called the general’s flight “Clay’s caprice.”
That snappy phrase was all he allowed to leak to the press. To Clay’s face, the prime minister termed the flight “brazen, asinine, senseless, eccentric Yankee clownishness, a crack-brained, muddle-headed, clottish, dizzyingly stupid act of puerile glory-hoarding.” (General Clay replied, “Let’s not mince words here, Prime Minister.”)
Churchill was correct, in a way. Clay risked himself—the commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force and all the experience, judgment, and knowledge incumbent in that position—for a glimpse of the action.
Justifying his flight, Clay later claimed that even as late as daybreak, AACCS did not know the location of the invasion. History has supported his argument. It is difficult to believe now, with time’s precise hindsight, that the Germans could by sun-up have occupied for an hour a sixty-mile strip of English soil without the Allies knowing with certitude the locations of their landings and without the Allies fully abandoning their notion that the invasion would take place—indeed, was taking place—across the North Sea. General Clay’s report was the first irrefutable evidence provided to the Defense Committee and AACCS that the German horde was coming from France.
The English Channel at Folkestone was only sixteen miles from headquarters at Eastwell, and we arrived moments after take-off. The low cloud cover was spotty, and Captain Norman piloted the Cub from cloud bank to cloud bank, plunging us into white blindness, then abruptly emerging to view the coast below, each time with more clarity as we neared the coast, as if we were increasing the powers of a laboratory microscope.
We turned southwest at Folkestone to follow the channel, and there below us was the vast panorama of the invasion. The silver water was strewn with German vessels. Countless ships. I could not imagine where the Kriegsmarine would have fitted in more ships, had they the ships. Barrage balloons floated above many of them. As far as the eye could see to the west, the channel bristled with the vessels, a staggering display of Teutonic will and strength.
General Clay said over the hum of the Cub’s engine, “Any more ships, we’d have to sandbag the coast just to keep the seawater from overflowing.”
Terry Norman jinked the plane into another cloud. He had scarcely bothered to look at the channel. There were as many Luftwaffe planes over the coast as there were ships below. To this day I have no adequate explanation why our tiny, slow, defenseless Cub was not spotted and shot down. Certainly Norman’s evasive piloting helped. With typical modesty, he claimed later the Luftwaffe was consumed by ground support and was rightfully anticipating weak resistance from the RAF. They weren’t looking for us, so they didn’t see us. Or perhaps the German pilots mistakenly identified us as a German spotter. So many Luftwaffe planes buzzed around us we could have been part of a Luftwaffe formation. I was terrified.
“Take notes and photos, Jack.”
“Yes, sir.”
Clay dictated, “The vanguard of the invasion fleet, the mine-sweepers and buoy-layers and motor launches and cutters, have already turned around. Approaching the shore west of Folkestone are four, no, five lanes of ships. A battle ship, the Tirpitz, and three cruisers, one is the Scharnhorst, stand off shore, and are now shelling,” he paused to look through binoculars “three or four hundred yards inland.”
I could see the flash and smoke of their targeted fire, a rim of explosives that had walked inland from the beaches.
“Barges, hundreds of them, ranging out five miles to sea. Also, there’s a pocket battleship further along the line. The Lutzow, I think. Yes, the Lutzow.”
I hadn’t thought the general knew ships from Shinola, but he continued his dictation as we ducked in and out of the clouds. “The transport fleet is an amalgam. In the first waves are mine-sweepers and the others. In the second are the barges and smaller craft, a number of them already ashore. In the third are freighters and coastal steamers, some look like rust-buckets. Also numerous tankers. I’ll be damned, I also see an ocean liner.”