The battalion of the German 916th Grenadier-Regiment on the Pointe du Hoc took even longer to communicate. The 352nd Infanterie-Division heard only at 08.19 hours that the Rangers had succeeded in scaling the cliffs. The fighting was to continue all that day and most of the next, as the 916th counter-attacked Rudder’s force again and again. The Rangers ran out of ammunition and armed themselves with German weapons taken from those they had killed. This was to prove a dangerous measure when a relief force eventually arrived.
Not far from the first large landing craft, which was still ablaze, Cota chose a section of the sea wall with a mound five yards beyond. He told a soldier with a Browning automatic rifle to keep German heads down on the bluff above. He then supervised the placing of Bangalore torpedoes under the barbed-wire entanglement. Cota had also told Lieutenant Colonel Max Snyder of the 5th Rangers to blow similar gaps, advance inland and then swing round westwards to attack the German fortifications at Pointe et Raz de la Percée.
With the wire blown and smoke from the seagrass set on fire by naval shells, Cota decided the time had come to make a rush across the stretch of marshy grassland which led to the base of the bluff. The first soldier through the wire, however, was hit by a burst of machine-gun fire. ‘Medico!’ he yelled. ‘Medico I’m hit. Help me!’ He moaned and cried for a few minutes. ‘Finally he died after sobbing “Mama”, several times.’ The other men were so shaken that Cota led the way to get them moving. Soon a single file of riflemen from the 116th were through to the bluff and making their way to the top. The smoke from the burning grass was so thick that those who had not thrown away their gas masks put them on.
At 08.30 hours Cota returned to join Canham at his improvised command post under the bluff. Attention turned to an American soldier marching five German prisoners in front of him, their hands above their heads. But a burst of German machine-gun fire from above killed the first two prisoners. The others knelt pleading in the direction of the machine-gun nest not to fire at them, but another prisoner was hit full in the chest.
The Germans, suddenly realizing that most American soldiers were sheltering out of sight under the sea wall, began to use their mortars to target them. Exploding rounds sent pebbles flying like grapeshot. A mortar bomb landed by Canham’s group, killing two men next to Cota and blasting his radio operator twenty feet up the hill. They moved the command post rapidly, but still had no contact with the 1st Division on the left. Communications had collapsed. To compound the problem of radios wrecked by sea water, German riflemen had targeted the heavily burdened signallers as they lumbered up the beach with their ninety-pound packs.
Lack of contact with the shore disturbed General Gerow as he waited for news on the bridge of the command ship, the USS Ancon, ten miles offshore. He was already alarmed by the sight of the choppy seas tossing landing craft around and sinking several of them. Confused reports were coming in, mainly from the crews of landing craft returning to collect their next load. At 09.15 hours he received a message from the control vessel off the Easy Red sector of Omaha. ‘Boats and vehicles piled on beach. Troops dug in on beach. Enemy holds fire until craft beaches.’ Gerow also heard that the engineers were unable to clear paths through the minefields and that ‘enemy snipers and machineguns appear to concentrate fire on officers and non-commissioned officers’.
Gerow informed Bradley aboard the USS Augusta of the position. They were deeply worried. Bradley even began to consider the possibility of abandoning Omaha and switching following waves either to Utah beach or to the British sector. The situation on many parts of Omaha, especially round the Vierville exit, was indeed horrific. Yet despite the impression of universal chaos, some troops were landing almost unopposed and breaking through to the ridge with comparatively few casualties, as the 1st Division had already shown near Colleville. Even in the 29th Division’s second wave, C Company of the 116th had experienced a relatively easy landing at 07.10 hours, 1,000 yards to the left of their objective. Having lost only twenty out of 194 men crossing to the sea wall, they too were helped when climbing the bluff by smoke from the seagrass set alight during the naval bombardment.
Major S. V. Bingham, the Texan commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, 116th Infantry, reported that from his batch of landing craft ‘everyone got ashore safely’ on Dog Red. One of his officers observed that ‘enemy fire was not as bad as I had imagined it would be’. One of Bingham’s companies which landed further down the beach, however, suffered heavily. Bingham led about fifty men across the sea wall and wire towards a three-storey house below the bluff surrounded by trenches. ‘No one had weapons which would function,’ he reported, so they dropped into the trenches to clean them. They cleared the house, even though the staircase had been destroyed by the shelling. Once it was secure, Bingham led his men straight up the bluff to their front. They pushed inland another 400 yards, then turned west towards Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, but encountered a German strongpoint in a farmhouse on the edge of the village. Captain Cawthorn, in battalion headquarters, was shouting an order when a piece of shrapnel hit him. It entered one cheek and went out the other without damaging his jaws, purely because his mouth was open at the moment of impact. An officer who arrived soon afterwards noted that ‘he spouted blood as he talked but did not seem to mind’.
The scenes of chaos on the beach and offshore had hardly improved by 09.30 hours. ‘It was just one big mass of junk, of men and materials,’ an officer reported later. There were burnt-out and still-burning vehicles, corpses, and discarded equipment scattered in all directions. Bodies continued to wash up, rolling like logs in the surf, parallel with the water’s edge. One soldier said, ‘They looked like Madame Tussaud’s. Like wax. None of it seemed real.’ The water’s edge was blocked in places by damaged and destroyed landing craft. Further out, the chaos was even greater. Colonel Benjamin B. Talley, Gerow’s assistant chief of staff, reported that the landing craft were milling around offshore like ‘a stampeded herd of cattle’. The navy could not decide which craft should go in and which should be held back. But although many unsuitable vehicles had been landed, the tank reinforcements were at last starting to make a difference, even though a number of them threw a track when manoeuvring on the beach. Replacing the track in the open under mortar and machine-gun fire required extraordinary courage.
The course of the battle against the emplacements gradually turned against the defenders. In one case combat engineers managed to place a truck loaded with TNT beside a pillbox. ‘They lit the fuse and blew it up. Going in, they found German bodies all untouched by the explosives, blood pouring out of their noses and mouths. They had been killed by concussion.’ The most effective weapons were the guns of the destroyers, eight American and three British, which sailed in parallel to the shore and dangerously close to bombard German positions. Their guns became so hot that teams of sailors had to play hoses on them to cool them down. Many soldiers on Omaha later believed, with a good deal of truth, that these front-line destroyers saved the day. Most infantry officers afterwards felt that the naval support would have been much more effective if destroyers close in had targeted strongpoints from the start, rather than battleships firing blind from a great distance.
Tanks also played an important part. One German survivor of the 2nd Battalion of the 726th Grenadier Regiment remembered the farewell message from one bunker as Shermans attacked — ‘Lebt wohl, Kameraden! ’ — ‘Farewell, comrades!’ — then the connection was broken. He also claimed that ‘the survivors of the “resistance nest” were brutally executed in defiance of the Geneva Convention, except for 66 prisoners, of whom half were wounded’.