The 391st Field Artillery, right behind us, fired intermittent interdictory fire practically all night long.
Occasionally, the German sound and flash system would pick up the location of the artillery battalion and they would send a few incoming rounds. The 391st would stop firing for a little while, then start again. I soon got used to the noise. I lay back, lit up a cigarette, and was really enjoying myself. I must have dropped off to sleep immediately, because I began to dream about being branded on the chest with a hot iron, a scene I remembered from the movie The Scarlet Letter. In my dream I could feel the extreme heat on my chest. I even thought I could smell flesh burning.
I awakened with a start and looked down to a glowing ring about eight inches in diameter smoldering on my chest. The cigarette had apparently fallen out of my hand and set the kapok of my sleeping bag afire. I threw back the sleeping bag, jumped out of my foxhole, and made a mad rush to a nearby kitchen truck to find water. I grabbed the first can I found in the dark and headed back to douse the smoldering sleeping bag. Just as I reached the edge of the foxhole, I put my hand on the cap and realized that the can held gasoline rather than water. The two cans were identical except for the caps.
Not only would the gasoline have caused an explosion that would have killed me instantly and set the whole woods on fire, the Germans would have started counterbattery fire that would have resulted in horrendous casualties. I rushed back to the kitchen truck and grabbed a water can, making sure about the top this time, then ran back to the foxhole and flooded it. I got back in the soaking wet sleeping bag, so grateful to have been saved from a ghastly inferno that I just lay back thankfully and went to sleep.
Although the hedge-chopper crews continued to work around the clock, by dawn of July 26 they had installed less than half of the planned fifty-seven units. The remaining tanks had been returned to the assembly area the previous evening, but the welding crews continued to work on them anyway. After the attack started, the crews took the remaining parts of the partially completed hedge choppers with them to install on the designated tanks later.
The operating hedge choppers proved effective and helped keep our tank casualties low because the Germans did not anticipate the next hedgerow breakthrough. The devices were mounted so low on the tank transmissions that the German tank crews could not tell by looking over the hedgerows which tanks had the choppers and which did not. The entire project showed the ingenuity of the American soldier and his ability to improvise.
At dawn on July 26, there was still a slight haze in the air, but the sun soon burned it off and we knew the day would be clear. Green luminescent panels had been issued to the infantry and the armored units to mark the front lines and to identify the tanks. These replaced our original red luminescent panels, which could have been confused with the red Nazi flag sometimes carried by German tanks.
The ammunition supply company had been working night and day to get ammunition to the artillery and tank units. The tanks and the M7 gun carriers filled their ready racks first so they would have a complete combat load of ammunition when they moved out. They stored excess ammunition on the ground and used this in the initial barrage. The interdictory fire that had started the night before continued at a fairly low level.
The Bombardment
The initial barrage started at about 1000, some thirty minutes prior to the air attack. The ground fog had completely dissipated. Because bombing in a heavily wooded area is difficult under ideal conditions, the bombardiers needed every possible advantage.
The L5 Cubs cruised over the lines approximately a thousand feet back and up. I’m sure the observers and pilots felt a lot better with their armor-plated seats. The first targets were enemy artillery and antitank guns.
The German dual-purpose 88mm guns became a particularly high-priority target.
The first flight, B26 attack bombers, came over in a column of squadrons in tight formation at approximately eleven thousand feet. There appeared to be one-half to three-quarters of a mile between the squadrons. Once they started, they formed a long gray continuum across the sky and over the horizon. I was reminded of Leonidas in the battle of Thermopylae; told that the Persian arrows were so numerous that they would darken the sky, Leonidas said, “Good, so much the better, we can fight in the shade.”
The constant drone of the motors was interrupted only by the artillery and the terrible bomb blasts when yet another salvo struck the ground. A few of the 88s that survived the initial barrage opened fire on the first flight as they came over the target area. Three of the planes in the first squadron were hit and appeared to disintegrate in midair.
This victory was short lived for the Germans. The L5 observers saw the blasts of the antiaircraft guns and immediately called down on them the full power of ninety battalions of field artillery. The guns were eliminated within seconds. It appeared thereafter that every time an antitank or antiaircraft gun opened up, it was immediately destroyed.
In spite of all the precautions, some mistakes were made. The Bois du Hommet-Pont Hébert highway was mistaken for the Périers-Saint-Lô highway. The latter was the real bomb line, but the constantly churning dust and debris from the bomb blasts apparently hid some of the marker panels. As a result, some of the bombs dropped short on our side of the line. There were about six hundred casualties in the 9th Infantry Division.
One bomb actually dropped in our 3d Armored Division area, but we sustained no severe casualties from it.
Lieutenant General Leslie McNair, chief of the army ground forces in Washington who had come to Normandy to observe the operation, was in a foxhole in the Vents Heights area when a bomb dropped short and killed him. McNair was the highest-ranking American officer killed in combat in World War II.
It took an hour for the more than nine hundred B26 medium bombers in the first flight to pass over the target.
If we thought that the B26 attack was something, we hadn’t seen anything yet. Immediately following the B26 attack, seventeen hundred B17 and B24 high-level bombers from the Eighth Air Force flew over at approximately twenty thousand feet. By this time, the German antiaircraft fire had been pretty well eliminated, and there was little evidence of flak. Because the planes had to fly only a few hundred miles from England to the target, they could carry a relatively light load of gasoline and a full armament of six to eight tons of bombs.
The bomb load of each plane included 500-pound demolition bombs and 150-pound antipersonnel bombs.
The demolition bomb would produce a crater forty-five to fifty feet in diameter and fifteen to twenty feet deep. It didn’t take many of these bombs to produce overlapping craters in a small field. A direct hit on a tank would demolish it completely; at a distance of five to ten feet, it would break the tracks and turn the tank on its back. In a small town such as Marigny, one of these bombs would take out an entire block. Marigny was so completely devastated that only rubble remained. When American troops finally assaulted the town, it was difficult for them to tell where the streets had been.
The 150-pound antipersonnel bomb had a heavy steel case with grooved segments, similar to a hand grenade; when it exploded, it fragmented into many small, deadly missiles. In the two hours it took the B 17s to make their bomb run, the combination of these two types of bombs obliterated everything in the target area. In our assembly area in the Bois du Hommet, approximately a mile from the bomb line, we could feel the ground shake whenever a bomb load struck.