Up and down Omaha Beach, shells still burst overhead and machine gun fire kept up its deadly chatter. The sands were now a blood-soaked killing field. Cole had silenced the pillbox directly in front of them, so the men moved forward again, not even waiting for the lieutenant's order. They ran farther and faster this time, even with their waterlogged boots and gear.
Cole expected every step to be his last. Crossing the open beach, he had never felt so naked and exposed. Though the machine gun was silent, they were starting to take rifle fire from the Germans in the sand dunes. Gratefully, he threw himself down on the sand beside the lieutenant.
Cole looked through the sight and saw that a German squad was moving back into the pillbox. If the machine gun was manned again, the American soldiers moving up the beach would be chewed to pieces.
He was breathing too hard to take good aim. He needed something to rest that rifle on. He looked ahead, but there was nothing between them and the bunkers but a final stretch of open sand and curls of barbed wire. Cole shifted around and put the rifle across the lieutenant's pack.
"Hey!" The lieutenant started to get up, but Cole pushed him back down.
"Better hold still, sir, or we're all going to wind up dead."
The Germans did get off a burst from the machine gun, but Cole shot them in quick succession. Then he was up and running toward the dunes. He got as far as the barbed wire before throwing himself flat. The lieutenant had wire cutters, and he snipped a path through the wire. More men were moving up and doing the same.
The big guns up in the dune bunkers could not angle down far enough to fire at the Americans who had made it this close to the German positions, but they were taking plenty of fire from the troops in the bunkers, who were targeting Americans with their Mauser rifles and even submachine guns. One by one, Cole picked them off. He bought the lieutenant and the other men enough time to move through the field of barbed wire.
Then the lieutenant threw a grenade through the slit of a concrete bunker. There was a flash and bang of high explosive, and then the enemy guns fell silent. The tide of battle had suddenly changed on Omaha Beach.
CHAPTER 2
Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower lit another cigarette, sucked the smoke deep into his lungs, and studied the wall-size map in the operations center for what seemed like the millionth time.
The map portrayed the English Channel and the French coast at Normandy, with units and ships, even airplanes, indicated by cut-out shapes that were periodically moved about the map by smartly uniformed WACS. It might all have been mistaken for a classroom exercise if the mood in the room had not been so tense and somber.
Although he was surrounded by staff, Ike felt very much alone. Since the moment that he had given the order to proceed with the invasion, it was as if he inhabited a glass cocoon. A heavy, invisible load seemed to stoop his shoulders as he hunched over his cigarette. Ike could literally feel the weight of responsibility — it was as tangible to him as one of the heavy packs that his soldiers were carrying ashore in France. He knew it was the weight of thousands of lives that hung in the balance that June dawn, and perhaps the outcome of the war itself.
What bothered Ike was that after months of planning, and the tremendous effort of thousands upon thousands of men from his own staff down to the field officers and the soldiers themselves, nobody knew that Operation Overlord would succeed.
It was all an incredible gamble, though it was also a calculated risk. Ike was fascinated by the Civil War and often recalled the words of Confederate General Robert E. Lee: "It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."
Though he was a brilliant strategist, Lee had ordered the tragic Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. Ike couldn’t help wondering if he was now commanding a similar disaster.
There were probabilities and predictions, of course, but they were not particularly reassuring. Some estimates put casualties on D-Day itself as high as seventy percent for the airborne forces, meaning seven out of every ten men he had seen off yesterday afternoon were potentially going to their deaths. He sucked on the cigarette again.
As many as 12,000 Allied troops could be killed and wounded before the day was out. That would mean thousands of families devastated by the decisions he had made. It was enough to keep a man up at night, which could explain why Ike hadn't slept much, and looked it.
Ike and most of his staff had been living on coffee, cigarettes, hot dogs and the occasional drink — though he never poured more than two fingers of scotch. His mouth tasted like an ashtray the morning after a party, but he barely gave a thought to himself, exhausted though he was. He knew that even now, men were fighting and dying on the beaches. He tried to harden his heart to that fact, but the thought still wrenched at him. At this very moment, more men were being ferried across the channel, probably seasick and cold.
"Any word yet?" he asked.
"Reports say there is little resistance at Utah Beach, sir. However, the German defenses were stronger than expected at Omaha. We're having a hell of a time there."
"Casualty reports?"
The aide just shook his head. "No solid numbers yet, sir, but the machine guns on the heights are really chewing our boys up."
"God help them."
Ike was fully aware that he and his staff had planned the largest military invasion of all time. Like most generals, he was a student of military history, and the closest example he had found of a similar attempt had come in 1588, when the Spanish Armada had sailed to sack England. Ike was not comforted by the fact that the invasion had been disastrous due to storms and a spirited English defense. The Spanish had lost most of their ships and thousands of troops had drowned upon being shipwrecked on the craggy Irish coast.
But Ike was not King Philip sailing blindly into stormy seas with little more than a blessing of the fleet and a trust in God's Will being done. Operation Overlord had been meticulously planned. That planning had also taken place during the last year in utmost secrecy, for the Reich had spies everywhere. Great care had been taken to plant the seeds of misinformation and deceit about when and where the invasion would take place.
The Germans knew, of course, that an invasion was likely, and any schoolboy with a map could see that it would take place somewhere along the French coast where it fronted the English Channel. Using fake guns and troop trains, artificial radio traffic, and a campaign of false information, the Allies had worked hard to deceive the Germans that the landing would come farther north, at Pas de Calais.
Had the Germans taken the bait? Depending upon the answer to that question, the war in Europe could be won or lost by lunchtime.
General Rommel had been summoned by Hitler to reinforce the so-called Atlantic Wall as a defense against the Allies. Defending miles of coastline with a military that was increasingly being spread too thin was no easy task, but Rommel was highly capable. Ike had groaned at the aerial surveillance photos showing yet more defenses being built. It seemed that every day that passed, the Germans were able to strengthen their positions. The Allies’ best hope was to keep the Germans off balance. Would the Allied invasion come at Pas de Calais or Normandy?
All night, reports had been coming in, starting with the results of the aerial insertion behind German lines. Now, waves of men were storming the beaches themselves.
The weather had not been cooperative. A winter invasion was out of the question on the stormy English Channel. Late May or early June seemed to provide the best opportunity for a smooth crossing. But there had been cool, cloudy, rainy weather dogging them all through the English spring. It needed to be clear enough that airplanes could not only drop their men accurately in France, but also for the Army Air Corps to provide support. The cloud cover had still played havoc with the drop and some of the pilots had missed their targets, scattering the 101st and 82nd Airborne over more than twenty miles. Confused and fragmented, they were now trying to join up across the tangled hedgerow country that made up much of Normandy.