The Bedford Boys: One American Town's Ultimate D-day Sacrifice Read Online Free Page A

bullets and shrapnel hissing all around.
    “What are you doing?” asked Breeden.
    “Looking for a damn rifle that will work,” said Presley, pointing up to the bluffs. Some of his men had moved past the sea wall.
    “Get down or you’ll get hit,” Presley ordered.
    “What the hell are you talking about?” replied Breeden. “You’re a damn sight bigger target than me.”
    Presley grinned and walked on. Before long, he came back, toting an M-1 carbine, waved at Breeden, and then joined his men. 18
    By 8:30 A.M., approximately five thousand troops had been landed on the 6,500 yards of Omaha Beach. Out at sea, naval commanders realized something had gone terribly wrong. According to the Overlord plan, the 1st and 29th Divisions should be inland by now. But when observers peered through binoculars and telescopes, they saw wave after wave of soldiers jammed together on the beach. Along the surf line lay a gruesome jetsam of dead men, body parts, and vast quantities of equipment essential to forcing exits from the beach: TNT packages, boxes of ammunition, wire-cutters, and countless Bangalore torpedoes. The loss of communications equipment was especially grave. Three out of four radios among the 116th Infantry battalions were useless. 19
    Realizing that covering fire was essential, given that most of the amphibious tanks were out of action or sunk, U.S. Navy and British Royal Navy commanders brought their boats as close to the shore as possible, a couple actually scraping the sea bed, and trained their five-inch guns on the bluffs. But where were they to fire? Only a couple of the men fighting for their lives along the sea wall had radios to direct the ships’ salvos. Nonetheless, the warships opened up. At one point, desperate men had to use flag signals to stop a heavy barrage of their sector. But for most men, such as Bob Slaughter, the shelling was a much-needed boost to morale.
    Since coming ashore, Slaughter had crouched down behind the sea wall. Suddenly, he saw several officers moving towards him. Slaughter recognized Canham, his arm in a sling, a Colt .45 in his good hand. 20
    “They’re murdering us here!” Canham shouted. “Let’s move inland and get murdered!”
    “Who the hell is that son of a bitch?” asked one GI. 21
    Every Stonewaller would know before the day was out, for Canham seemed to roam everywhere. “We’d have shot him in training,” recalled Company A’s Russell Pickett. “But once the fighting started, he was a true soldier.” 22 Few veterans disagree that Canham was the most outstanding regimental commander on D-Day.
    Brigadier General Norman Cota was just as brave and inspirational. He also gave men hope when there was none. Some found the will to fight on simply by looking at him as he strode about defiantly, back straight, chewing his unlit cigar, mumbling ditties to himself when he wasn’t cursing the Germans.
    Hal Baumgarten would never forget seeing Cota’s rangy figure approach him that morning. It was as if he was immortal; from the outset, officers had been first to be picked off by snipers. “He was coming from the west with a major, had a pistol in one hand, and the fellows were all yelling for him to get down. He looked very similar to the actor Robert Mitchum with his slanted eyebrows. He was very, very brave.” 23
    All along Dog Beach, others watched as Cota still moved from one group to another, now urging the Rangers to lead the way off the beach. Inspired by Cota, officers began to organize their men for an advance.
    Cota had spotted a section of the sea wall with a low mound of earth five yards beyond it. He ordered a Ranger to place a Browning automatic rifle on the mound. He then crawled after the man and ordered him to provide covering fire. Next, Cota organized the blowing of an opening in a thick barbed wire fence that ran along the far side of a ten-foot-wide promenade road beyond the sea wall.
    Smoke from a grass fire now partly obscured the beach. Cota