AS TIME GOES BY
Assault wave headed towards the beach.
A battlefield is a cruel arena in which to win one's spurs. It demands total committment while permitting absolutely no margin for error. It requires one to react instantaneously under extremely stressful conditions which can result in positive conclusions or a lifetime of unremitting regret should you survive. It will take the innocence of youth and transform it into a quivering mass of undisciplined protoplasm, engender inexpicable feats of bravery and produce rediculous acts of comic opera. It is not my intent to minimize the unspeakable horrors of a battlefield environment, but to direct these observations towards the little bit of humor that will arise even under the most adverse conditions.
It was the night of June 5th 1944, the eve of the most ambitious transportation of amphibious combat troops ever conceived by the mind of man.It would initiate the first and only successful cross channel invasion from either side It would also bring together the greatest concentration of troops, firepower and transportation vehicles ever assembled for a combat operation. It was to mark an historic occasion not only in magnitude but in brilliant conception as well and I was proud to have been chosen to participate. We had been aboard now for two days, awaiting the order to move.The invasion had already been postponed for 24 hours because of extremely hazardous weather conditions.
The mood aboard ship was one nervous apprehension and the close confinement was beginning to take it's toll. Tempers were short and the heightened degree of urgency was causing everyone to become somewhat edgy. We were to have absolutely no awareness of the overwhelming magnitude of this operation until the morning light. No one slept that night knowing that the following morning would find us trying to survive in an extremely hostile envirornment. As H hour approached, tensions increased, exponentially to a point where breakfast became more ritual than nourishing. Although we were aware that this would probobly be the last hot meal we would all enjoy for a long time, no one could concentrate on anything but the impending battle. As a solitary member of a highly trained combat team, aboard a ship steaming inexorably towards an unknown but unquestionably perilous rondevouz with destiny, one is consumed with a disquieting feeling of absolute isolation even though you know, in your mind, that this is the largest force of arms ever assembled.
You feel alone and vulnerable in a night so dark the only light that can be seen is from a random star peeking out from a heavily overcast sky. The long night plays tricks with your confidence in your abiity to perform with honor. We are fearful, yes, not so much in death for we have prepared ourselves for that eventuality. We fear in how we will face that final curtain and we ask God to give us the courage to die like men.
The sky begins to brighten in the east and dawn of the most monumental day in history is upon us. The Padre is doing his sad work of preparing men to die. We have all made our peace with God, it is now in His hands as to who will survive. It is time now to disembark and as we come above deck, we are greeted with the most incredible sight ever witnessed by mortal eyes. As far as you can see, in any direction, the waters are covered with hundreds of ships of every size, configuration and classification. There are troop transports, tankers, cargo vessels, landing craft of every discription and war ships of every size from the smallest minesweeper to the giant battleships of all the allied nations. a cannade of murderous fire is being visited upon enemy installations in the beach area. Now, you are no longer alone in your insignificant little ship but a part of the greatest fighting force to visit these or any other waters on the face of this earth. Your moral has suddenly had a massive infusion of confidence and the adrenalin is flowing in rivers throughout your body. Your enthusiasm is somewhat dampened however as you prepare to board the landing craft. Due to an off shore storm, the seas are running anywhere from ten to fifteen feet. Those in the initial assault waves were loaded directly into the landing craft, aboard ship and then lowered in to the angry sea. Succeeding waves however, were to board the returning crafts by scrambling over the side of the mother ship by way of loading nets made from woven ropes. During maneuvers, this was effected quite easily since practice exercises were conducted in relatively calm waters. But in the real world, with the landing craft bobbing violently about, off loading got to be a rather delicate undertaking. While clinging precariously to an uncertain footing, you had to time your departure so that you effected your transfer as the small boat attained the apex of it's upward cycle. All too many were not able to summon the expertise required to effect this exchange and dropped with 60 pounds of pack driving hard into the deck resulting in broken limbs and damage to other vital body parts. Some caught the boat coming up with pretty much the same results. Others, not quite so fortunate, were pushed from behind or fell missing the boat completely and were either drowned or crushed against the mother ship. On the job training was short, brutal and unforgiving. Here now, our trials with the raging sea were just beginning.
After the perilous off loading operation, the landing craft went off to a staging area where we bobbed around in an incomplete circle until the twelve boats comprising the assault wave were assembled. Those of us who survived the ordeal of disembarkation were immediately seized with gut wrenching waves of nausea precipitated by the violent tossing about. Crowded, as we were, in such extremely tight quarters, we were soon wearing each other's breakfast. Barf bags were not standard issue.
Coming ashore on the most crucial day of WWII
Despite months of rigerous intensive training, none of us, at this point, could be considered as "combat ready". But just when we start thinking that nothing could be worse than the hell we were experiencing, shells from onshore enemy batteries start falling in and around our assault wave. The full impact of our immediate danger is not apparant until the landing craft on our right disappears in a firey ball of human detritus that only a nano second ago was alive with frightened but eager young men. Seasickness is all but forgotten now and all we want is to get off this water borne death trap. Shortly before hitting the beach, there is a lull when all friendly artillery fire is suspended to give the assault troops the opportunity to land without the danger of being hit by shells from our own guns. This is the time when you are most vulnerable to enemy fire since they can fire upon you without suffering return fire. We were however, not entirely without artillery support. The larger battleships standing far off shore had not the capacity to fire with the pin point accuracy required for close combat support. On the other hand, the smaller more maneuverable destroyers were traversing patterns parallel to the beach, heaving shell fire into known enemy positions. At times, they ran so closely to the shoreline, it seemed they had to be scraping the bottom with their keels. I have nothing but the greatest admiration and pride for the brave seamen who exposed themselves to devastating enemy fire in order to provide us with an element of artillery support during this critical phase of the invasion of Omaha Beach.
After an excruciating lifetime of apprehensive uncertainty, nakedly exposed to enemy fire, our landing craft finally hit sand. The ramp was lowered and we were able to scramble ashore, taking minimal losses.
Here again, I should like to commend the naval personel who piloted these small boats. For the most part, they performed in exemplary fashion, with courage and determination, repeatedly running back and forth with fresh troops and delivering them to the proper landing zones.
Some, unfortunately, were reluctant to come close enough and discharged their troops in water too deep for survival. As we staggered ashore, the water had an unnatural pinkish cast. We learned all too soon the reason for this strange phenomenon. Once ashore,we searched around for the bomb craters the Air Force told us would cover the beach area. The craters were vital for survival for there was no natural cover on the beach and the craters were to provide some basic form of protection from enemy small arms fire. There were no craters on the beach other than those formed by naval gunfire and they were much too shallow for adequate cover. The beach area had not as yet been secured and without the craters, survival was rather tenuous. The Air Force had promised us 100 tons of bombs for every 500 square yards of beach. Sure enough, we found the craters 2 days later, 5 miles inland.
As you might well imagine, things were in a chaotic state of flux for a good part of the morning with neither side giving much ground. We were pinned down without much hope of relief until he engineers could clear "beach exits".
The Easy Red sector of Omaha Beach was particularly hard hit because of two basic conditions.
1 - As previously stated, the terrain features of this stretch of beach offered no natural cover. We were totally dependent upon the non-existant bomb craters for defensive and command positions.
2 - So that the integrity of the landing areas should not be compromised, all aerial surviellance was discontinued for a period of two weeks prior to the invasion.
In that time frame,the Germans moved two divisions into the Omaha Beach area for anti invasion maneuvers. True, they were largely rear echlon, home forces. However, anyone shooting at you from a fortified position becomes a formidable adversary. They did, in fact, represent additional, unexpected people in the firing line. Had they been seasoned, battle hardened veterans, the outcome of that fateful day's battle could have resulted in catostrophic failure.
So here I am with a bunch of other civilians, in olive drab, playing at soldiering, facing an adversary tenaciously determined to deny us free access. It is a time for introspective contemplation. It is understandable, that in a war time environment, vast numbers of people are infused into the armed forces with a proportionate number of people directed into positions of leadership. All too frequently, the selections of who will be chosen to lead are influenced by the candidates intellectual acuity with little or no consideration directed towards his emotional stability, mental disposition or personality characteristics. Apparently, the same group of people who have determined that a minimal I.Q. of 110 should be the criteria for administering life and death decisions must have established 90 days as sufficent time for transforming passive, innocent adolescents into cold blooded killing machines. Unfortunately, neither of these criteria is consistant with the desired conclusions. Most of my contemporaries were in the same boat, so to speak. None of us enjoyed the luxury of developing naturally into responsible young men. We were unceremoniously removed from a comparatively sheltered, protective atmosphere and ruthlessly projected, with a minimum amount of training,into a frenetically belligerant world, determined to destroy what was left of humanity. In truth, no amount of training could adequately prepare us for the unspeakable horrors that lay ahead. Almost every responsible person, in a command position, has at some time, felt woefully inadequate to the oppresive demands of combat leadership. There is forever present, in the back of your mind, the haunting realization that at a critical moment, you might make a wrong decision that could result in the wholesale decimation of your command. You never feel fully trained or competent to do the job that has been entrusted to you. I imagine, Eisenhower, more than anyone else, had carried the weight of this awsome responsibility with a large measure of aprehension. Nevertheless, I am facing an enemy, much like myself, who but for the sake of a geographical anomaly, could be me, fighting to preserve my own square yard of paradise. I am brought back to the moment of reality by the announcement from Capt Schmaltz that he is going to conduct his own personal reconnaisance and that we should hold our positions until his return.
Now, Capt Schmaltz is a giant amoung men and that is his true given name. A West Point graduate and a soldier in every definition of the word. Tall and ramrod straight, broad shouldered and sporting a Guard's moustache that would have labeled him British had it not been for the American uniform he was wearing.
He slithered out of his fox hole and disappeared in an westerly direction. Capt Schmaltz was an extradinarily unique individual. He came to the amphibious engineers fom the 82nd Airborne where he had experienced three combat jumps.He was assigned as asst. G-3 which means he operated as deputy director of Brigade operations. His motivation to amphibious operations, as I was to understand, was the boredom of idle time spent between jumps. I would suspect, however, it was more in the nature of a career move. Nevertheless, there he goes off to seek his own measure of adventure. At times, a battlefield can be a paradoxically quiet place. A forboding silence is all pervasive, accentuated by the sounds of exploding shells and small arms fire. Beyond that, there is no other sound to indicate the presence of any other living thing. No bird sounds, insect noises or people. Commuications are conducted in overly exaggerated muted tones, pehaps in awe of the many inert forms lying about or perhaps to deny the enemy the knowledge of your location. In either case, there is little liklihood that you will be overheard.
Some considerable time has elapsed since we last saw Capt Schmaltz disappear into the gloomy haze and we are beginning to consider his well being with a mounting degree of apprehension. Softly at first, but with an increasing range of intensity, a strange and alien sound is penetrating the oppressive silence. Someone is whistling the music of a currently popular tune. It is difficult to comprehend for these are not the sounds you would normally reconcile with the carnage that dominates the beach area. But sure enough, the whistling continues to grow in volume and when we gain the courage to raise our heads above the perimeter of our holes in the ground we can discern the unmistakable form of our Capt Schmaltz, blithfully strolling along the beach, his head devoid of helmet which he is carrying as you would a bucket, by the chin strap. Apparantly unperturbed by the small arms rounds which must be buzzing around his head, he makes his way to where we are franticaly imploring him to exercise some consideration to his immediate well being. Our intrepid captain has made it back to our relatively protected area, none the worse for his extended sojourn into enemy occupied territory. Mystified as to why he was carrying his helmet rather than having it where it could provide him with some small measure of protection, the captain explained that at some point during his morning constitutional, he came across this unoccupied farmhouse that seemed to have an inordinate number of liberated chickens frantically running about. Well aware of how long it had been since we enjoyed fresh, scrambled eggs, the captain felt obliged to appropriate as many of these embroyonic cacklers as he could effectively carry and his helmet presented the only satisfactory vehicle for transportation. We cooked them up in the very same helmet and under the most disagreeable conditions imaginable, devoured them with gusto to satisfy the most discriminating cordon bleu chef.
It was shortly after this experience that I became hospitalized and upon discharge, learned that Capt Schmaltz had once again, moved on to an apparantly more exciting field of operation. I have never heard from or saw Captain Schmaltz again and I often wondered if he ever found the ultimate measure of excitement or did it find him. But to this day, whenever I'm in my kitchen cooking up scrambled eggs, the ghost of Captain Schmaltz is somwhere in there with me, softly whistling, "As time goes by".
The preceding piece was written for the 50th anniversary of "D Day". Since that time, I have tried, unsuccessfully to determine whether or not Capt Schmaltz survived the war. Through the help of some other West Point graduates, I was able to learn that Capt Schmaltz not only survived but retired as a colonel. However, Col Schmaltz embarked on his final adventure on the 13th of December, 1978.I often wonder if with his demise, did Col Shmaltz ever achieve his ultimate thrill. Those of us who came under his influence have become better people for it.