“What the hell do we do now sir? The one relative bright  spot on the 116th front was Charlie Company’s missed landing on Dog White between the Vierville and Les Moulins draw.

There with a handful of 743rd tanks in sight and smoke from grass fires  masking their run in.

C Company reached the seawall with comparatively light losses and retained  more cohesion than any other 116th Company so far.

Although D Company from the 116th disastrous landings effectively stripped  the First Battalion of much of its heavy weapon support, Dog White became the natural focal point.

Seeing the situation on Dog Green during the   run-in, Colonel Max Schneider diverted the Fifth  Ranger Battalion and the remaining Second Ranger Companies into Dog White rather than attempt  to land into the killing ground at D-1.

Under the cover of smoke, they joined C Company  of the 116th of the seawall while the 116th   Regimental Command Group including Brigadier  General Norman “Dutch” Cota also came ashore here with relatively light casualties.

From that  point on, the effort to crack the Vierville sector centered on the improved foothold rather than the  original Dog Green axis.

Brigadier General Norman “Dutch” Cota very nearly failed to reach Omaha Beach  at all.

His landing craft struck a mined obstacle.

He braced for the blast, but the charge slipped  harmlessly into the surf.

He and his small staff   splashed ashore under fire, briefly sheltering  behind a tank before reaching the timber seawall where scattered, shaken soldiers were pinned  by small arms fire and murderous mortar bursts.

Shrapnel killed men around him.

One fragment, the  size of a shovel blade, took a soldier’s life only a few feet away from the general.

Despite the  chaos, Cota made a deliberate effort to steady   the men.

When Private William Stump asked another  soldier for a light, he was startled to find he had addressed a general.

Cota’s reply, “That’s  okay, son.

We’re all here for the same reason.

”   Remaining at the seawall meant certain death.

Though by his own admission, scared to death, Cota moved calmly along the beach exposed to  enemy fire, urging soldiers to get off the sand   and into the fight.

As Sergeant Frank Huser later  recalled, “seeing a general walk about so openly convinced many of them that they could move too.

”  Cota set about forcing a breach.

He placed a BAR   gunner for covering fire and directed another man  to blow a gap in the double apron of wire with a Bangalore torpedo.

The first soldier through  the opening was shot down, his agonising screams   unsettling everyone behind him.

Knowing hesitation  would doom the attack, Cota charged through the gap himself.

A mortar blast killed two more men  beside him and hurled him up the slope.

Yet at 51, one of the oldest men on the beach, he stood  up unhe hurt and kept climbing.

Using a German   communication trench for cover, he gathered a  small group and continued upwards.

At the crest, machine gun fire stalled the advance.

When  he could find no junior leaders to take over,   Cota led the assault himself.

The German position  broke.

Cota’s party pushed towards Vierville-sur-Mer, skirmishing with isolated German positions along  the way.

By 1000 hours, as more survivors reached   the ridge, Cota greeted them with a dry, “Where  the hell have you been, boys?” By noon, concerned the vehicles still had not reached Vierville, he  led a five-man patrol back toward the beach.

On   the way, German fire from a cavern forced a brief  fight.

Lieutenant Jack Shea recalled that a dozen rounds of American small arms fire brought down  five defenders.

Captured German soldiers were,   in Shea’s words, “a sorry looking bunch.

” Further  on, mines blocked progress.

Cota ordered one of the prisoners to walk ahead as a guide, forcing a  safe path back down the bluff.

As they descended,   they passed the bodies of more than 30 men of the  29th Infantry Division who had fallen, trying to make the same climb.

So, this is Widerstandsnest 73.

We’ve passed through Widerstandsnest 72 and made our way up here to the very western side of the  Vierville Draw, the D-1 exit overlooking Omaha Beach.

And this is a fantastic place to come.

If you’ve  not been to Omaha Beach before, but you’re looking to come here, you need to make the effort.

Climb  up here because this gives you the most incredible view over the beach.

And as the tide’s going out  now, you can see from these defensive positions because behind me here, these were a series of  German trenches that stretched quite a way that way to the east along the clifftop which is now  part of a camper van park.

So you can’t really access it anymore unfortunately.

But there’s a  little bit here and along with the bunker down there that housed the 7.

5 cm pak gun.

That in  this whole area still gives you a really good idea of just the commanding view that the Germans  would have had up here.

From this point here, you can see that with an MG34 or with an MG42 that  as landing craft made their way up to the shore, that enfilading fire that you would be able to  project down the beach into those landing craft either coming straight ahead or onto the sides  of those ships, remember landing craft weren’t armored by very nature of what they needed to do.

They were lightweight, so mostly constructed of wood and thin sheet metal.

The ability for  rounds to penetrate through them would have been very effective even from this distance.

And  it is incredible looking out over toward the east toward the majority of Omaha Beach because we’re  on the western most extreme end of the beach here.

It’s incredible to think what was happening here  on the, you know, the morning of the 6th of June 1944.

So down from the trenches up on the clifftop  there at WN73, here we’ve got a proper fortified position, a big concrete casemate.

In here would  have been a 7.

5 cm pak gun.

So an anti-tank gun that was faced firing straight down Omaha Beach.

This wasn’t designed to fire out from the position here out to the sea to attack the ships.

It was  designed like most of the German positions.

It   was designed to provide enfilading fire down the  length of the beach.

So the seaward side and the concrete here was much thicker to withstand direct  bombardment from any naval ships.

The other side, the concern for protection wasn’t as great.

But  if we look in here today, you can see actually it’s still in relatively good condition.

and some  pock marks at the back it looks like where enemy fire was taken on D-Day, but for the most part  structure still stood fairly well considering it’s been exposed to the elements out here for  the past 80 years, not to mention the action that it saw here on D-Day.

Captain Ralph Goranson had prepared two plans for C Company’s assault on Charlie sector, each dependent on what they found  at the Vierville Draw.

If the 29th Infantry Division   managed to clear the D-1 exit, he intended to push  inland through the draw and then turn west along the coastal road toward Pointe de la Percée.

That was plan  one.

But if the draw remained in German hands, then plan two would be required.

Scaling the  sheer cliffs of Charlie sector under fire   without the specialised climbing equipment issued  to the Rangers attacking Pointe du Hoc.

Even light resistance from above could make such a climb  ruinously difficult.

By dawn, it was already clear   which plan would be forced upon them.

At 0645,  the two LCA’s carrying Charlie Company hit the shore under immediate fire.

Goranson’s own craft  took four direct artillery hits before a single Ranger reached the beach.

12 men were killed and  most of the remainder wounded while still aboard.

On the second LCA, Lieutenant Sydney Solomon led  his platoon off the ramp into a hail of machine gun fire.

He dragged the wounded Sergeant Oliver  Reed out of the surf before a mortar blast knocked   him flat and forced him to crawl the remaining  distance to the cliff base.

The men struggled through nearly 300 yds of exposed sand at low  tide.

Heavy, waterlogged, and under converging fire from mortars, machine guns, and rifles.

First Sergeant Henry Steve Golas, trying to force momentum, shouted for the men to get off the beach  before being cut down himself.

13 more Rangers   were badly wounded in the crossing.

Technician  fifth grade Jesse Renan, shot through the groin and paralyzed, continued dragging himself forward,  firing his BAR as he inched across the sand.

A gallantry later marked by the award of a silver  star.

From the base of the cliff, Goranson could   see the 29th Infantry Division and the tanks  of the 743rd Battalion taking even heavier punishment around the Vierville draw.

19 Rangers  had already been killed on their small stretch of   beach alone.

There was no question now.

Plan two  had to be attempted.

Lieutenant William Moody, Sergeant Julius Belchure, and Private First Class  Otto Stevens moved west along the cliff base until they found a viable, if still perilous, section to  climb.

Stevens led the ascent, driving his bayonet into the clayface for purchase, with Belchure and  Moody following.

Four sections of toggle rope were   hauled up after them to bring the remaining  Rangers to the summit.

By extraordinary luck, the Germans in WN73, located above and  slightly east of their chosen climb,   had not yet shifted their attention toward the  cliff edge.

One by one, the surviving Rangers made the ascent.

Goranson himself reached  the top at around 0715.

Once at top the bluff,   Goranson quickly judged that the pressing  threat lay not to the west, but to the east, where the Germans positioned a WN73 was still  dominating Dog Green.

He turned his dwindling force toward the fortified stone buildings, zigzag  trenches, dugouts, and the camouflage 75mm pack gun that anchored the strong point.

Though  the house had been shattered by naval fire,   German troops still occupied the trench system  behind it.

Lieutenant Solomon, despite being wounded on the beach, was among the first Rangers  into the trench network.

Clearing the position   was brutal and close quarters.

A sniper killed  Lieutenant Moody.

Belchure and Stevens worked trench to trench with grenades and rifles.

Belchure  personally accounted for several defenders near   the mortar pit.

Both sides exchanged grenades over  the trench.

Yet the Rangers reduced to just a few dozen effective men held the ground, pinning  the Germans and disrupting their fire on Dog   Green.

As more 29th Division survivors reached  the bluff, roughly 20 infantrymen joined the Rangers in the attack, helping to push the German  troops back from the trench line.

Throughout the   morning and early afternoon, small groups of  enemy reinforcements filtering in from Vierville were repelled by the Americans.

Later, with German  resistance finally thinning along the cliff line, Company C turned towards Pointe du Hoc to rejoin the  wider Ranger effort.

One other major defensive structure existed where I’m stood now on D-Day.

It was a huge anti-tank wall that was built right across the road from WN72 up to these cliffs  here.

The Germans had put this in place because they knew that as this road goes up through the  Vierville Draw that it would provide a fantastic blocking opportunity for any motorised vehicles  and armour trying to move in land.

As such, when the fighting had progressed so far on D-Day, Cota  then ordered his engineers to come in and demolish this concrete structure to enable the tanks of the  743rd Tank Battalion that had made it ashore here and other vehicles so they could start progressing  inland to consolidate the beach head.

Cota turned   to Colonel Lucius Chase of the Six Engineer  Special Brigade, who hesitated at the site.

Cota pointed to a bulldozer loaded with TNT and  told him, “Use it.

” The engineers stacked boxes of explosives in a U-shaped pattern at the base  of the wall, lit the fuses, and ran for cover.

The explosion tore down both barriers.

When the  dust settled, the walls were gone, and a bulldozer was already pushing the rubble aside.

It was 1600  hours in the afternoon, 9 and 1/2 hours after the first landing craft had hit the beach.

The first  Shermans, trucks, DUKWs, and jeeps began moving up the newly opened road.

The most important exit  on Omaha Beach was finally open.

In opening the Vierville Draw, the Americans did more than seize  a tactical objective.

They reopened the flow of the invasion itself.

Without that one paved road,  Omaha would have remained a cul-de-sac of wrecked craft and dead men.

With it cleared, the front  could link east and west and continue its drive south inland.

That morning, the German officer had  reported confidently that the enemy’s assault had been repelled.

By dusk, his strong points were  silent, their telephone lines dead.

The Vierville Draw once the Germans choke point had become  the artery of the Allied advance.

Now, one of the smaller memorials here on Omaha Beach at the  Dog Green sector here in Vierville, but one that’s no less important is that to the US Army Rangers  that landed here on D-Day.

This memorial here on the western side of the Vierville draw is to that  of the Fifth Ranger Battalion and Companies A, B,   and C of the Second Ranger Battalion.

Those men  landed here along with the 29th Infantry on D-Day and helped breach the Atlantic Wall, enabling the  men of the 29th to move south and form that bridge head in land from Vierville.

And it was here on  D-Day that the Rangers gained their famous motto, “Rangers lead the way!” All thanks to the  deputy commanding general of the 29th Infantry Division,   General Norman “Dutch” Cota.

He gave that order  to the men of the Rangers to try and break the stalemate here on D-Day.

Thankfully, it worked and  the men were then able to push inland and earning a place in history for the US Army Rangers.

Now,  out of the many memorials that can be found along Omaha Beach, this one is one that I’m personally  very fond of.

Now, when you think of Omaha Beach, most people typically think of the Americans that  landed here, the 29th Infantry Division and the   First Infantry Division, and you’d be right to do  so, but there were British personnel involved in the operation here as well.

And the men from  the Second Tactical Air Force landed here to   provide radar coverage in order to protect the  troops that were here from any roving Luftwaffe patrols.

“Sugar Charlie 3.

I say again, Dog One is open!”  So I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of WW2 Wayfinder looking at the actions here  at the Vierville Draw on Omaha Beach on the 6th   of June 1944.

Thank you to my YouTube Members  and my Patreons for your continued support with this project.

It wouldn’t be possible without  you all.

Okay, I’ll see you all in the next one!

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