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 The Invasion
Interactive feature of the most complex attack ever conceived
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E-mail your letter to the editor
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Harold Baumgarten as a young soldier. on his 19th birthday in Torquay, England 1944
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IN HIS OWN WORDS: HAROLD BAUMGARTEN
Posted Sunday, May 23, 2004
Baumgarten, 19, a rifleman with the 116th Infantry, was wounded five times during the battle for Omaha Beach
Having my college education and a good background in American history and wartime battles, I realized that it was not going to be easy, and I did not expect to come back alive. I wrote such to my sister in New York City—to get the mail before my parents and break the news gently to them when she received the telegram that I was no longer alive.
We left the marshaling area with full battle equipment, about 100 lbs. per man, and went in trucks to the huge seaport of Weymouth, England. That night we boarded a liberty ship, Empire Javelin, which was to carry us across the Channel to Normandy. The harbor of Weymouth was crowded with ships of every size, shape and description, most of them flying the Stars and Stripes. We had the old battleships Arkansas, Nevada and Texas with us. On the evening of June 5, the harbor came alive. I could see one ship signaling to the other that this was it.
At 3:30 a.m., we left the Javelin on British LCAs [landing craft assault]. It was pitch black, and the Channel was rough. The huge bluish-black waves rose high over the sides of our little craft and batted the boat with unimaginable fury. [The waves] broke our front ramp, and the boat began to fill with icy Channel water. The water reached my waist, and things looked black for us as our little boat began to sink. But the lieutenant rammed his body against the inner door of the ship and said, "Well, what the hell are you waiting for? Take off your helmets and start bailing the water out." All our equipment as well as ourselves were wet. Our TNT was floating around the boat. We were dead tired from pumping hand pumps and bailing out water with our helmets. Our feet were frozen blue.
At about 6:30 a.m., I saw the beach with its huge seawall at the foot of a massive bluff. An 88-mm shell landed right in the middle of the LCA [to] the side of us, and splinters of the boat, equipment and bodies were thrown into the air. Bullets were passing through the thin wooden sides of our vessel. The ramp was lowered, and the inner door was opened. A German machine gun trained on the opening took a heavy toll of lives. Many of my 30 buddies went down as they left the LCA.
I got a bullet through the top of my helmet first, and then as I waded through the deep water, a bullet aimed at my heart hit the receiver of my M-1 rifle. The water was being shot up all around me. Clarius Riggs, who left the assault boat in front of me, went under, shot to death. About 8 or 10 ft. to my right, as we reached the dry sand, I heard a hollow thud, and I saw Private Robert Dittmar hold his chest and heard him yell, "I'm hit! I'm hit!" I hit the ground and watched him as he continued to go forward about 10 more yards. He tripped over a tank obstacle, and as he fell, his body made a complete turn, and he lay sprawled on the damp sand with his head facing the Germans, his face looking skyward. He seemed to be suffering from shock and was yelling, "Mother, Mom," as he kept rolling around on the sand.
There were three or four others wounded and dying right near him. Sergeant Clarence Roberson, from my boat team, had a gaping wound on the left side of his forehead. He was walking crazily in the water, without his helmet. Then I saw him get down on his knees and start praying with his rosary beads. At this moment, the Germans cut him in half with their deadly cross fire. I saw the reflection from the helmet of one of the snipers and took aim, and later on, I found out, I got a bull's-eye on him. It was my only time that rifle fired—due to the bullet that hit my rifle. It must have shattered the wood, and the rifle broke in half, and I had to throw it away.
Shells were continually landing all about me in a definite pattern, and when I raised my head up to curse the Germans in the pillbox on our right flank who were continually shooting up the sand in front of me, one of the fragments from an 88-mm shell hit me in my left cheek. It felt like being hit with a baseball bat, only the results were much worse. My upper jaw was shattered; the left cheek was blown open. My upper lip was cut in half. I washed my face out in the cold, dirty Channel water and managed somehow not to pass out. I got rid of most of my equipment. Here I was happy that I did not wear the invasion jacket. I wore a regular Army zippered field jacket, with a Star of David drawn on the back and THE BRONX, NEW YORK written on it. Had I worn the invasion jacket, I probably would have drowned.
The water was rising about an inch a minute as the tide was coming in, so I had to get moving or drown. I had to reach a 15-ft. seawall, which appeared to be 200 yds. in front of me. Finally, I came to dry sand, and there was only another 100 yds. or maybe less to go, and I started across the sand, crawling very fast. The Germans in the pillbox on the right flank were shooting up the sand all about me. I expected a bullet to rip through me at any moment. I reached the stone wall without further injury. I was now safe from the flat-trajectory weapons of the enemy. All I had to fear now were enemy mines and artillery shells.
Things looked pretty black and one-sided until Brigadier General Norman D. Cota rallied us by capturing some men himself and running around the beach with a hand grenade and a pistol in his hand. [He] ran down the beach under fire and sent a call for reinforcements. Every man who could walk and fire a weapon charged up the hill later on in the day toward the enemy. I got hit in the left foot while crawling by a mine.
At the end of June 6, we were only in about half a mile. As the evening progressed, I felt like I was getting very weak, and along the way, I got another bullet through the face again. I was starting to feel very weak from all that bleeding. As it got dark, I became very trigger happy, and anything that moved in front of me, I started to fire at.
About 3 a.m., I found myself lying near a road above the bluffs in the vicinity south of Vierville. I got an ambulance to stop by firing [in its direction], and it stopped, and two men came out and asked if I could sit up in the ambulance. [Later] they took me out and put me in a stretcher, and I saw a huge statue. I think later on, in retrospect, it was a church near the beach, silhouetted in the darkness. The next morning I saw the German prisoners marching by me. The 175th Infantry Regiment apparently landed around that time, and German snipers opened up on the beach, including the wounded. I got shot in my right knee in the stretcher. I had received five individual wounds that day in Normandy. The 1st Battalion of the 116th Infantry was more or less sacrificed to achieve the landing and was completely wiped out. It was a total sacrifice.
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