Herald and Review from Decatur, Illinois • Page 43

-1 Herald Review Insight Decatur, Illinois, Sunday, June 3, 1984 iAyjg- 'iSrv 1 'i By JEFFREY ULBRICH OMAHA BEACH, France (AP) Like everyone else, Michel Hardelay knew that the Allied invasion of France was imminent. But also like everyone else, including the Germans, he expected it to come farther up the coast at Pas de Calais. "The BBC had told us to make shelters, and I started to dig a hole in my garden," says Hardelay, referring to those early June days of 1944. "But the warning was for all of France, not just us in Normandy." The week of heavy bombardment intensified the night of June 5, and few people in Vierville-sur-Mer, where Hardelay worked as an engineer, slept as the planes roared overhead and the bombs fell. At daybreak.

Hardelay, who later was to become mayor of Vierville, looked from the window of his mother's house on a hill over the sea. He couldn't see the beach, but he saw the English Channel black with ships. "They were still three or four kilometers away and I couldn't tell whether they were landing here," recalls Hardelay, relaxing in his beachfront home. "I didn't really know they were debarking here until I saw my first American about 8 a.m." In Ste. Mere Eglise.

near Utah Beach, Raymond Paris also had heard the BBC message. A member of the French Resistance, Paris emerged from hiding on June 4 to visit his family. A fire in a house just off the main square on Monday, June 5, brought Paris and some of his neighbors out of their houses in defiance of the German curfew. As they set up a bucket brigade. Allied planes flew overhead in two waves.

"All of a sudden, a third formation flew over and I saw the doors of the planes open," says Paris, who was 20 years old at the time. "It was maybe 10:15 p.m. and it wasn't quite dark yet. Then men were jumping. "I saw parachutes opening and falling either among us or around us," says Paris, a retired law clerk.

There were 50 to 60 Germans in the square watching the firefighters. "The Germans and the machine gun on the church started firing in all directions, at the men, at the planes. Tracers were everywhere." The Americans began landing in trees, on buildings and in the streets. Paris says: "There were the planes, the fire, the fire bell ringing, the sound of machine guns, the paratroopers filling the air all over us, people shouting, the Germans going crazy. That left an unforgettable memory." Paris says the airborne troops did not hit the ground fighting.

"They got rid of their chutes and ifSf AP Newsfeatures photos American troops and supply vehicles splash ashore in France as 250,000 men invaded Europe from England on June 6, 1944. disappeared. About midnight, about 100 Germans formed up in the street just outside Paris' house and headed south toward Carentan. ''That was the last time I heard the sound of German boots." began their slow approach to the Normandy coast, about 10 miles ahead, one of the supply boats swamped and sank. There was one survivor.

A short while later, another LCA swamped and sank in the heavy seas. This one carried Capt. Harold "Duke" Slater and some of his Company men. Rangers in the other LCAs could see Slater and his men threshing about in the freezing water-, trying to stay afloat, but there was no thought of stopping to help them. Those By G.K.

HODENFIELD For Th Associated Press The fear began to subside and excitement mounted at 4:05 a.m., June 6, 1944. That's when 2,225 men of the 2nd U.S. Ranger Battalion left their landing ships, the HMS Ben Machree and HMS Amsterdam, in their LCAs to begin the assault on Hitler's Atlantic Wall. It was D-Day, the long-awaited opening of the Second Front. A couple of hours earlier we had been EDITOR'S NOTE D-Day, 1944, began the liberation of Europe, and the people who first tasted its joys and agonies lived along the edge of the Normandy beaches.

Here's how the invasion looked to those whom fate accorded a dangerous front row seat, including former Associated Press writer G.K. Ho-denfield, who took part as a combat correspondent with the first wave of Rangers. Inside, three Central Illinoisans, including a Ranger, recall their part in the invasion. People in the tiny village of Crepon, about three kilometers from what the British and the Canadians had designated Juno Beach, also had a presentiment that something big was coming, according to Paul Ampe, 72, a farm worker. Tfr2? My wite woke me up ana saia, listen a big guns on Pointe du Hoc were still there, and they were the sole purpose of this operation.

In any event, all of the Rangers knew they were expendable. (Slater and some of his men were picked up later and returned prot esting bitterly to England. They wanted to be taken to Pointe Hoc.) Just before dawn, the big ships lying offshore opened fire all along served a hearty breakfast of pancakes and coffee, a meal designed to reduce the pos-sibility of seasickness. The Ben Machree and Amsterdam were former Channel Steamers, and quite comfortable. The LCAs (Landing Craft, Assault) were built to carry 20-30 men or one vehicle, and were not built for comfort.

The LCAs were to run aground, raise their ladders, and provide a fast and relatively easy means of getting over the clifftops. Just before reaching the narrow Pointe du Hoc beaches, one of the DUKWs was hit by 20mm fire and sunk. The other three were never truly effective. The nine LCAs touched down at about 7:10 a.m. a good 40 minutes late.

A welcoming committee was at the top of the cliffs, shooting directly down at the Rangers and dropping hand grenades on them. Some of the LCAs fired their rockets before hitting the beach and the rockets failed to reach the clifftops. All had other rocket launchers which could be carried ashore and fired from there. Captain Masney saw the other LCAs stop too soon and fire their rockets ineffectively. He ordered the boatswain on his LCA to keep driving toward the beach, and warned against shooting the rockets prematurely because, "We've got plenty of time." Thus it was that LCA 883 made the only dry landing of the group, and five of our six rockets went sailing over the cliff tops.

The sight and sound of the rockets drove the Germans back from the clifftops just about long enough for some of the Rangers to start up the rope ladders. The first LCA to touch down had brought Lt. Col. James Earl Rudder of Brady, Texas, to the shores of France. Rudder set up his command post on the narrow beach.

Snipers and machine gunners were on the cliffs all around us, so we scrambled to the safety of the cliff base. Sgt. Bob Youso and Pvt. Alvin White of our LCA had already started up the ladders and others lined up awaiting their turn. Despite the opposition, the Rangers got to the top of the cliffs and began pushing the Germans back.

I'll never know how they did it. As each group of Rangers reached the clifftops they set about their assigned mission find those German guns and spike them with thermite grenades. But the guns weren't where they were supposed to be. First Sgt. Leonard Lomell (now a successful attorney in Toms River, N.J.) knew the guns couldn't be far away.

Although he had been shot in the side just as he left his LCA on the beach below, he was one of the first Rangers up the cliffs, and he was determined to find those guns. He did. At the place where his target gun was supposed to be, Lomell could see tracks leaving the gun position. Along with Staff Sgt. Jack E.

Kuhn, he followed the tracks down a narrow lane and sure enough, they found five of the guns. Incredibly, the guns were set up to fire on Utah Rtit M2 Em Beach from a well camouflaged position. There were piles of ammunition ready to be fired and fuses on the shells. But there wasn't a German soldier anywhere in the immediate area. With Kuhn covering him, Lomell climbed over a hedgerow and set off thermite grenades in the recoil and traversing mechanism of two of the guns, and used his gun butt to smash the sight on all five guns.

Then Lomell and Kuhn went back for more thermite grenades and put the remaining three guns out of action. The thermite grenades melted the mechanisms and rendered the guns useless. The Rangers had been scheduled to break out of Pointe du Hoc and advance eastward toward Grandcamp and Omaha Beach by noon of D-Day. In fact, they didn't leave Pointe du Hoc until about noon on D-plus-2, about 48 hours late. It was about 1 a.m.

on June 7 that the Germans launched their first counterattack. That was thrown back, but they regrouped and hit us again about dawn. The reinforcements, after bloody, bitter fighting, moved up from the east, and the Germans took off. But those guys coming from Omaha beach heard the sound of our captured German weapons. Since they believed the original striking force had been wiped out, they assumed we were Germans, and they opened fire on us.

Col. Rudder had an American flag displayed, and ordered our firing to stop. But we already had lost several men to "friendly fire." About noon on D-plus-2 the remnants of Companies and walked off Pointe du Hoc. Of the original force, there were only about 50 who could walk under their own power. Some of those were badly wounded, including Rudder and Masney, both wounded twice.

Some of the survivors will meet again at Pointe du Hoc on the 40th anniversary of D-Day. Masney and Lomell will be there, among others. We'll all miss Rudder, who became president of Texas before he died at age 60 in 1970. little to what happening, Ampe says during a stroll through his garden 40 years later. The sound of bombing was louder than usual.

"At 6:30 a.m., the roads were full of Germans in retreat," he says. The English in the Juno sector came ashore more quickly and easily than the beleaguered Americans at Omaha Beach. "Then we heard English tanks rolling through and some shooting. The sky was full of smoke. You could even see the bombs cutting tracks through the smoke as they fell." Five or six Germans were holed up in the bell tower of Crepon's 13th century church.

"An English tank blew part of it away, the small tower on the side. We were lucky. We didn't suffer much damage. But a lot of farm animals were killed." Many joyful people ran down to the sea for a look at the beach they hadn't seen for years because the Germans had put it off limits. No less surprised than the French was Herbert Drossier, then 18.

who was serving as a tank gunner in the German Tiger Division in the Cherbourg area. Drossier fought against both the Americans and the British before being taken prisoner in August 1944. His division had been sent from Amiens to the Cotentin Peninsula on June 5 and ran into American paratroopers the next day. "They dropped dummies first," says Drossier, who took up residence in Normandy after he was freed. "We thought they were men.

We were in our tank hidden in the woods when we saw the first one. We advanced slowly. I saw he didn't move and I thought he was dead. I touched him and said, 'he isn't very Then I saw he wasn't real and I was really mad." Jeannette Pentecote. daughter of a local butcher, was 16 on June 6, 1944, when American paratroopers began their sweep through Ste.

Mere Eglise after daybreak. "I was in the butcher shop with my mother and father when the Americans came down the street, keeping close to the wall," says Mrs. Pentecote, who now runs a restaurant near the main square. Mrs. Pentecote recalls that her father gave his truck to the Americans to use.

"We never saw it again, but it was a pleasure to give it." About eight kilometers inland at Trevieres, Claude Dupont is a barber like his father before him. As a 15-year-old boy, he and his friends often had talked about an invasion by the English. "Even the Germans talked about the Tommies," says Dupont during a conversation in his shop. "But we didn't really believe it was happening until we saw the Germans around town start running right and left." The shelling and bombing wiped out much of Trevieres. After spending two days in a ditch on the edge of town, Dupont and his family finally emerged.

"There were bodies of American and German soldiers all around. The fields were full of dead cows with their feet sticking up in the air." One vivid memory that Dupont has is of a dead German soldier lying in the square with his mouth open. Two American soldiers were standing over the body. "Somewhere they had found a bottle of champagne. The two would each take a drink of the champagne and then pour some in the mouth of the dead German." the invasion coast.

The sky was aflame with the flashes and flares of hundreds of big guns. We knew there were about 5,000 ships out there in the darkness, carrying almost 200,000 men and their fighting gear to the French beaches. But came the dawn, and we saw that things were not going according to plan. The winds of at least 15 knots and the four-foot waves had pushed the Ranger flotilla far off course. We were headed for land at least three miles east of Pointe du Hoc.

The mistake in navigation was quickly corrected, but valuable time had been lost. So had the element of surprise. Instead of coming ashore directly from the north at H-hour, the Rangers found themselves headed west parallel to the beaches, more than half an hour late. You make friends quickly in combat, and lose them just as quickly. I had spent much of the trip in the LCA kidding with a Ranger who said he would never understand why a reporter, who really didn't have to, would go along on what was cer- I tain to be a suicide mission for about half the Rangers.

He was a great guy, and I wish I had learned his name. Shortly-after our LCA turned west and headed for Pointe du Hoc, a German rifleman on the cliffs shot him through the head. He toppled over quietly at my feet. The casualties in the other LCA were higher. The naval fire had, indeed, driven the Germans to cover.

But they had recovered when the bombardment stopped and had come out to see what was going on. What they saw were slow-moving LCAs loaded with soldiers perfect targets for sharpshooters less than 200 yards away. The loss of two LCAs had reduced the Ranger fighting force to fewer than 200 men. Also in the Ranger flotilla were four DUKWs (pronounced The DUKW was a 2Vt-fon truck chassis with a hull, rudder and propeller to make it amphibious. The Rangers had equipped their four DUKWs with extension ladders from the London Fire Brigade.

The DUKWs were loaded at deck level, then lowered into the black and choppy waters of the English Channel. As a correspondent for the Army newspaper Stars Stripes, I was assigned to LCA No. 883, commanded by Capt. Otto "Big Stoop" Masney of Company and Pewaukee, Wis. The Rangers had been briefed and "sealed" aboard the Ben Machree and Amsterdam on June 1.

We had gone through the false alarm of June 5. D-Day had been originally scheduled for that day. but had been postponed because of horrible weather. The weather didn't seen much better now, but there was a subtle change in the Rangers. Their attitude now was, "Come on, let's get this thing over with." The seas were high and wild, the wind strong and biting cold.

The Ranger plan was vital to the success of the entire invasion, but it was basically simple. Their target was Pointe du Hoc, a comparatively small tableland that jutted into the English Channel like the letter between the main American landing sites on Omaha and Utah beaches. The Germans had six 155mm guns on Pointe du Hoc, all capable of pouring murderous fire onto either Utah or Omaha. Invasion planners called Pointe du Hoc "Target No. 1." The sides of the of Pointe du Hoc were sheer cliffs, most more than 100 feet high, which is why one Allied officer said, "Three old women with brooms could keep the Rangers from climbing those cliffs." The LCAs were equipped with rocket launchers that would hurl grapnel hooks over the clifftops, trailing rope ladders.

The Rangers would land on the narrow beach below the cliffs, pull the ropes tight to set the grapnel hooks firmly into the earth, scamper up the rope ladders, spike those 155mm guns with thermite grenades, and move about one mile inland to meet reinforcements from Omaha Beach at noon on D-Day. A good plan, a basically simple plan. But, As the 11 loaded LCAs formed up and snafu Situation Normal, All Fouled Up! At the end of the day, a battlefield grave..