To learn more about my Uncle Fred Pitcherella I read D-Day June 6, 1944 The Climatic Battle of World War II by Stephen E. Ambrose.
I learned he was in the 146th Engineers. I have no way of knowing which sector of Obama Beach my uncle landed on.
My children watched Uncle Fred place maggots on an open sore on his foot to eat away dead flesh.
My Uncle Fred served in WWII. He was a combat engineer and landed with Army Rangers on Omaha Beach. He couldn't take off his boots for 3 months and contracted a foot fungus that lasted the rest of his life. He was wounded and sent to England to recuperate.
In his mind the worst thing that happened to him was that while he recuperated most of his friends were killed when a bridge prematurely detonated. His lifetime regret is that if he was there the accident wouldn't have happened.
FROM:
Sunday, May 24, 2015
Growing up among heroes.
I was 2 when the war ended. The Coatesville I grew up in was full of veterans of WWII. There was plenty of talk about "The War" when I was a boy. They came back, opened businesses, taught in schools, became police and judges.
***
I’m assuming he was in the 146th Engineering Battalion since he was at the liberation of Paris. It’s possible he was in another battalion.
This is not from Stephen Ambrose’s book. It’s from The Corps of Engineers: The War Against Germany:
"Engineers on OMAHA
The eight demolition support teams
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for OMAHA and the three command teams aboard a British transport had had a chance to get some sleep during the night. But the gapping teams, crowded aboard LCTs and towed LCMs, were miserable. One of the LCTs had broken down early in the voyage, and several swamped in the Channel swell. Their drenched and seasick passengers transferred to the bucking LCMs in the blackness, no small feat considering the amount of equipment involved. (Map 16)
The engineers were overburdened for their trip to shore. Each man carried a forty-pound bag of Hagensen packs, wire cutters, a gas mask, cartridges, an inflatable life belt, a canteen, rations, and a first aid packet. They had either carbines or Garand rifles and bangalore torpedoes to tear apart the barbed wire on the beach. Some had mine detectors, others heavy wire reels wound with 800 feet of primacord, and some carried bags of fuse assemblies. Over their uniforms all wore coveralls impregnated against gas, and over them a fur-lined jacket. Each LCM held two rubber boats, each containing about 500 pounds of explosives, extra bangalores, mine detectors, gap markers, buoys, and from 75 to 100 cans of gasoline.2
Almost from the beginning, things began to go wrong for the sixteen gapping teams. They managed to transfer from the LCTs to the LCMs on schedule, around 0300. At 0450, twenty minutes after the amphibious tanks and the first infantry assault wave started for shore, the demolition teams were on their way to the line of departure, some two miles offshore. Behind them, their support teams were delayed when their LCMs failed to arrive on time, and they encountered difficulties getting into smaller craft from the attack transports. Unable to load completely until 0500, the support elements finally got under way at 0600, far too late to reach the tidal flat in time to help the gapping teams. The precisely timed schedules, conceived for fair weather and calm seas, were breaking down even before the engineers reached the shore.3
The assault gapping teams headed landward heartened by the rain of metal descending on enemy positions. The eight assault teams assigned to the eastern sector of OMAHA with the 16th Regimental Combat Team reached the line of departure at first light; Navy control boats herded them into their correct lanes for Easy Red and Fox Green beaches. As they headed for shore, heavy shells of the naval bombardment whistled over their heads, and at 0600 bombers arrived with the first of some 1,300 tons of bombs dropped on the invasion area on D-day. The sight made the drenched, shivering men in the boats momentarily forget their misery. They were cheered in their certainty that the Air Forces would saturate the beaches, and when a British rocket ship loosed the first of a barrage of 9,000 missiles at the German positions, hope mounted that the German artillery and machine-gun nests would be silent when the LCMs came in. Optimists recalled a statement from a briefing aboard one of the transports: "There will be nothing alive on the
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MAP 16
beach when you land.”4
The illusion did not sustain them long, for the bombers had flown through cloud cover that forced their crews to rely on imperfect blind bombing techniques. Only two sticks of bombs fell within four miles of the shore defenses, though the area behind the beaches took a thorough pounding. The British rockets made a fine display, but disappeared over the cliffs to dig up the landscape behind the German coastal works. The naval barrage beginning at H minus 45 minutes was also more effective inland, contributing to the disruption of German communications. The combined power of the air and naval bombardment did much to isolate the battle area. But the German shore batteries on OMAHA, located in bunkers and enfilading the beach so that they could fire no more than a few hundred yards out to sea, remained mute during the opening moments of the action. Offering no muzzle flashes to give away their positions to the Navy gunners and invite their own destruction, they were largely intact when the first wave of engineers, tanks, and infantry hit the tidal flat.5
For the first troops in, OMAHA was "an epic human tragedy which in the early hours bordered on total disaster."6 The morning mists and the smoke raised in the bombardment concealed landmarks in some sectors, and a strong tidal crosscurrent carried the boats as
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much as two thousand yards east of their intended landfalls. The 741st Tank Battalion launched twenty-nine of its thirty-two duplex-drive tanks offshore and immediately lost twenty-seven when they foundered or plunged directly to the bottom of the Channel upon leaving their LCTs. Two swam ashore, and the remaining three landed from beached LCTs, only to fall prey at the waterline to German gunners. Machine-gun fire whipped among the engineer and infantry landing craft, intermingled now, and followed them to the beach. As the ramps dropped, a storm of artillery and mortar rounds joined the automatic and small-arms fire, ripping apart the first wave. Dead men dotted the flat; the wounded lay in the path of the onrushing tide, and many drowned as the surf engulfed them. An infantry line formed at the shingle bank and, swelled by fearful, dispirited, and often leaderless men, kept up a weak volume of fire as yet inadequate to protect the engineers. In the carnage, the gapping teams, suffering their own losses, fought to blow the obstacles.
On the left of Easy Red, one team led the entire invasion by at least five minutes. The commander of Team 14, 2d Lt. Phill C. Wood, Jr., was under the impression that H-hour was 0620 instead of 0630. Under his entreaties, the Navy coxswain brought the LCM in at 0625, the boat's gun crew unsuccessfully trying to destroy Teller mines
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on the upright stakes. Wood and his team dragged their explosive-laden rubber boat into waist-deep water under a hail of machine-gun fire. No one was on the beach. The lieutenant charged toward a row of obstacles, glancing backward as he ran. In that moment he saw an artillery shell land squarely in the center of the craft he had just left, detonating the contents of the second rubber boat and killing most of the Navy contingent of his team. The LCM burned fiercely. Wood's crew dropped bangalore torpedoes and mine detectors and abandoned their load of explosives. Dodging among the rows, they managed to wire a line of obstacles to produce a gap, but here the infantry landing behind them frustrated their attempt to complete the job. Troops, wounded or hale, huddled among the obstacles, using them for cover, and Wood finally gave up trying to chase them out of range of his charges. Leaving the obstacles as they were, he and his team, now only about half of its original strength, rushed forward and took up firing positions with the infantry concentrated at the shingle.7
Other teams had little more success. Team 13's naval detachment also fell when an artillery shell struck its boatload of explosives just after it landed on Easy Red. The Army contingent lost only one man but found the infantry discharging from the landing craft seeking cover among the obstacles, thus preventing the team from setting off charges. Team 12 left its two rubber boats aboard the LCM, yet managed to clear a thirty-yard gap on Easy Red, but at a fearful cost. A German mortar shell struck a line of primacord, prematurely setting off the charges strung about one series of obstacles, killing six Army and four Navy demolitions men and wounding nine other members of the team and a number of infantrymen in the vicinity. Team 11, arriving on the far left flank of Easy Red ahead of the infantry, lost over half its men. A faulty fuse prevented the remainder from blowing a passage through the beach impediments.
Only two teams, 9 and 10, accomplished their missions on the eastern sector of OMAHA. Team 9, landing in the middle of Easy Red well ahead of the infantry waves, managed to open a fifty-yard path for the main assault. Team 10's performance was encouraging in comparison with that of the others. Clearing the infantry aside within twenty minutes of hitting the beach, the men demolished enough obstacles in spite of heavy casualties to create two gaps, one fifty yards wide and a second a hundred yards across. They were the only gaps blown on the eastern half of the assault beaches.
The remaining teams assigned to that area had much the same dismal experience as Lieutenant Wood's team, and the failure of the assault gapping effort became evident. At Fox Green, Teams 15 and 16 came in later than those on Easy Red but met the same heavy artillery and automatic fire. At 0633 Team 16 plunged off its LCM, leaving its rubber boats adrift when it became apparent that they drew German attention. Here too the men gave up trying to blow gaps when the infantry would not leave the protection of the German devices. Team 15 touched down at 0640, just as the tide began rising rapidly,
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and lost several men to machine-gun fire before they left the LCM. In a now common occurrence, they sustained more casualties when a shell found the rubber boat with its volatile load. The survivors nevertheless attacked the Belgian gates farthest from shore and fixed charges to several. The fusillade from shore cut away fuses as rapidly as the engineers could rig them. One burst of fragments carried away a fuseman's carefully set mechanism-and all of his fingers. With no choice but to make for shore, they ran, only four of their original forty uninjured, to the low shingle bank on Fox Green, where they collapsed, "soaking wet, unable to move, and suffering from cramps. It was cold and there was no sun.
Seven teams bound for the 116th Infantry's beaches on the western half of OMAHA-Dog Green, Dog White, Dog Red, and Easy Green-were on schedule, most of them, in fact, coming in ahead of the infantry companies in the first waves. The eighth team landed more than an hour later; its LCT had foundered and sunk shortly after leaving England, and the team transferred to other craft. When it finally landed at 0745, the team found the obstacles covered with water. The duplex-drive tank crews on the western half of the beach came in all the way on their landing craft rather than attempting the swim ashore, but their presence was only briefly felt. German fire disabled many tanks at the shingle line where they had halted, unable to move farther, and those remaining could not silence the heavier enemy guns. The men of Team 8, landing a little to the left of Dog Green, saw no Americans on the beach but confronted a German party working on the obstacles. The Germans fled, and the team was able to blow one fifty-yard gap before the American infantry arrived. Teams 3 and 4, badly shot up, achieved little, and Teams 5 and 7 could do no blasting after the incoming infantry took cover among the beach obstructions. The only positive results came when Teams 1 and 6 each opened a fifty-yard gap, one on Dog White and one on Dog Red. Command Boat 1, on the beach flat at 0645, unloaded a crew that made an equally wide hole in the obstacles on Easy Green. Where the engineers successfully blew lanes open, they had first to cajole, threaten, and even kick the infantry out of the way. Gapping team members later recalled that the teams had more success if they came in without firing the machine guns on the LCMs, since their distinctive muzzle flashes gave their range to the enemy.
The tardy support teams appeared off the eastern beaches, all carried off course and landing between 0640 and 0745 on or around Fox Red. The German artillerymen at the eastern reaches of OMAHA met them with fearsomely accurate fire. One 88-mm. piece put two rounds into Team F's LCM, killing and wounding fifteen men; only four men of the original team got to shore. Team D got a partial gap opened, making a narrow, thirty-yard lane, but the other teams could do little. The men arriving later found the German fire just as heavy, and the incoming tide forced them to shore before they could deploy among the obstacles. They joined the earlier elements that had found
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shelter under the cliffs at the eastern end of the beach.9
Their strength reduced to a single machine, engineer tankdozers could offer little help. Only six of the sixteen M-4s equipped with bulldozer blades got ashore, and the enemy picked off five of them. The remaining one provided the engineers an alternative to blowing up the obstacles, an increasingly hazardous undertaking as more troops and vehicles crowded onto the beaches. Instead of using demolitions, which sent shards of metal from the obstacles careening around the area, the teams set about removing the mines from stakes, ramps, hedgehogs, and Belgian gates, and let the tankdozers, joined later in the day by several armored bulldozers, shove the obstacles out of the way as long as the tide permitted. Pushed ashore after 0800 by the inrushing water, the gapping teams helped move wounded men off the tidal flat and consolidated equipment and the supply of explosives to await the next ebb.
In the meantime the Navy had discovered that the obstacles did not pose the expected problem once they were stripped of their mines. Shortly after 1000, several destroyers moved to within a thousand yards of the beach. Engaging the German emplacements with devastating 5-inch gunfire, they began to accomplish what the tanks in the first assault could not. Using the covering fire, two landing craft, LCT-30 and LCI-554, simply rammed through the obstacles off Fox Green, battering a path to shore with all automatic weapons blazing. Though LCT-30 was lost to fire from the bluffs, the other vessel retracted from the beach without loss, and dozens of other craft hovering offshore repeated the maneuver with the same result.10
When the first morning tide interrupted the work of the gapping teams, they had opened just five holes, and only one of these, Team 10's 100-yard-wide lane on Easy Red, was usable. Their ranks virtually decimated in their first half-hour ashore, the teams' members were often bitter when they discussed their experience later. Most of the equipment the LCMs carried had been useless or worse; the rubber boats with their explosives had drawn heavy fire, and the engineers had abandoned them as quickly as possible. The mine detectors were useless since the enemy had buried no mines in the flat, and German snipers made special targets of men carrying them. With no barbed wire strung among the obstacles, the bangalore torpedoes the engineers brought in were only an extra burden. Overloaded and dressed in impregnated coveralls, the engineers found their movement impeded, and wounded and uninjured men alike drowned under the weight of their packs as they left the landing craft. The survivors also criticized the close timing of the invasion waves that left them only a half hour to clear lanes. The confusion produced when the engineers landed simultaneously with or even ahead of the infantry led to the opinion that there also should have been at least a half hour between the first infantry assault
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and the arrival of the gapping teams. In future actions, support teams should go in with the groups they were backing up rather than behind them in the invasion sequence. Lastly, as a tactical measure, the gapping team veterans recommended that the first concern should be to strip the mines from any obstacles encountered so as to render them safe for tankdozers or landing craft to ram.11
The human cost of the engineers' heroism on OMAHA was enormous. When the Army elements of the gapping teams reverted on D plus 5 to control of the 146th and 299th Engineer Combat Battalions, then attached to V Corps, they had each lost between 34 and 41 percent of their original strength. The units had not yet accounted for all their members, and the Navy set losses among the naval contingents of the teams at 52 percent. Fifteen Distinguished Service Crosses went to Army members of the team; Navy demolitions men received seven Navy Crosses. Each of the companies of the 146th and 299th Engineer Combat Battalions involved and the naval demolition unit received unit citations for the action on D-day.12
The end of the first half hour on D-day saw approximately 3,000 American assault troops on OMAHA, scattered in small clumps along the sand. Isolated from each other and firing sporadically at the enemy, they sought to advance up the small defiles leading to the flanks and rear of German positions, but no forward motion was yet evident. On the right, or western, flank of the beach in front of Vierville in the 116th Infantry's zone, the Germans had taken the heaviest toll among the incoming men, and the assault of Company A, 116th Infantry, crumbled under the withering fire. Reinforcements were slow, often carried off course to the east in the tidal current. A thousand yards east, straddling Dog Red and Easy Green, lay elements of two more companies from the 116th, confused by their surroundings but less punished by German fire since the defensive positions above were wrapped in a heavy smoke from grass fires that obscured vision seaward. Sections of four different companies from both assault regiments landed on the Fox beaches and, huddled with engineers from the gapping teams, fired at opportune targets or contemplated their next moves. Only in the stretch between the Colleville and St. Laurent draws, Exits E-1 and E-3, was there relative safety. The German posts in the bluffs here seemed unmanned through the whole invasion, which also permitted the more successful performance of the gapping teams on Easy Red. But the success of the invasion on OMAHA now depended upon getting the troops and vehicles off the beaches and through the German coastal defensive shell.13
Opening the Exits
While the ordeal of the gapping teams was still in progress, a second phase of
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engineer operations on OMAHA began with the arrival of the first elements of the 5th Engineer Special Brigade. These units were charged with bringing some order out of the chaos of the invasion beaches. For the purpose some engineer combat battalions became the core units for beach groups, which included a DUKW company, quartermaster units for gasoline and other supply, a medical detachment, ordnance ammunition, maintenance, and bomb disposal units, and an assortment of signal, chemical, and military police companies. A company from a naval beach battalion completed the organization to assist in structuring the beaches for supply operations. Four groups had assignments on OMAHA for D-day. The 37th Engineer Battalion Beach Group supported the 16th Regimental Combat Team, 1st Division, and the 149th was behind the 116th Infantry. The 348th was to facilitate the landing of the 18th Infantry, following the 16th on the eastern end of the beach. The 336th Engineer Battalion Beach Group was scheduled to arrive in the afternoon to organize Fox Red. All the groups were under 5th Engineer Special Brigade control until the assault phase was over; the 149th Engineer Battalion Beach Group would then revert to the 6th Brigade.14
The earliest elements stepped into the same fire that cut up the gapping teams. First in was a reconnaissance party from Company A, 37th Engineer Combat Battalion, led by the company commander; it landed at 0700, ten minutes ahead of schedule, opposite the E-3 draw on Fox Green. Sections of the remainder of Company A and a platoon of Company C, accompanying a headquarters group, arrived over the next several minutes, but the entire complement of the battalion's men wound up hugging the shingle bank and helping to build up the fire line. Another engineer section, this one from Company C, 149th Engineer Combat Battalion, scheduled for landing on Dog Red, landed on Easy Green. They set to work there, and a small detachment began digging a path through the dune line to the road paralleling the shore. A second detail wormed its way through gaps cut in the barbed wire and approached the base of the cliffs, only to be halted by an antitank ditch. Enemy fire forced the group back to the shingle line. Two companies from the 147th Engineer Combat Battalion suffered forty-five men lost to artillery fire even before their LCT set them down off Dog White at 0710. In the five-foot surf they lost or jettisoned their equipment and found shelter after a harrowing run for the shingle.15 An LCI put Company B, 37th Engineer Combat Battalion, ashore safely at 0730 at Exit E-1, leading to St. Laurent, which the battalion was supposed to open for the 2d Battalion of the 16th Infantry. Company A was to open Exit E-3 for the 3d Battalion but did not arrive until 0930. Landing near E-1, Company A had to make its way through the wreckage on the beach to E-3, where the unit ran into such withering artillery, mortar, and small-arms fire that it could accomplish little all day. Unluckiest of all was Company C, which was to push inland and set up transit areas. A direct hit to its LCI on landing at Exit E-1 killed many men. In the same area one
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of two LCIs carrying the battalion staff broached on a stake; the men had to drop off into neck-deep water and wade ashore under machine-gun fire.16 Coming in with the fifth wave, they had expected to find OMAHA free of small arms fire. Instead, the beach was crowded with the men of the first waves crouching behind the shingle. Deadly accurate artillery fire was still hitting the landing craft, tanks, and half-tracks lining the water's edge; one mortar shell killed the commander of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion, Lt. Col. Lionel F. Smith, and two members of his staff, Capts. Paul F. Harkleroad and Allen H. Cox, Jr., as soon as they landed. Badly shaken, the engineers joined the infantrymen behind the shingle bank.
By 0930, infantry penetrations of the German positions above the beach were beginning to have some effect, though only a few men were scaling the heights. Rangers and elements of the 116th Infantry got astride the high ground between Exits D-1 and D-3 around 0800 and slowly eliminated some of the automatic weapons trained on American troops below. Between St. Laurent and Colleville, companies from both regiments got men on the heights. One company raked the German trenches in the E-1 draw, capturing twenty-one Germans before moving farther inland. In the F-1 draw back of Fox Red, most coordinated resistance ended by 0900, but isolated nests of Germans remained. The movement continued all morning, and the engineers either joined attempts to scale the bluffs or made it possible for others to climb.
Beyond the shingle on Easy Green and Easy Red were a double-apron barbed-wire fence and minefields covering the sands to the bluffs. As the infantry advances began to take a toll of the German defenders on the bluffs, Sgt. Zolton Simon, a squad leader in Company C, 37th Engineer Combat Battalion, gathered his five-man mine-detector crew, cut a gap in the wire, and led his men into the minefield. Disregarding the fire, they methodically opened and marked a narrow path across the mined area, into a small defile, and up the hill. Simon was wounded once while helping to sweep mines and again when he reached the hilltop, this time so seriously that he was out of action. By now, infantry was on the trail behind him, urged into the gap by 1st Lt. Charles Peckham of Company B. who stood exposed to enemy fire directing men across the mine-swept corridor.17
The task remained of getting the tanks inland. A platoon of the 20th Engineer Combat Battalion, landing in support of the 1st Battalion, 16th Infantry, began blowing a larger gap through the minefield with bangalore torpedoes. Mine-detector crews of Company C of the 37th Engineer Battalion followed to widen the lanes to accommodate vehicles. But the tanks could not get past the shingle, where they could get no traction. Behind the shingle lay a deep antitank ditch. Pvt. Vinton Dove, a bulldozer operator of Company C, made the first efforts to overcome these obstacles, assisted by his relief operator, Pvt. William J. Shoemaker, who alternated with him in driving and guiding the bulldozer. Dove cleared a
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ENGINEERS ANCHOR REINFORCED TRACK for vehicles coming ashore at OMAHA.
road through the shingle, pulled out roadblocks at Exit E-1, and began working on the antitank ditch, which was soon filled with the help of dozer operators from Company B and a company of the 149th Engineer Combat Battalion that had landed near E-1 by mistake. The pioneer efforts of Dove and Shoemaker in the face of severe enemy fire, which singled out the bulldozer as a prime target, won for both men the Distinguished Service Cross.18
Company C's 1st Lt. Robert P. Ross won the third of the three Distinguished Service Crosses awarded to men of the 37th on D-day for his contribution to silencing the heavy fire coming from a hill overlooking Exit E-1. Assuming command of a leaderless infantry company, Ross took the infantrymen, along with his own engineer platoon, up the slopes to the crest, where the troops engaged the enemy, killed forty Germans, and forced the surrender of two machine-gun emplacements.19 Cleared fairly early, the E-1 exit became the principal egress from OMAHA Beach on D-day, largely due to the exertions of the 37th Engineer Combat Battalion. The unit suffered the heaviest casualties among the components of the 5th
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Engineer Special Brigade-twenty-four men killed, including the battalion commander
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CHAPTER XV
The Landings on OMAHA and UTAH
