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THE ASTORIAN • TuESdAy, JuNE 4, 2019
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
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Editor
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REMEMBERING D-DAY
A pure miracle
Editor’s note: When correspondent
Ernie Pyle was killed by a Japanese
machine gun bullet in 1945, his columns
were being delivered to more than 14 mil-
lion homes. He wrote about war from a
soldier’s perspective. This is his first dis-
patch after the d-day landings of June 6,
1944.
N
ORMANDY BEACHHEAD,
June 12, 1944 — Due to a
last-minute alteration in the
arrangements, I didn’t arrive on the beach-
head until the morning after D-day, after
our first wave of assault troops had hit the
shore.
By the time we got here the beaches
had been taken and the fighting had moved
a couple of miles inland. All that remained
on the beach was some sniping and artil-
lery fire, and the occasional startling blast
of a mine geysering brown sand into the
air. That plus a gigantic and pitiful litter of
wreckage along miles of
shoreline.
Submerged tanks
and overturned boats
and burned trucks and
shell-shattered jeeps and
sad little personal belong-
ERNIE
ings were strewn all over
PYLE
these bitter sands. That
plus the bodies of sol-
diers lying in rows covered with blan-
kets, the toes of their shoes sticking up in
a line as though on drill. And other bodies,
uncollected, still sprawling grotesquely in
the sand or half hidden by the high grass
beyond the beach.
That plus an intense, grim determina-
tion of work-weary men to get this chaotic
beach organized and get all the vital sup-
plies and the reinforcements moving more
rapidly over it from the stacked-up ships
standing in droves out to sea.
• • •
Now that it is over it seems to me a
pure miracle that we ever took the beach
at all. For some of our units it was easy,
but in this special sector where I am now
our troops faced such odds that our getting
ashore was like my whipping Joe Louis
down to a pulp.
In this column I want to tell you what
the opening of the second front in this one
sector entailed, so that you can know and
appreciate and forever be humbly grate-
ful to those both dead and alive who did it
for you.
Ashore, facing us, were more enemy
troops than we had in our assault waves.
The advantages were all theirs, the disad-
vantages all ours. The Germans were dug
into positions that they had been work-
ing on for months, although these were
not yet all complete. A one-hundred-foot
bluff a couple of hundred yards back from
the beach had great concrete gun emplace-
ments built right into the hilltop. These
opened to the sides instead of to the front,
thus making it very hard for naval fire
from the sea to reach them. They could
shoot parallel with the beach and cover
every foot of it for miles with artillery fire.
Then they had hidden machine-gun
nests on the forward slopes, with crossfire
taking in every inch of the beach. These
nests were connected by networks of
trenches, so that the German gunners could
move about without exposing themselves.
Throughout the length of the beach,
running zigzag a couple of hundred yards
back from the shoreline, was an immense
V-shaped ditch fifteen feet deep. Nothing
could cross it, not even men on foot, until
fills had been made. And in other places at
the far end of the beach, where the ground
is flatter, they had great concrete walls.
Army Signal Corps
Army medical personnel administer a transfusion to a wounded comrade who survived when his landing craft went down off the coast
of Normandy.
MORE ONLINE
To learn more about the Ernie Pyle World
War II Museum, go to erniepyle.org
beyond the sand. And the enemy had four
men on shore for every three men we had
approaching the shore.
And yet we got on.
• • •
MORE INSIDE
75 years on, D-Day haunts, drives its
veterans
Page B4
These were blasted by our naval gunfire
or by explosives set by hand after we got
ashore.
Our only exits from the beach were
several swales or valleys, each about one
hundred yards wide. The Germans made
the most of these funnel-like traps, sow-
ing them with buried mines. They con-
tained, also, barbed-wire entanglements
with mines attached, hidden ditches, and
machine guns firing from the slopes.
This is what was on the shore. But
our men had to go through a maze nearly
as deadly as this before they even got
ashore. Underwater obstacles were ter-
rific. The Germans had whole fields of evil
devices under the water to catch our boats.
Even now, several days after the landing,
we have cleared only channels through
them and cannot yet approach the whole
length of the beach with our ships. Even
now some ship or boat hits one of these
mines every day and is knocked out of
commission.
The Germans had masses of those great
six-pronged spiders, made of railroad iron
and standing shoulder-high, just beneath
the surface of the water for our landing
craft to run into. They also had huge logs
buried in the sand, pointing upward and
outward, their tops just below the water.
Attached to these logs were mines.
In addition to these obstacles they had
floating mines offshore, land mines buried
in the sand of the beach, and more mines
in checkerboard rows in the tall grass
Beach landings are planned to a sched-
ule that is set far ahead of time. They all
have to be timed, in order for everything
to mesh and for the following waves of
troops to be standing off the beach and
ready to land at the right moment.
As the landings are planned, some ele-
ments of the assault force are to break
through quickly, push on inland, and attack
the most obvious enemy strong points. It
is usually the plan for units to be inland,
attacking gun positions from behind,
within a matter of minutes after the first
men hit the beach.
I have always been amazed at the speed
called for in these plans. You’ll have sched-
ules calling for engineers to land at H-hour
plus two minutes, and service troops at
H-hour plus thirty minutes, and even for
press censors to land at H-hour plus sev-
enty-five minutes. But in the attack on this
special portion of the beach where I am
— the worst we had, incidentally — the
schedule didn’t hold.
Our men simply could not get past the
beach. They were pinned down right on
the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire
from the bluff. Our first waves were on that
beach for hours, instead of a few minutes,
before they could begin working inland.
You can still see the foxholes they dug
at the very edge of the water, in the sand
and the small, jumbled rocks that form
parts of the beach.
Medical corpsmen attended the
wounded as best they could. Men were
killed as they stepped out of landing
craft. An officer whom I knew got a bul-
let through the head just as the door of his
landing craft was let down. Some men
were drowned.
The first crack in the beach defenses
was finally accomplished by terrific and
wonderful naval gunfire, which knocked
out the big emplacements. They tell epic
stories of destroyers that ran right up
into shallow water and had it out point-
blank with the big guns in those concrete
emplacements ashore.
When the heavy fire stopped, our
men were organized by their officers and
pushed on inland, circling machine-gun
nests and taking them from the rear.
As one officer said, the only way to take
a beach is to face it and keep going. It is
costly at first, but it’s the only way. If the
men are pinned down on the beach, dug in
and out of action, they might as well not be
there at all. They hold up the waves behind
them, and nothing is being gained.
Our men were pinned down for a while,
but finally they stood up and went through,
and so we took that beach and accom-
plished our landing. We did it with every
advantage on the enemy’s side and every
disadvantage on ours. In the light of a cou-
ple of days of retrospection, we sit and talk
and call it a miracle that our men ever got
on at all or were able to stay on.
Before long it will be permitted to name
the units that did it. Then you will know
to whom this glory should go. They suf-
fered casualties. And yet if you take the
entire beachhead assault, including other
units that had a much easier time, our total
casualties in driving this wedge into the
continent of Europe were remarkably low
— only a fraction, in fact, of what our
commanders had been prepared to accept.
And these units that were so battered
and went through such hell are still, right
at this moment, pushing on inland with-
out rest, their spirits high, their egotism in
victory almost reaching the smart-alecky
stage.
Their tails are up. “We’ve done it
again,” they say. They figure that the rest of
the army isn’t needed at all. Which proves
that, while their judgment in this regard is
bad, they certainly have the spirit that wins
battles and eventually wars.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Political bitterness
hen growing up in the 1930s and
1940s, I remember the anger caused
by President Franklin Roosevelt and his pol-
icies. Today, a lot of folks react angrily to
President Donald Trump and his policies.
But one big difference today is the extensive
political bitterness in America.
President Roosevelt, and all presidents
who followed him, belonged to a ruling class
with well-established political standards and
rules of political engagement. Establishment
politicians faithfully adhered to those rules.
Trump never ran for public office, and is an
outsider businessman with his own political
rules. And that perplexed the established rul-
ing class.
For months on end, journalists, pundits,
pollsters and establishment politicians railed
against Trump — some even called him a
clown — and assured voters of a “guaran-
W
teed winner” in Democrat Hillary Clinton.
After all that hoopla, a lot of folks are now
bitter.
Trump’s successful use of social media
like Twitter especially angers journalists not
used to being outmaneuvered, with Trump
framing the news narrative almost every
day. In fact, I can’t remember in my lifetime
another president who’s made himself so
accessible to public questioning and scrutiny.
And just like Roosevelt’s policies mostly
ended up being good for the country, so also
will Trump’s policies for economic growth
and America’s place in the world.
As history was kind to President Roos-
evelt, so also will history be kind to Presi-
dent Trump. The continual harassment of
President Trump by Democrats today is
unprecedented, but will become just another
footnote in the history books.
DON HASKELL
Astoria
Tsunami: Save lives,
or fire trucks?
was invited to attend and all-day con-
ference on coastal management, where
presenters shared information on Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)
and Clatsop County planning.
My understanding is that now FEMA is
more about people — what to do to save
lives first. We need to focus on Gearhart
taxpayers, rather than building a resilient
fire station. Fire equipment should not take
precedence over people.
One of the advisors to coastal cities
asked me (I was the only one there from
Gearhart): “How is Gearhart going to take
care of their tourists and residents when
the tsunami comes?”
I did not have an answer. A verti-
cal evacuation structure could be built,
but where? We need to plan now to take
I
care of our residents, and others, before
we attempt to save easily replaceable fire
equipment.
Gearhart has approximately 1,700
homes, with a largely senior citizen base
of full-time residents. We have a fire
department that has only responded to two
fire calls, and over 400 emergency medi-
cal calls, in the same period of time. The
responses to opioid overdoses, seizures,
heart attacks, etc., far exceed our fire
emergency needs.
Residents need to know at what level
emergency medical technician (EMT)
training our volunteer fire fighters are at to
respond to these emergencies, and increase
the skills that each has to aid the residents
and tourists they should be serving first,
before being loaned out of state to fight
fires.
HAROLD T. GABLE
Gearhart