The Fighting First by Flint Whitlock

Author:Flint Whitlock [Flint Whitlock]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-11T16:00:00+00:00

War correspondent Don Whitehead recorded his impressions of the chaos still reigning on the beach: “The wounded lay at the water’s edge with the glazed look of shock, waiting until someone could remove them. Dead men’s bodies were sprawled in the gravel or rolled gently in the surf. A wounded man crawled out of the water to the edge of the protective embankment. A mortar shell hit him squarely between the shoulders.”2

The 18th RCT’s 2nd Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel John Williamson, was leading the charge onto shore just to the west of Exit E-1. 3 Aboard one of the assault ships was nineteen-year-old Ralph “Andy” Anderson, a private first class from Kansas City, Missouri, and an automatic rifleman assigned to E Company, 18th RCT. Before the invasion, several members of his company who had taken part in the North Africa and Sicily landings had attempted to buck up his spirits. Anderson said, “They kept telling me it [the landing] would be a piece of cake. They were just trying to encourage us poor souls that didn’t know anything about it. My squad leader had been in the North Africa and Sicily campaigns and he told me, ‘The first thing you do is take that bipod off the BAR* and drop it into the English Channel. They’re gonna be looking for you the minute they see that automatic weapon.’ So I did. It’s still there, so far as I know.”

Losing his weapon at the water’s edge in his haste to reach safety, Anderson somehow managed to make it through the rain of artillery, mortar, and machine-gun fire and, teaming up with an assistant gunner from another squad named Lowery (whom Anderson vaguely knew and called “Buckeye” because he was from Ohio), took cover along the crowded shingle. Realizing he was weaponless, he dashed back into the surf to retrieve his BAR; he cleaned it three times before it would operate properly. Above Anderson and Lowery, a machine gun in a concrete fortification was spitting a stream of continuous fire. “We must have hit the beach almost perfect, but there weren’t nobody else there that would go up the path, so I told Buckeye we’ve got to get off this beach or we’re gonna get killed.” Dodging bullets and shrapnel, the two of them began scrambling up the path past the still-active pillbox. “A destroyer pulled up broadside to the beach. Buckeye and I had already gone past that pillbox, maybe fifty or a hundred yards up the hill, when [the destroyer] started shooting at it. They put every round in that pillbox; none of the shells got close to us.”4

Jack Bennett, a twenty-year-old private from Vernon, Texas, a member of E Company’s mortar squad, recalled that his landing craft came in, was waved off, moved westward, and finally broached on a sand bar,where the troops debarked into deep water. “The water was up to my neck, and I’m six-two. I can’t swim, but I can walk fast under water!” Lugging

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