29TH DIVISION - WWII STORIES

Kearnie SLINGLUFF

Page 2

It was very consoling to look up in the air and see those planes overhead, because for those of you who haven't been on an invasion -- I don't think very many of you have -- you have the feeling that you are making it all by yourself, and you have done a whole lot of studying about the German west wall. You know that it is going to be tough to crack, and you think, "God Almighty, the United States has picked me to crack it," and you look up in the air and you see a whole lot of fighter planes and think, "Well, maybe I am not doing it quite by myself, I've got a little bit of help."

Getting about ten miles from the shore -- there were ships all over the place, just all over the water as far as you could see in any direction, and the big battleships were throwing shells in toward land. You would watch them throw a broadside, and rock back, and straighten up, and about a minute later they would light up again. God knows what they were shooting at.When we got about ten miles from the shore control boats began coming by us with loud speakers on board saying, all elements of the One Hundred and Seventy-Fifth Infantry are wanted ashore immediately. That was our call. We went over the side on cargo nets into little boats that are known as LCVP's. That is a landing craft vehicle personnel. It holds about thirty men or one jeep. We loaded it up with about thirty-five men in each one, and we had broken ourselves down into little fighting teams of roughly thirty men that knew how to knock out a pill box, and so forth, so that we were all set up to go over the side, and we went over the side in these little things. It was pretty tricky because it was very rough, and if you have ever gone over a cargo net into a canoe or whatever it is, you know one minute you are about to step on it, and the next minute it is eight feet below you, and you have got about thirty or thirty-five pounds of equipment strapped around you, you are trying to take care of a rifle and a gas mask, and God knows what all, yourself too, and it is a little hard. But when you go over the side they form up into what is known as a wave. Your little craft gets filled up, and it goes over somewhere and starts going around in a circle, and as other craft get filled up that are assigned to your wave they start following it around in the same circle, and pretty soon all the craft are there, and then the lead craft breaks off and heads in for shore, and you head in just like a line of geese, and then finally you branch off on both sides and form up a wave and you hit the shore all at once so as to deliver the maximum fire power on whatever your objective is going to be. It is the shock action that makes an invasion work.Well, we started in to the shore, and we were crouched down behind the ramps on these little boats, and we were crouched down like that for about an hour, I suppose, while they move in toward the shore, and you have plenty of time to think about home and mother and "medium rare," and all of those things that you liked. You are very uncomfortable. That was the worst part of the invasion for me. I was plenty scared. we began getting in close to the shore, and occasionally machine gun bullets would rattle across the ramp in front of you, and then you would maybe stick your head up a little bit. I stuck my head up once in a while to take some pictures, and pulled it down again very quickly. But you always had that thought in your mind that, "My God, it is going to be about five minutes and that ramp isn't going to be there, and I am." So it was pretty tight.

The landing craft on my left hit a mine, and it didn't sink. It went right straight up in the air. Pieces of it in all directions. It must have hit a big mine and parts of it sort of sprinkled down on top of us.The craft that I was on got all the way inshore, and most of the others did, and we spread out as we went in so that we wouldn't be too good a target, and there wasn't terribly much fire on the beach at that time. I was able to get my company together to some degree pretty quickly, and we started up the draw on the left that I had been ordered to go through to get to the regimental assembly area. I had put my scouts out in front, and as soon as they got well into the draw there was a great deal of machine gun fire that opened up on them.. They were very unhappy. They came back to me and reported it and reported that that draw was completely covered, and I knew that my battalion commander was ashore, and I went to him to find out whether he wanted us to attack up that draw or not, and he said no, he did not, that the draw on the right that went directly into Verville was open, that it had been opened up, and that I would follow the troops that were going up through the draw.Now, to drop back a little bit and throw a bouquet or two at that point. That draw on the right was opened by our first wave, which was comprised of elements of the One Hundred and Sixteenth Infantry, the Virginia Infantry Regiment of the Twenty-Ninth Division. The first division which had come in I believe on our right was a division that was supposed to be the crack division of the United States Army. It had seen action in Africa, it had seen action in Sicily, it had been in two other landings before, and it had stalled on the beach. The One Hundred and Sixteenth Infantry of the Twenty-Ninth Division attacked through that draw. They opened a hole through the beach, and the first division had to follow us through. We had never seen any action before that, and we were as good as we thought we were or we wouldn't have gone through.

Anyway, when we got there that hole was open. But there was a traffic jam such as you would see at the corner of Forty-Second and Broadway, vehicles bumper to bumper, tanks, men just jammed up in there, occasional 88's dropping in among them, and there was no possible way of moving up in there. I had learned a lesson coming into the shore that waiting was the hardest thing to do when you were under fire, and I wanted my men to be busy, and busy quickly. I knew I couldn't take it waiting, and I was pretty sure they couldn't. So we slipped up the side of this draw, the left side of this draw and climbed back over the top of this cliff. There were flat fields back over there, and we could go right back over the cliff, and I formed my men up into three or four man teams, because it was a sand cliff that you could slide down. While we had been on the beach we had been able to see these holes all through the cliff where machine gun fire was coming out and sniper fire was coming out at us, and we knew they were shooting real stuff because I had four or five men hit.So we got a little initiation in how to catch Germans right there. These three man teams would locate one of these holes. They would see a puff of smoke down underneath them. The first man would get a grenade in his hand. He would dig his heels into the sand and he would slide down and get astraddle of one of these holes. Then he would fling a grenade down between his legs, and then he would back back right up against the cliff again, and as soon as the grenade went off he dived down into the hole, and his friends would follow him and they would just spray the hole with automatic rifle fire. Of course, they couldn't see what was inside. There was just a cloud of dust and everything else inside, and after they sprayed it a while everything would quiet down and they would look around to see what they had done inside. Occasionally they would find a dead kraut and occasionally they would find some that came out with their hands up. They had had enough.

Page 3