It soon became apparent that Allied intelligence had made a mistake. The concrete casements were as expected - albeit heavily scarred by bombardment - as were the trenches, but there were far fewer Germans than anticipated and crucially, no guns. Instead, there were telegraph poles which had been put in place to look like guns. Tracks leading inland revealed that the Ranger's targets had been moved.
As command and medical posts were established atop Pointe du Hoc – the wounded were tended to inside a captured casement – Ranger groups moved towards the road, their secondary target. This involved moving through the Pointe's heavily defended perimeter. While the minefields, bunkers, machine guns and barbed wire had been designed to repel attacks from the opposite direction, they were still lethal and, unlike the casements, occupied by a full compliment of German troops.
When D company reached the road they only had twenty fully functioning men left.
By 08:15 am around 35 Rangers had created a roadblock, achieving the secondary objective. However, the situation across the Pointe was still chaotic, as Rangers and Germans fought sporadically, all having to crawl for safety, often capturing and recapturing each other. Some Germans surrendered, only to be killed by other Germans. Rudder was heavily shaken by a British naval shell that fell short, and he'd also been shot in the leg by a sniper, but he remained forcefully in charge and arranged for the ever-present western machine gun to be removed. Lieutenant Eikner had brought along a First World War signaling lamp in case the mission's artillery spotters were incapacitated; they had been. Sending Morse Code via the lamp's shutters, the command post contacted USS Satterlee and directed naval gunfire onto the machine gun until it was obliterated.
Away from the Pointe, Rangers were patrolling, fighting when necessary and following any suspicious tracks. At one point a group of around eleven Rangers dropped back to allow a large convoy of armoured Germans to pass uncontested: they simply couldn't attack over 50 enemy troops when the primary objective wasn’t complete and the Germans were heading elsewhere. Having destroyed some telegraph poles on the coastal road, Sergeants Leonard Lomell and Jack Kuhn followed a dirt road inland and made a discovery. There, hidden beneath a swathe of camouflage netting which rendered them invisible to Allied spotting planes, were the five guns, laid out and ready to fire upon Utah beach once the Pointe's spotting point had been re-established. In a later interview, Lomell recounted what happened next:
"There was nobody at the emplacement. We looked around cautiously and over about a hundred yards away in a corner of a field was a vehicle with what looked like an officer talking to his men. We decided let’s take a chance. I said "Jack, you cover me and I’m going in there and destroy them." All I had was two thermite grenades – his and mine. I went in and put the thermite grenades in the traversing mechanism and that knocked two of them out because that melted their gears in a moment. Then I broke their sights. We ran back to the road...and got all the other thermites from the remainder of my guys manning the roadblock and rushed back and put the grenades in traversing mechanisms, elevation mechanisms, and banged the sights. There was no noise to that. There is no noise to a thermite, so no one saw us." (Leonard Lomell, cited in Remembering D-Day, Personal Histories of Everyday Heroes by Martin Bowman, (HarperCollins 2004), pg. 69. )
At around the same time a patrol from E Company had discovered the German guns' ammunition dump, also undefended. Under the command of Sergeant Rupinski, the Rangers blew the dump, creating a huge explosion that rained debris on the already retreating Lomell and Kuhn. Word was soon returned to Rudder’s command post and then relayed to the Satterlee: the guns had been destroyed. It wasn't yet 09:00 am.
A view of both craters and bunker.
The Wait And The Aftermath
According to the original plan, troops from Omaha would meet up with the Pointe du Hoc force at around midday. Unfortunately things had gone badly wrong on the beach and, while the landings had eventually succeeded, the day of carnage left the Omaha soldiers short of their inland targets. The elements of 5th and 2nd Ranger Battalions which diverted away from the Pointe landing at 07:00 had made little progress round to their comrades because they'd also been involved in the struggle to secure Omaha. This meant Rudder and his men needed to hold the Pointe for much longer than expected and with very few reinforcements. Only two platoons of Rangers made it from Omaha, one platoon on the evening of the 6th and a second on the afternoon of the 7th, thanks on the latter occasion to an LST that ferried the wounded one way and as many Rangers as could be found the other.
In addition, three US paratroopers who'd been dropped away from their landing zone surprised everyone by fighting through German lines and into the Pointe base.
Ultimately, the Rangers held onto the Pointe du Hoc compound until they were relieved late morning on June 8th. Throughout the intervening period they suffered five major counter attacks by German troops from 1st Battalion, 914 Regiment, who had recovered from their confusion, regrouped and begun the bloody business of repelling invaders. The extent to which the Rangers were aided by the German's own defences, which had been set-up to repel just the kind of landward attack the Wehrmact were attempting, is unclear from the histories but, despite more supporting fire from Satterlee, as well as USS Barton and USS Thompson, on occasion the Rangers were pushed close back to the cliffs. This period was the costliest for the men of D, E and F companies, with many being killed, wounded and captured but, had the Germans retaken the Pointe, they might have brought replacement artillery up and shelled the fragile Omaha beach.
One of the deepest craters at Pointe du Hoc is as you first walk in near the entrance.
By the evening of June 8th, Rudder's original force of 225 Rangers from D, E and F companies had suffered 135 killed, wounded or missing, with around eighty dead. Had the five 155m guns fired upon the Allied landings, casualties would surely have been far worse. There had once been a sixth gun atop the Pointe, but after being damaged in a bombardment it had been removed for repair. A, B and C Companies suffered equally: half of the first two units were shot down after landing on Omaha beach, while Company C lost 38 of their 64 men in a succession of bitter assaults as they tried to reach Pointe du Hoc.
2nd Battalion was the first unit to complete their assigned D-Day missions and received a Presidential Unit Citation. Colonel Rudder and Lieutenant Lomell were presented with the Distinguished Service Cross, while Lieutenant Kuhn received the Silver Star. These, and other survivors, faced another year of war.
From Robert Wilde, European History