"The command came to drop the ramp and in an instant I knew we were entering a killing zone,” recalls US Ranger veteran James Gabaree. “I jumped into the water, knee deep and red with blood. Explosives were going off ahead of us, and enormous sheets of fire from artillery guns, rifle and mortar fire blanketed the beach. Machine gun bullets were hitting the water with such force, it looked like it was raining. It was slaughter. Men were dying all around me.”
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D-Day – 6 June 1944. Operation Overlord, the campaign to liberate Nazi-occupied Western Europe, is underway on the Normandy coast. Some 7,000 naval vessels have landed 132,000 soldiers on five beaches codenamed Gold, Juno, Omaha, Sword and Utah. US units hit Utah and Omaha; while at Gold, 25,000 men from the British 50th Infantry Division land, tasked with capturing Bayeux then meeting with the Americans at Omaha and the Canadians from Juno. At Sword, the British 3rd Division’s key objective is to take Caen.
Despite detailed planning, more than 10,000 men lost their lives: 946 Canadians, 2,700 British and 6,603 Americans.
James Gabaree was among the 2nd and 5th Rangers embroiled in the chaos of Omaha Beach that day. The exploits of this elite group have become legend – here and in the USA – immortalised in films and history books that tell the story of how they scaled the cliffs and neutralised the deadly guns at Pointe du Hoc. But how accurate are these portrayals?
Maps to a mystery
In 2005 English militaria collector Gary Sterne bought a Second World War American serviceman’s uniform. “In the tunic pocket I found an old map. It showed Grandcamp, a small fishing port between Omaha and Utah Beaches. There was a crosshatched region marked ‘area of high resistance’.”
Gary was fascinated. Not only did it “detail a location that was not previously discussed as having any military interest or sites”, but he had a house nearby and knew the area well.
The next time Gary visited Normandy, he headed for the spot on the map and found himself in a field near Maisy village looking at some strands of barbed wire and an intriguing sheet of concrete. “I thought it was the foundation of a building destroyed during fighting,” says Gary. Returning to his car, he tripped over a chimney pot: “It was a light-bulb moment – I was actually standing on the roof of a building set into the ground.” He came back with his brother and they made a hole in the soil large enough to crawl into. “It was a tunnel leading to bunkers with an old bicycle and ammunition boxes. I realised it was a bomb store.”
Over the next few weeks, Gary discovered more buildings, trenches and a screw-threaded steel rod. “It was for screwing down the base for a Howitzer, a heavy coastal artillery gun.”
Two years later, Gary had bought the land that encompassed the whole site – all 144 acres. Gradually he uncovered gun emplacements, ammunition stores, a hospital building, bunkers and a wood-panelled commandant’s office. “Everything we find, we clean up for future display. We’ve found bits of equipment – knives, forks and glasses, bottles (the hospital had a lot of medical bottles inside it), bits of equipment – none of it in particularly good condition.”
The firepower of this coastal artillery position had been huge, with Howitzers trained on Omaha and Utah Beaches. “Once I’d figured out that the Germans had built this as part of the Atlantic Wall system, I knew that it had some importance.”
Hunt for information
Gary approached several military museums and experts in the UK and USA to see if they could tell him anything about the site, but they all drew a blank, as did the local townspeople. He couldn’t find anything in books about the Second World War either.
This raised some obvious questions. Why didn’t Maisy’s battery make an appearance in any of the accepted histories? More intriguingly, why had it been buried?
After publicising what he had found, Gary was approached by a Ranger veteran. “He told me: ‘I remember the battle at your site really well.’ He came to Maisy and talked to the press about his experiences. Other Rangers corroborated his story.”
Over the following 15 years, Gary interviewed about 30 veterans of the 2nd and 5th Rangers, including James Garabee, and built up a picture of what had happened at Omaha and on the land nearby, which didn’t tally with the history books. He thinks he may have discovered why Maisy was buried – figuratively and literally – and it all hinges on the actions of the Rangers’ commander, Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder.
Gary also turned to the US National Archives in Washington DC and the National WWII Museum in New Orleans to see what the official version of events could tell him, and was astounded. “I found thousands of documents all proving that Maisy was a target on D-Day.”
There was a whole new history in freshly released documents – many of them stamped “Top Secret” – and he later collated his findings into a two-volume work telling the story of the Rangers from 1943 to 10 June 1944.
“I started with the morning reports for each unit. They allowed me to build up a picture of what everyone was doing, and create a skeleton on which to put more of the detail of the story. I also looked for the orders issued on a daily basis about Maisy, overflights from intelligence aircraft, and reconnaissance from local Resistance units radioed over to England.”
One priority was to find details of what the Rangers knew about Maisy prior to June 1944 because “they had to plan to attack it, and figure out how to neutralise it on D-Day”.
However, in Gary’s first book The Cover Up at Omaha Beach, Ranger veteran Frank Kennard recalls: “I had no knowledge of Maisy. It wasn’t a 2nd or 5th Ranger objective.”
It became clear during the course of Gary’s research that there were no guns at Pointe du Hoc at the time of the landings. Lieutenant Colonel Rudder was passed intelligence information and knew this – and that Maisy posed a much more serious threat. But he chose to focus his men’s efforts on the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. This is hardly surprising, since General Dwight D Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, had emphasised that this was the most important mission of all on D-Day.
“Colonel Rudder told me to climb the cliff. We started to climb and were put under fire from machine guns on the left. We could see Germans running around on the top of the cliffs – shooting at us and tossing grenades. I was too wet and miserable to care. We felt pretty disappointed when we got there and there were no guns,” George Kerchner, Ranger veteran, told Gary.
Heavy toll
The 1st Infantry Division’s field order for D-Day clearly shows that Rudder was tasked with destroying Maisy battery. However, he remained at Pointe du Hoc. “He became world-famous after the battle of Pointe du Hoc, but Maisy was left to continue to fire for three days, killing countless men,” says Gary. It wasn’t until 9 June, a day after Rudder had been relieved, that the Rangers moved inland to take the battery.
Digging deeper, Gary discovered more: “Rudder was ordered not to go in with his men on D-Day – he was to go in afterwards. On the ship the evening before D-Day, he sacked one of his officers and put himself forward to lead the mission to Pointe du Hoc” – and get the glory. Rudder was duly decorated for his actions at Pointe du Hoc, but was later quietly moved to a much less prestigious unit following an enquiry into what had happened.
Finding proof in the archives was vindication for Gary, “of what I thought about the site’s significance and of what the Rangers had told me about Maisy. Many were wounded there, but nobody ever gave them credit for what they did. I wanted to tell the truth about what happened.”
Whether Maisy’s burial and subsequent omission from the history books was down to Rudder’s ambition, history’s focus on the Rangers’ bravery scaling the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc, or to spare the US Army’s embarrassment, Maisy (and the Rangers) are once more getting the recognition they deserve. Thanks to Gary’s efforts, the battery is now open to the public – its two miles of trenches the only original German ones you’ll find in Normandy: “It’s been about uncovering history and preserving it. I don’t believe history should be left buried.”
The surviving Rangers and their stories breathed life into the site: “Standing on Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hoc or Maisy with someone who fought there, it’s astonishing – really, really astonishing.”
